Information for First Wednesday Organizers

Recruiting and scheduling speakers

As ideas come up, add them to the potential speakers Google Sheet
Reach out to new potential speakers about 2 months in advance, starting with just a few at a time in case they agree
When someone accepts, ask about the amount of time they'd like to present and the basic topic of their presentation
Try to book no more than 50-55 minutes of presentations
About 3 weeks before the First Wednesday, ask presenters for final title and description
Update the wiki schedule page with presentation details

Setting up and announcing the meeting details

Turn on audio transcript in your Zoom account
- Go to Settings on left
- Click on Recording on top
- Under Advanced cloud recording settings, select "Create audio transcript"
Turn on live transcript in your Zoom account
- Go to Settings on the left
- Stay on "Meeting" at the top
- Under "In Meeting (Advanced)"
  - Look for the "Automated Captions" section, and make sure the switch is flipped on
  - Look for the "Full transcript" section and turn on the switch to "Allow viewing of full transcript in the in-meeting side panel."
Create Zoom meeting with the following settings:
- passcode
- automatically record meeting → In the cloud (this is related to "turn on audio transcript" above)
Update wiki schedule page with Zoom meeting details
About 2 weeks before the First Wednesday, send a reminder to the five everyone lists with presentation descriptions and meeting details (both in the email body and with a .ics file as an attachment)
Send a final reminder the day of the talks (can use Outlook to schedule this email so it goes out early on the day)

During the meeting

Make presenters co-hosts as they arrive:
- Option 1: Hover over a user's video, click the ellipsis icon, click Make Co-Host.
- Option 2: Using the participants window, hover over the name of the participant who is going to be a co-host, choose More, click Make Co-Host
Turn on Live Transcript
- Look for "Live Transcript" or "Closed Caption" in the meeting controls (might be under "More")
- In the pop-up window, click on the "Enable Live Transcription" button
Ensure that the recording has started
Begin meeting close to the hour
Make any necessary announcements (e.g., requests for more people to sign up to speak)
Briefly introduce each speaker
Monitor time of presentation and try to keep presenters close to their allotted time
Monitor chat and repeat questions verbally when it is time for Q&A
Monitor unmuted participants, mute as needed

Processing and posting the recording

Download the video (.mp4) and caption (.vtt) files from the zoom web interface when they have finished processing.
1. Note: if you are using both the audio transcript and live transcript options in Zoom, you may get two separate caption files. They're not identical, so you could review each to see which is a better starting point.
Convert .vtt file to .srt format: https://www.happyscribe.com/subtitle-tools/convert-vtt-to-srt
1. Note: In case happyscribe.com changes, the Zoom transcript .vtt file contains the sequential numbers necessary for a .srt file. Using regular expressions (find: (\.)(\d{3}) replace: ,($2)), you can just delete WebVTT from the top and save it as a .srt file.
Open Adobe Premier Pro and start a new project
Import the .mp4 and .srt files
Drag the video onto the timeline, ensuring that the video is in V1 and the audio is in A1.
1. In my attempt, it included a transcript track at the end in V1, so I just selected and deleted it.
Drag the transcript onto the timeline. Make sure that it is in V2.
Open the .srt file in a text editor and look for the first timestamp. In Premier, move the transcript track to that timestamp.
Use the razorblade tool to trim at the beginning and end of the video, if necessary. Delete the tracks before the trim mark and move all of them to the starting position.
Double click the transcription track to open in a new panel. Resize to make it larger. Edit transcript as necessary.
With captions selected, go to "File" -> "Export" -> "Media". The format should be H.264, match the source. In the "Captions" tab: select "Create Sidecar File" and select "SubRip Subtitle Format (.srt). Then click "Export".
Rename the file to "First-Wednesday-[Month]-[Day]-[Year].mp4"
Upload the video to Warpwire. Once uploaded, add the srt file

Meeting follow-up

ask speakers for their slides (either a link or a file)
if speakers share a file, upload as an attachment to the wiki schedule page
add links to slides into the wiki schedule page
add link to Warpwire recording to the wiki schedule page
send follow-up email to the five everyone lists with links to slides and recording and any additional announcements

A note on captioning recordings

The captions from Zoom seem to have some issues. They don't have reasonable punctuation or capitalization, and often the chunks of text presented on the screen for the same time range can be very long - 3 to 4 lines, taking up a large portion of the recording when viewed.
It would be nicer to have short blocks of well-formatted text, but manually splitting up the Zoom captions into smaller chunks is very time consuming.
At Duke, we have access to Panopto, and Panopto has auto-captioning functionality that works better than Zoom's.
If you want to try Panopto instead, you can do the following:
- download the audio-only file from Zoom (smaller file, easier to work with than the video)
- log into https://library.capture.duke.edu/ with your netid
- On the left, click on My Folder
- At the top, click on the Create button, and select Upload Media
- Upload the audio file
- After the file has been uploaded and processed, you should see the file show up in the list of things in your folder
- If you hover over the audio file, you should be able to see a "Settings" option
- Clicking on Settings opens up a new overlay
- On the left menu, click on Captions
- You should see an option at the top to "order" automatically generated captions
- After the "order" is placed, you will need to wait a bit for them to generate
- When they are ready, you can download the captions as a .srt file and then upload them directly into Adobe Premiere Pro for general clean up and video editing