Speaker 1: Do you struggle to find the time to take useful notes from important training videos? I did. In this video, I'll show you a quick and free way to get quality notes from video narration. Now TechSmith, the Camtasia people, have done a fabulous job at making it easier to produce videos. As a result of the advances in video technology, there are many fine online training courses that are video-based and that offer real life-changing solutions for their viewers. But there is still a huge problem for many people. It takes time to really consume and get the most out of those videos. While you may be able to watch a 30-minute training video and understand it at the time you watched it, you won't remember it all unless you take notes that you can quickly review later. And taking notes from a video is a hugely time-consuming process. My experience shows that it can easily take eight times the length of the video to type quality notes on the content of that video. Busy people who want to learn something important to their careers or their business will buy access to video courses, but then they find they don't have the time to adequately consume them and internalize the information. They find that taking notes from a video is such time-consuming, soul-sucking drudgery that they keep putting off the consumption of these training videos until they can find the time. And they can never find enough time. They never catch up. But if you have a video screen capture program like Camtasia, you can save a huge amount of time. Just follow these steps. Step one, get a free account at otter.ai, a California company. Otter seems to have the best combination of transcription accuracy and generosity in their free account. You can use it to transcribe up to 600 audio minutes per month in a free account. That's 10 hours of audio. Their company seems to be mainly focused on transcribing business meetings and conversations within teams and having you listen to their, quote, smart notes, unquote, at audio speed. But we'll use Otter a bit differently. Their inexpensive paid account gives you up to 6,000 audio minutes, or 100 hours of audio per month, plus extra features for $10 a month. Full disclosure, I am not affiliated with otter.ai. Step two, go to the video you want to transcribe. In your browser, get into the portal that contains the video you wanted to transcribe and get ready to watch it, but don't start it yet. Step three, set up Camtasia to record your screen. You might think you could use an audio recording program like Audacity for this, but I find that most of those programs tend to record audio from a microphone. We need Camtasia's ability to record system audio, the audio that is coming directly from the video. If you want, you could use Camtasia to record the audio and the video, and you could upload that whole video to Otter for transcription. I prefer to just upload the audio narration. So I set up the Camtasia recorder's video frame on just a very small part of the screen that is just outside the actual video and not actually changing. Doing that will correctly record the audio, but the video part of the capture will be much smaller. Step four, record the video. You'll be able to watch the video and hear the audio while you record it. When the video ends, stop the Camtasia recorder, use Camtasia recorder to check the audio at the beginning, middle, and close to the end, and if okay, save the recording. Step five, I prefer to export only the audio track as an M4A file since that is the smallest. In this step, I like to put the recording on the timeline, separate the audio and video tracks, delete the video track from the timeline, and export the audio track to M4A format, the smallest file size. Step six, get into your Otter account and upload the M4A audio file. Otter will immediately start to transcribe it. It can send you an email when it finishes, which will take somewhat less time than the duration of the audio. Processing a five-minute video will take just a few minutes. Processing an hour-long video will take about 40 minutes or so. Step seven, you really should edit the audio in Otter because no computer transcription is perfect. Otter is very good, but it has trouble figuring out where sentences begin and end, where paragraphs begin and end, and certain words. For example, it has trouble figuring out whether it should transcribe your as Y-O-U-R or Y-O-U apostrophe R-E. In the beginning of this example, you can see several problems. It puts a paragraph break right in the middle of a sentence. It doesn't understand that Help Scout is a commercial name, and on and on. Let's fix problems like this. Otter's editor will let you hear the audio while the screen will highlight each word it had created as it goes along.

Speaker 2: Let's start off with free trials. Free trials, you've seen them used really heavily in the software and SaaS space.

Speaker 1: I suggest that you should fix suspicious words if you think Otter got them wrong, make changes to show beginning and ending of sentences, hit Enter to start a new paragraph since Otter will sometimes make very long sections of text that are hard to follow. So in our case, in one place, we hit Enter to make a new paragraph break right after the initial sentence. Then we hit Backspace in another place to join a partial sentence into the next paragraph, and we made some changes to words that Otter couldn't quite figure out. Keep on doing this in Otter's editor until you reach the end of your transcript. Step 8, download the transcript into your favorite word processor or note-taking tool. I prefer to download the text with time values in front of each paragraph. I save the text file and also paste it into something else so I can add emphasis with font size and bold facing. You might paste the text into your word processor. I prefer to paste it into the WizFolders program because that tool lets me keep multiple files open and it is searchable. I use WizFolders all day, every day, document all of my work. You can learn more about WizFolders at www.wizfolders.com. Step 9, it will help you the most to add bold-faced headings to the transcript in your word processor or note tool and to highlight key sentences so you can quickly find them in the future. That's it. You're done. Thanks for checking out this video. Please subscribe if you're not already subscribed. If you want to, check out that free Secrets of Successful USB Developers Guide with tips on getting your USB projects working end-to-end really fast every single time. Click or tap the screen in the description below. As always, we're helping you build your knowledge, skills, and impact with online video. Talk to you soon.