When most people think of meeting recordings, they often expect a standard video capture of the original meeting. For most web conferencing platforms, this is the case. Adobe Connect recordings however provide much more functionality. It's certainly possible to generate a static video by clicking the 'Make Offline' button. By default however, Adobe Connect recordings are much more interactive and completely indexed.

When you click to view a recording, the Adobe Connect server starts replaying the meeting. Not a video of the meeting - the meeting itself. Obviously some elements - like the audio that was broadcast - are recorded. Most pods though are completely live and retain some of their interactivity. When you create a recording, the Adobe Connect server automatically creates an index of every action that took place in the meeting along with specific timeline informtation. When viewing a recording, Adobe Connect is essentially replaying that index. In fact, you can even view part of the index. To the left of the recording, you should see a black sidebar with the meeting index. If you don't see it, look for a small arrow to open up the meeting index. This index includes chapter markers for every layout change, every time you moved a slide, and other activities like chat or video. The index is searchable - making it easy to jump directly to the portion of the recording in which you're interested.

Since you're not wathcing a static video, you can also interact with some of the meeting components. Meeting polls will be closed, but you could still take a quiz if the original meeting incorporated a quiz from Presenter or Captivate. You can still download files from a File Share pod. You can even select and copy text from a note pod or interact with custom pods. It also means there are ways you can edit the recording that simply wouldn't be possible with a video. In addition to making edits to the timeline, you can anonymize the recording, remove certain pods, and event edit the index itself.

In this video, I walk through how to access and edit an Adobe Connect recording.