Breeze Article
Best Practices for Recording Breeze Meetings
Overview
Having a great recording of your web seminars for use in marketing your
product is just as important as holding the event itself. Similarly, customers
who use Breeze Meeting in highly regulated industries, such as Life Sciences,
Government, or Financial Services, must archive meetings for compliance
with industry regulations. And for everyday users, preserving a record
of your meeting is a useful tool that keeps team members on the same page
and maintains a historical record of past decisions.
Breeze provides many unique capabilities that combine to create
compelling meeting recordings. Rather than producing a monolithic, static
recording, Breeze provides a fully interactive, streaming experience that
gives users the ability to download shared files and interact with content
as if they were in the live meeting. Breeze automatically creates bite-sized
chapters within recordings that keep the content digestible and allow viewers
to skip to content that is most relevant to their needs.
This article provides information about the mechanics of Breeze Meeting recordings as well as best practices and strategies for how to take advantage of the unique features that Breeze provides.
Requirements
To complete this tutorial you will need to have the following installed:
- Access to a Macromedia Breeze Meeting Account (Hosted or Licensed)
Breeze 5
Introduction
Breeze Meeting is a powerful web conferencing solution that allows you to record meetings to repurpose meeting content for users who are unable to attend a meeting in person. Breeze Meeting contains a wealth of features that help users experience your recordings as if they were there in person. If traditional meeting recordings work like a VHS tape in your VCR then it helps to think about Breeze Meeting recordings as an interactive DVD. You can even skip to specific “chapters” that are of interest.
In this article I first describe how meeting recordings work, followed by a discussion about the advantages of Breeze’s approach to recording meetings. Once you have an understanding of these basics, I provide a set of best practices that help you create compelling, interactive recordings that keep viewers engaged. I then discuss some special considerations that you need to keep in mind about audio and bandwidth when recording meetings. I end with a discussion about the various ways that customers are using Breeze recordings today, and link to a step-by-step process for making a recording publicly viewable.
How Do Meeting Recordings Work?
Understanding how meeting recordings work lays the foundation for how to create a great recording and will spark ideas about the best ways to use the functionality to make your recordings more interactive. Unlike similar products, Breeze Meeting recordings are not monolithic, linear representations of the presenter’s screen over the course of a meeting, but rather interactive, fully indexed, and searchable representations of the live experience. Rather than simply recording what is happening on the presenter’s screen, the Breeze server records the activities of each pod as an individual stream. A master timeline keeps track of each activity and creates an index point (think bookmark) that the meeting recording uses during playback. Using this information can increase the interactivity of your meeting recording as well as help keep the various streams of the recording in sync. We’ll discuss this in more detail later. The Breeze server automatically creates an index point in the meeting recording when any of the following actions occur:
- A piece of content is loaded into the Share Pod (a document, a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, a video, a Macromedia Captivate demonstration, and so on).
- A user begins sharing their screen.
- A user begins broadcasting audio or live video from the Camera and Voice Pod
- A slide is advanced in a presentation.
- A chat message is sent.
- A meeting layout is changed.
These indices surface in the meeting recording interface. A list of them appears next to a search box that users can use to search for specific bookmarks in the recording. These search results include any chat messages or slide titles.
Figure 1. Breeze Meeting Recordings are played back using the Flash Player which is already installed on 98% of Internet Connected PCs Worldwide meaning viewers can access them instantly without downloading any additional plug-ins.
Since Breeze does not have to process and convert the meeting into a static video, the archive is available within minutes of stopping the recording. However, you should be aware that if you use Breeze with integrated teleconferencing, the recording may not be available at the conclusion of the meeting and may take some time to convert the recorded audio into the MP3 format. This is because the conference provider must process the audio, package it up, and send it to Breeze for integration with the rest of the meeting recording.
The Advantages of Our Approach
Now that you understand how Breeze Meeting recordings work, it’s time to understand how these differences provide a superior viewing experience for your users. If you use meeting recordings as part of marketing, sales, or training initiatives, then you know that it is important to keep viewers engaged to ensure that your message gets across. Similarly, you want users to be able to find what they are looking for without having to sit through the entire recording. As mentioned previously, Breeze Meeting recordings are fully interactive, indexed, and searchable, which means that a learner can go directly to a specific point in a recorded virtual classroom session, or a prospective client can go directly to a point in the webcast on a specific new feature, instead of having to watch an entire recording. Similarly, you can imagine a scenario in which you give participants a clickable URL in a chat window, a FlashPaper document, or embed in a recorded PowerPoint slide. When viewing a recording, participants can click and open that URL as if they were actually in the meeting.
Recording a Breeze Meeting
The basics of recording a Breeze meeting are very simple.
To start recording a meeting:
- From the menu bar, select Meeting > Record Meeting.
- In the Record Meeting dialog box, enter a name and summary for the meeting recording.
- Click OK.
A notifier and a red circle appears in the menu bar to indicate that the meeting is being recorded
Figure 2. To initiate a meeting recording simply select the Record Meeting option in the Meeting menu.
To stop recording a meeting:
To stop recording a meeting, do one of the following:
- Place the pointer over the red circle in the menu bar, and select Stop Recording option from the pop-up menu.
- Select Meeting > Record Meeting to remove the check mark from the menu bar.
The meeting recording is saved and is available for playback at any time.
Figure 3. To initiate stop a meeting recording, mouse over the red recording indicator and a notifier will appear with a link to Stop Recording.
Best Practices for Meeting Recordings
When recording Breeze meetings, there are strategies that you can employ to produce great results.
Strategy 1: Keep recorded sessions brief
As a general guideline, it is recommended that you keep your recordings to no more than an hour in length. There are many reasons to do this. First, experts in the field of e-learning have concluded that users retain more knowledge with short presentations. In fact, most e-learning best practices suggest that you keep self-running presentations, a meeting recording being an example, to no longer than 15 minutes. This seems to be the point when the ability for learners to effectively engage with the content begins to deteriorate. Studies show that if you create large, monolithic recordings, viewers will have a harder time finding the information they need. Fifteen minutes is undoubtedly too short of a time to get your message across, answer questions, and convey a call to action. However, there are still ways that you can employ this fifteen minute rule when conducting your meetings. I discuss these best practices in more depth in strategy 2.
People in the e-learning field have conducted a lot of the research about viewers and knowledge retention, and you can apply these same lessons to other areas of business as well. For example, a customer-facing web seminar has many of the same objectives as an e-learning course. Ultimately, you want your viewers to be engaged while attending and to ultimately retain your message and take action. If you inundate them with too much information, your message ultimately gets lost. For example, when you write a brochure for a new product, do you cram as much information into the brochure as possible? No. You extrapolate the most important points and back them up with supporting information in a concise and convincing way. Just because web seminars allow you to deliver your message in a different way, doesn’t mean that you should treat them any different than the other marketing materials that you create.
For scenarios in which you have to conduct very long sessions, an all-day sales training session, for example, you can employ other strategies when recording. These daylong training sessions are undoubtedly segmented into various sections that you can use to your advantage. Rather than creating a single multi-hour recoding that you provide to users who cannot attend, you can create multiple recorded modules for each of these sections. This allows users who cannot attend to view the recordings in bite-sized chunks, and users who want to review the content can find what they are looking for more easily.
Strategy 2: Segment your recording into distinct sections
There is nothing worse than attending an online meeting or web seminar in which the presentation is simply slide after slide of a presenter talking at you. Everyone has participated in one of these meetings, and you undoubtedly stopped paying attention and started checking e-mails or did other work in parallel. This is a natural tendency for web conferencing users because by attending meetings virtually, you ultimately lose the ability to employ many of the social conventions that you normally rely on to keep your audience involved in an in-person meeting. The same principle that e-learning experts tout about minimizing presentation length to keep viewers engaged is at work here as well.
It’s important to take the time to think about your presentation content in the context of the medium by which you are communicating. Before you jump into web conferencing, you must understand the social conventions of the virtual world. Although this may seem overly theoretical, there are some very tangible ways where this can come into play. For example, it may not be such a great idea to reuse the exact presentation content that you presented in front of a live audience, when you were able to rely on body language and physical gestures to keep your viewers engaged. You may have had just a few slides, but you relied on your speaking ability and presence to carry the presentation content. The same approach is more difficult for web conferences because its nearly impossible to rely on these gestures as a way to captivate your audience.
Luckily, both Adobe and the former Macromedia have a long legacy as the leader in defining great digital experiences on the web, and Breeze Meeting was created with the social conventions of the web in mind. Because viewers are all remote, rather than relying primarily on your own personal presentation style, you need to rely more on the technology to keep them engaged. This is where the 15 minute rule becomes relevant. Your presentation will ultimately be more effective if you keep viewers engaged by leveraging the tools provided to you. It is recommended that you stay on one particular presentation mechanism for no more than 15 minutes at a time. One way to do this is by injecting an interactive user poll in various parts of the presentation which is a common practice we like to employ in our web seminars.
Planning the flow of your meeting ahead of time helps you keep viewers involved and engaged in both a live or recorded scenario. Breeze Meeting leverages persistent meeting rooms in conjunction with layouts to give you the tools to really plan how you are going to get your message across ahead of time.
A layout is a specific arrangement of display panels, called pods. For example, the default meeting template contains a layout called “Sharing” that includes a Camera and Voice Pod an Attendee List, a Notes Pod, and a Share Pod.
Figure 4. The Breeze Meeting default template includes three layouts: Sharing, Discussion, and Collaboration.
You can customize layouts to optimize the content view for viewers and to divide the meeting into digestible segments, such as Introduction, Presentation, Q+A, and Poll. Alternatively, you can use layouts as an organizing principle to manage a meeting with several presenters by creating a custom layout for each presenter. You can label each layout with the presenter’s name and preload it with the presenter’s relevant content. You can then reorder the layouts to reflect the speaking schedule so that navigation from layout to layout is seamless and fully choreographed. For example, you can prepare poll questions ahead of time, optimize the pods’ size for the task at hand, and remove unnecessary pods. Breeze Meeting provides you with the tools to create engaging meetings whether people view them in real time or as recordings.
View
the documentation to learn more about layouts - View best practices for ideas on how to set up a meeting room to conduct an engaging webinar
This same best practice of organizing your content into layouts in advance also plays into helping to maintain the integrity and interactivity of the recording playback experience. As mentioned previously, Breeze automatically creates an entry in the recording index every time you switch layouts. Each time you change to a different layout, Breeze creates an index entry that users can use as a bookmark to navigate through the recording. This is incredibly useful for viewers because it allows them to find the specific point in the recording that is most relevant to them.
Figure 5. This meeting room’s layouts have been customized to ahead of time to mimic the flow of the event. The meeting host simply needs to click from layout to layout to switch between meeting segments. This layout contains poll questions created beforehand that participants responded to in the event itself.
To add to the benefits of using layouts, Breeze also uses these recording index entries as a cue point to synchronize audio with the other events in the meeting. For example, if the viewer is watching the recording on a low bandwidth connection, and if a meeting recording contains very few recording index entries, the meeting audio could become out of sync with the other meeting events. What a user sees on the screen may not exactly match up to the audio. Using layouts to separate your recording into bite-sized segments can go a long way toward preventing this from happening.
Strategy 3: Optimize the screen sharing experience
Screen sharing is one of the areas in which recordings may run into synchronization issues with audio and video. Screen sharing is a bandwidth-intensive operation in both live and recorded instances. You can employ many strategies to improve the screen sharing experience in the live experience as described in Best Practices for Screen Sharing in Breeze Meeting. The same set of best practices also apply to creating recordings that include screen sharing. Implementing the strategies for effective screen sharing outlined in this article, can go a long way towards ensuring that meeting recordings play back flawlessly.
Voice and Meeting Recordings
You should also consider the following best practices for recording meeting audio. If you use Breeze’s native Voice over IP (VoIP) with the Camera and Voice Pod, you can record the audio automatically by selecting the Record Meeting option. If you use audio teleconferencing, as opposed to VoIP, it is recommended that you use the integrated telephony capabilities of Breeze Meeting because you can also automatically record your audio without having to do any special setup.
To get a basic understanding of the audio options using integrated teleconferencing and VoIP in Breeze Meeting, you can read Using Integrated Teleconferencing and Audio Broadcasting in Meetings applications. You should be aware that if you use both integrated teleconferencing and VoIP in the same meeting Breeze only records the teleconference audio.
Recording non-integrated telephone audio that is broadcasted using
Breeze VoIP
If you cannot use Breeze’s integrated teleconferencing, you can
still bridge telephone audio with VoIP by broadcasting the teleconference
audio to users through the Breeze Meeting interface. This gives users the
option of dialing into the teleconference directly or simply using their
computer speakers to listen to the audio. This flexibility is great for
meeting attendees—especially for meetings that include a global audience—and
it can provide tremendous cost savings to you by reducing the number of
users who attend over the phone, thereby helping you avoid the per-minute,
per-user costs associated with traditional audio conferencing.
In order to successfully record non-integrated teleconferencing you need to use a device that takes the audio from your phone and inputs it into your computer. Then you turn on the audio in the Camera and Voice Pod to broadcast the telephone audio to participants. At Adobe, most people use the THAT-2 Telephone Handset Audio Tap to achieve this. Once you set this up, Breeze Meeting records your telephone audio as a part of the meeting since you are taking the audio and broadcasting it through VoIP. You can simply record the meeting as you normally do and Breeze records the audio right along with it.
Figure 6. A sample configuration using a THAT-2 Telephone Handset Audio Tap to bridge a teleconference with Breeze VoIP
The device can be connected to any computer that is being used by a meeting host as long as that user is both dialed into the phone and broadcasting via the Camera and Voice Pod so if you have a dedicated machine that is used to manage events, this can be setup once and left in this configuration. Also if you have a remote presenter, they do not need to set up this configuration on their local machine. As long as their audio is going through the phone the device will correctly capture, broadcast, and record their audio.
One last thing to remember is that the Camera and Voice pod must be present in all layouts for Breeze to continue to be able to record and broadcast out the audio. So it’s always a good idea to check the layouts prior to the meeting.
Recording non-integrated telephone audio that is not broadcasted using Breeze VoIP
If you decide to use nonintegrated teleconferencing and you are not broadcasting the audio via Breeze’s VoIP capability, you can use one other option to capture the telephone audio as part of the recording. When you initiate a recording for meetings, a check box is included in the Record Meeting dialog, called Record Audio from Speaker Phone. This option only appears if you are using a meeting room that does not have integrated teleconferencing. Also note that you do not need a Camera and Voice pod present on each layout for the audio to get captured using this method.
Figure 7. The Record Meeting dialog box contains a “Record audio from speaker phone” option if you are not using integrated teleconferencing
If you use this option, you can do one of two things to record audio:
- Adobe recommends that you use a device such as a THAT-2 to bridge the telephone audio from a local phone into your PC.
- If you do not have any hardware to bridge phone audio with VoIP, you can always turn on the speaker phone and use a microphone connected to your computer to gather the audio. If you do this, you must make sure that the microphone is close enough to the speaker so that the audio is recorded at an acceptable volume.
When you select Record audio from speaker phone in the Record Meeting dialog box, the meeting captures the telephone audio, but this audio is not broadcasted out to meeting viewers; it is just being captured and sent to the Breeze server for recording purposes.
Bandwidth and Meeting Recordings
When you create a meeting recording, you must consider the bandwidth constraints. Remember that the Breeze server, not the local machine, creates meeting recordings. This is great because you can use the full CPU and memory power of your computer to conduct the live meeting rather than sacrificing some of that power for recording. However, presenting from a low bandwidth connection can affect the quality of a meeting recording. It is always a best practice for the machine that the presenter is using has a high-bandwidth connection. This ensures that all meeting events are reported to the server in a timely manner.
If you run into a situation in which the bandwidth required is more than the connection can handle, events may start to become out of sync. For example, because screen sharing requires a lot of bandwidth, the meeting recording may become out of sync if the machine that is presenting the content does not have adequate bandwidth. However, in these scenarios the live meeting experience suffers as well, so the recording is no better or worse than the experience that viewers in the live meeting. To understand how bandwidth allocation works in Breeze Meeting, you can read this article.
Making Meeting Recordings Viewable
Once your meeting recording is ready, you need to take action to make that recording viewable to other users, such as other meeting attendees, specific people in your organization, or the general public. When you use the optional Events module you can even create a listing of meeting recordings that users have to register for so that you can track demographic information about who is viewing meeting recordings, gather additional leads, and keep track of attendance.
You can view this brief Captivate tutorial to learn more about how you can share finished meeting recordings with other users.
Sharing
Meeting Recordings (1:22 min)
Where To Go From Here
As you can see, Breeze Meeting provides a unique approach to recording meetings that result in a fully interactive, searchable meeting recording. The most important thing that you can do to ensure a great recording are to prepare ahead of time making sure the audio is set up correctly and to preload content and create layouts prior to the meeting itself. Putting these principles into practice will allow you to record your meetings with confidence so you can concentrate on engaging with and interacting with your audience.
