Convert WebEx Recordings on a Mac

Using WebEx to conduct webinars and trainings is excellent – lots of collaboration and sharing features, including video of your presenters.  One of the best features for this kind of session is the ‘network based recording’ feature – the ability to record on the fly, and then share your recording from a simple URL link.  For most people, streaming from your WebEx site/account is convenient enough that we don’t do anything other than slap the link out on our website, or in emails to customers and colleagues, and forget about it.  For others, we want to take that recording (which is basically a video) and pull it down, convert it to other formats, and share elsewhere.  WebEx offers a converter – but it only works on Windows.  That’s really painful as a Mac user- even running a VM, it’s just slow and resource-hogging. 

I recently had a customer who had some recordings that she wanted to convert and use elsewhere – but since I only had a Mac to work with, I was stuck.  I went looking for a screen recorder utility in the Mac App store, and ended up choosing Screen Capture-Pro – it was around $5.  Screen Capture Pro lets you recording what’s on your screen – either choosing a selectable portion, or the whole thing – and even choose to record audio either from your mic or the computer audio.  This was key – I needed the audio from the voiceover & discussion in the recordings as well as the images.

Positives

-lets you create an MOV from your ARF

-perfect if you want to edit your results later using FCP or other Mac editing utilities

-great for mobile playback on iOS devices (we have a lot of ipad and iphone users)

-easy to use

-slick interface, simple set of options

-good quality results

-no loss of quality; I usually expect some artifacts when using a format-to-format conversion utility

-reasonable file size

-some of the PPT slideshow-recordings I did were in the 1 hour range, and only about 120mb

-can be used for LOTS of other applications

-recording general walkthroughs for training purposes, screencaps for placement in other videos, etc

also...  It's SEVEN BUCKS.  

Downsides

-minute-by-minute recording – if your Wx is 1.5 hours, you have to let it go for 1.5 hours

-does not let you select something on your 2nd monitor

-I put all my “current” work on the 2nd monitor while recording – email/im/etc 

-even still, be careful- popup windows on monitor 1 will show up in your recording

-time consuming, and you can’t fully use your computer while recording

-crashes if you select the “show in folder” option at the start of recording

-maybe not every time, but often for me

I would also consider using this to do iPad screencaps – by using the Reflection app and displaying my iPad tab-top on the Mac, I can then use SCP to record whatever apps or tools I’d like to show there.  This is HUGE for any of us who have to do customer demos, showing how our different tools work.  

Screen Capture-Pro is completely worth the $5.