How to Edit a Webinar (Even Without Video Editing Experience)

February 2022

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10 min read

How to Edit a Webinar (Even Without Video Editing Experience)

There are two different ways to edit a webinar. You can:

  • Edit and polish the entire recording, add intro and outro slides, trim out the logistical stuff you don't need, and publish the whole video
  • Clip short takeaway videos and create highlight reels from those clips to use (and repurpose) for your website and social media

Accomplishing either one of those tasks in traditional video editing software — think timeline-based editors like Adobe Premiere Pro, or even Apple iMovie — is unwieldy. Those tools make it challenging to make precise cuts and create smooth transitions throughout your recordings. You have to keep track of timestamps, trim videos at the exact right moments, play back your video to make sure it flows well, retrim if it doesn't, and repeat this process until you have a finished product.

But trimming out sections of video and pulling video clips can be done easily with text-based video editing tools because they let you edit videos by editing their transcript — the same way you'd edit a paper. You trim out content by striking through words, phrases, or sections of text you don't want and pull video clips by highlighting strings of text. You can edit your webinar far faster and without any video editing experience.

That's exactly what our online video editor, Reduct.Video, lets you do. We offer quick and accurate video transcription along with a suite of text-based video editing features to help you distill your webinars down to the most important moments or create engaging highlight reels you can share with stakeholders and across the web.

In this post, we'll explain how you can use Reduct to do both types of webinar editing (whole video or highlight reel). At the end, we also provide some tips for recording high-quality webinars and fine-tuning your footage so you always put your best foot forward.

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Reduct is an online, collaborative video editing platform that lets you edit your videos by editing their transcripts. Our editor is easy enough that anybody can use it, but it's also advanced enough to support the video production process.

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How to Edit & Fine-Tune Your Webinar Recording

Editing entire webinar recordings is beneficial so parties who couldn't attend during the live webinar can watch after the fact and get the entire experience.

You can download and publish your edited webinar recordings on your website, YouTube, or Vimeo channel, or upload them to your organization's intranet for teams to reference. Reduct also integrates with advanced video editing software like Apple Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro so you can push your edited webinar to these programs if you want to make any extra touch-ups.

Let's walk through the 5 steps to edit a webinar in Reduct.

1. Upload your webinar recording & choose your transcription option.

We provide multiple options to upload your recorded webinar. You can:

  • Drag and drop files from your computer
  • Import videos from a cloud storage drive like Google Drive or Dropbox
  • Connect your Zoom account and push cloud recordings over
  • Embed videos from online sources like YouTube

Note: We accept all file types and codecs so you don't have to convert video files before uploading.

Once you upload your footage, our platform automatically transcribes your video to text (Reduct's video text editing process starts with a transcript).

We provide automatic computer transcripts by default, but we also offer professional video transcription for teams that want the expertise of a human transcriber. Here"s how to choose between the two options:

  • Computer transcripts are fast and about 85% accurate; however, our transcripts are completely editable in case you spot anything you want to correct. They're best for when you have really high-quality recordings — audio with no background noise, only one or two speakers, and clear dialogue — and want quick online video transcription.
  • Human transcription takes a little longer and is more expensive than computer transcription, but it guarantees you a high-quality transcript you can trust (~99% accuracy). We offer the fastest and most affordable overnight transcription service available: We deliver transcripts back within 24 hours but it typically only takes us a couple of hours, costing $1.

You can learn more about Reduct's video to text transcription services and how to choose between the two methods in our other guide.

Then, you can review your interactive transcript in the Reduct dashboard and begin editing.

2. Select your transcript text & Add to Reel.

Next, highlight your entire transcript and select the Add to Reel option.

(Pro Tip: If you know you want to trim the beginning and ends of your recording, you can skip highlighting those sections of transcript so that content isn't transferred to your Reel.)

This will automatically pull your entire video recording into our Reel Builder ("Reels") where you can edit out content you don't need, add captions, and insert text slides.

3. Review your Reel and edit out all of the content you don't need.

In the Reel Builder, you can read back through your transcript and strike through all of the content you don't want or need, such as long tangents or stories, long pauses, filler words, and blunders. It's as easy as highlighting and "deleting" text.

You can un-do cuts at any time, too, so if you want to add content back into your presentation or accidentally cut the wrong clip, you can reverse the edits and make new changes.

4. Add text slides & captions

After, you can insert text slides within your video presentation to add intro or outro slides, place graphs or images, or provide extra information on the webinar topic for your viewers. Title slides are especially helpful for separating different questions in Q&A time. You can also choose how long these text slides are displayed — between 2 and 30 seconds — so you don't skip past longer information or have awkward gaps in your video content.

Reduct automatically adds captions to your video projects once your footage is placed in the Reel Builder. You can change the caption style — we offer 4 options — and even download the SRT file if you want to translate your transcript and add subtitles.

5. Share or download your finished product.

Once you've wrapped up edits, you can share your webinar with anybody directly from the Reduct platform. We offer unlimited free sharing; you don't have to worry about extra fees.

If you want to share with other team members, you can add them with permissions. Then they can review your footage and add comments if they have feedback.

Note: You can use permissions to add team members to video projects at any point after upload, so if you want to work on edits with other team members, you can add them as guest editors and collaborate in real-time. You can learn more about our collaborative video editing features in our other post.

To share your webinar with stakeholders or other external collaborators, you can enable and send a custom share link. These links work across email platforms, messaging apps like Slack, and workspace collaboration tools like Trello. They can also be embedded across the web. End users are directed to the Reduct platform where they can view your edited webinar alongside the interactive transcript.

Reduct share links enable an optimal viewing experience — people can click a word in the transcript to jump head, enable or disable captions, and control video speed. Text slides also serve as nice chapter breaks on the transcript to help viewers quickly understand the structure of your webinar.

share-as-link

You can also download your webinar to post across the web. We support 1080p downloads in the .mp4 format so you can publish your video (on most sites) without needing another conversion tool.

How to Create a Highlight Reel from Your Webinar

If you don't want to use your entire webinar recording — say, just some snippets to share on social media or a slideshow with all of the memorable moments — you can use Reduct's Highlight feature to pull video clips and create highlight reels from those clips.

This process also starts with transcription, as we described above. But after you receive your transcript, the next step is to start creating clips. Let's talk about how to do this.

1. Review your webinar transcript to identify the most important clips.

As you pinpoint important moments in your transcript, you can create video clips by highlighting text. Once you make a highlight, Reduct pulls the corresponding video as a clip (a.k.a. Highlight) and saves it under the Highlights tab.

You can also add tags to Highlights to categorize your clips. Say you hold an annual webinar that covers key points from the last year and what to expect in the new year. You can categorize clips appropriately (2021 Highlights vs. 2022 Expectations), then sort webinar clips by topic and find what's relevant.

It establishes a common language for tags. Our software will even auto-suggest tags based on the content of your video clips to help you tag faster and stay consistent.

2. Create a Reduct Reel from your video clips.

After you pull video clips, you have two options:

  1. You can download or share your snippets from the Highlights tab if you want to post specific clips on channels like Facebook or LinkedIn, use short clips in presentations, or share key moments with others. You can also drop individual video clips in the Reel Builder, use the Strikethrough feature to tweak your snippets, and enable captions before sharing.
  2. You can create a longer video story (a.k.a. Reduct Reel) with your video clips.

To create a Reduct Reel, drag and drop the video clips you want to use into the Reel Builder, and then put them in sequence. You can arrange and rearrange as needed, and even add Highlights from different recordings; this is helpful if you want to reference information from past webinars or compile clips from multiple events.

You can also use the search feature to quickly browse your Highlights library and pull video clips to use in your presentation. You can search by recording, tag, user, or Fuzzy Search. Fuzzy Search scans through your recordings to find everything relevant to your search query; it does this by analyzing your recordings by concept or theme instead of looking for exact search terms in transcripts. So for example, if you remember a certain quote but don't recall exactly what was said, you can just search what you remember about the quote and we'll find it for you.

Don't bother making precise cuts or finagling transitions between clips: Our platform weaves your video clips together seamlessly so your final product is't choppy. This is the real time-saver.

3. Remove everything you don't want, add captions, & insert text slides.

Once you have all of your clips in order, you can use the Strikethrough feature to clean up your video clips and remove anything you don't want in the final product. For example, if you have a really good clip, but the speaker uses a lot of "ums" or "likes," you can cut those filler words.

As we mentioned above, Reduct automatically captions your Reduct Reels by pulling transcript text. Our platform creates an updated transcript within the Reel Builder as you string video clips together, too, and you can download that transcript or SRT file if you want to use it outside of Reduct.

You can add text slides in this step, as well. You can drop these at the beginning or end of your footage, or place them between clips if you want to add context for users between transitions or switch webinar topics.

4. Share your Reduct Reel with others.

Then, once you're finished, you can share your Reduct Reel in the same ways we described above:

  • You can share with other team members with user permissions.
  • You can send it to people outside of your team with a custom share linkwe offer free unlimited guest seats.
  • You can download your Reduct Reel and publish it online.

When you share your video from the Reduct platform, end users get access to your Reduct Reel with the interactive transcript so they can review with ease.

Plus, if you make any changes to your edited webinar in Reduct, those changes reflect across all share links, so you know everyone with access to your webinar recording has the right version.

Bonus: Connect Reduct With Other Video Editing Tools

You can integrate Reduct with Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro X if you want to make more advanced touch-ups to your webinar recordings or connect with multi-cam footage. This is beneficial for experienced video editors who want to use Reduct to distill footage down to a rough cut and then do the creative fine-tuning in sophisticated video editing software.

Note: Our platform integrates well with Adobe Premiere Pro because we skip the XML imports and let you push videos via extension.

Read more about how Reduct modernizes the traditional video editing workflow in our post.

Other Tips for Recording & Editing Webinars

If you want to end up with a clean webinar video that you feel confident sharing, you have to start with good footage — you can't work miracles on recordings that have unflattering camera angles or hard-to-hear audio. But it can be hard to get a high-quality video when your webinar has many participants and people joining from different webcams. So we recommend sending all of your invitees a prep list so they know how to improve video quality. This list can include tips like:

  • Check your framing and enter yourself in the webcam.
  • Choose an area with good lighting and make sure there are no bright lights in the background that may cause distractions.
  • Silence background noise to the best of your ability; record in a quiet area where you won't be disturbed.
  • Use a high-quality microphone.
  • Speak loudly and clearly; wait to speak until other participants are done talking.

When recording your webinar, we also suggest recording faces and screens separately; this way, you have one video file showing your participants and another displaying the computer screen (or what your participants are viewing). Then you can use these recordings together or separately.

Note: If you're recording with Zoom, you can do this by turning on the "Record active speaker, gallery view and shared screen separately" option in your settings. Zoom also has a feature to optimize your recordings for video editing ("Optimize the recording for 3rd party video editor"). You can learn more about editing Zoom recordings in our other guide.

Typically, teams opt to use snippets of participants for social media and video clips of screen recordings to share with other team members. If you're editing and publishing your entire webinar, it's best to share the whole computer screen with the participants' faces in the corner.

Reduct removes the pain of working with video.

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