Consider Privacy During Recordings

We often say unguarded things when we think we are among people we trust. In this new era of everything happening remotely on video, we may drop our guard and be impolite, impolitic, or imprudent during a meeting that is being recorded.

There are also many kinds of meetings that are strictly private, proprietary, or confidential, and in the event they need to be recorded, much more care should be taken about the process.

A host can provide some additional help in a meeting by configuring for both privacy and disclosure in the account settings for recordings:

• Local recording: It’s wise to turn local recording on, but also disable the option “Host can give participants the permission to record locally,” unless this is something needed for an upcoming meeting. It avoids any confusion.

• Automatic recording: For some kinds of meetings or businesses, you may want to enable this option, because you have an internal, regulatory, or other obligation or guideline to record all meetings for later review.

• Recording disclaimer: I highly advise using this option in every circumstance in which recording will occur, as there’s no reason not to provide the most explicit warning about what a meeting member is agreeing to when they join a meeting. With “Ask participants for consent when a recording starts” enabled, all participants are informed the meeting is being recorded when they join (for automatic recording or a meeting in progress) or if you start recording during a meeting. Participants are told they are granting consent by continuing to remain in the meeting and may choose Leave Meeting or Continue. (While Zoom labels this setting a “customizable” disclaimer, the text can’t be changed—the customizable part is apparently choosing which options are used.)

• Multiple audio notifications of recorded meeting: While this is an ungainly label, it’s descriptive. Whenever something changes during a recorded meeting, there’s a message alerting participants, such as someone entering a meeting, or a recording starting up.

I would also suggest in addition to any disclosure, you announce at the start of a meeting that it’s being recorded. Zoom also shows a message within their apps while a recording is in progress to further emphasize that to members.

Set Local Recording Options

Each participant recording a meeting, whether they’re the host or not, has access to app settings that affect aspects of how Zoom works. In Settings > Recording in a desktop app:

• Pick a location or not: You can set a folder where all recordings go, or check a box to be prompted after the meeting is over.

• Record audio separately: If you select “Record a separate audio file for each participant,” you can use the files for multi-track mixing later in an audio editor. This can be useful if you use Zoom to record a podcast or for meetings or events that will be released as audio and need refinement before they go out.

• Optimize for a 3rd party video editor: Select this option, and Zoom produces a video file more easily used by video-editing software, as opposed to one that’s highly compressed for web-hosting and internet streaming. (This is also available in cloud recording.)

• Add a timestamp to the recording: I can’t see the utility in this, but there may be circumstances in which the precise time across which an event was recorded is relevant. (This, too, is available in cloud recording.)

• Record video during screen sharing: If you need just the audio, uncheck this box.

• Place video next to the shared screen in the recording: This forces side-by-side view in recording a shared screen.

If you want participants’ name overlaid on a recording, enable “Always display participant name on their videos” in a desktop app’s Recording settings.

Use Cloud Recording

With a paid account, you can record to Zoom’s cloud. It may be useful to you to pay the monthly fee as a single host in order to gain access to that feature. The single host account includes just 1 GB of storage, which is about four hours of audio and video by Zoom’s estimate.

Unlike local recording, only the host can initiate cloud recording.

You enable cloud storage on a paid account via account settings in the Recording options. Turn on Cloud Recording. You then have a number of options you can set that let you fine-tune what you capture:

• Pick views: Cloud recording lets you record from one or more views simultaneously. You can combine the active speaker and shared screen view, the gallery view with the shared screen, or—and this is the coolest part—separate streams of active speaker, gallery view, and shared screen. For later editing, that can be fantastic.

• Record an audio only file: Having separate audio can make it easier to produce a podcast or audio download from a meeting or presentation. However, you can’t create separate audio files for each member, as with local recording.

• Save chat messages: Chat transcripts are deleted when a meeting ends (unless you have “Auto saving chats” enabled in Meeting settings). This option saves chat text to cloud storage, too.

• Display participants’ names in the recording: This can be useful with many participants, allowing them to be more easily identified. (It’s not an option for local recording.)

• Save panelist chat to the recording: With webinars only, panelists chat to all panelists or to all panelists and attendees appears in the video.

Find Local Recording Output

Zoom drops locally recorded files in a folder named with the date, time, meeting name, and Meeting ID. The folder contains some combination of an MP4 video file, an AAC (.m4a) audio file, and a text file. (There’s also a .m3u playlist file, which may not be very useful.)

If you chose to not to record video, wanted a separate audio file for each speaker, or didn’t engage in chat, you see a different combination of files. With multiple audio files, a folder named Audio Record is nested with all of them.

Manage Cloud Recorded Sessions

Log into your account on the Zoom website and use the Recordings link in the lefthand navigation sidebar to see cloud-recorded meetings. You can download the various associated files, which are organized within a page for each meeting.

These media files and the text files can be used with any standard editing software, played back on your device, or posted to local file servers, web servers, or internet storage—keeping in mind the warnings about privacy above.

You can also choose to share cloud-recorded files. Each recorded meeting has a Share button you can click, and then set options. This lets you set a password, restrict to just internal users with Zoom accounts within your organization or associated with the host account, and allow or prevent downloads.