How to turn long webinar recordings into high-converting social video snippets?

Extract the most engaging 30‑second moments, repurpose them with platform‑specific specs, and add a clear CTA to drive conversions.

Step‑by‑step workflow

1. Ingest – Upload the full webinar to Descript (v3.12) and generate a transcript. Enable Auto‑summarize to get timestamps for each speaker turn.
2. Identify spikes – Export the transcript to a CSV, then run a quick Python script to compute an engagement score:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('transcript.csv')
df['score'] = (df['likes']+df['comments'])/df['views']*1000
highlights = df[df['score']>5]['timestamp'].tolist()

Select the top‑3 timestamps.
3. Clip extraction – Use FFmpeg to cut the segments:

ffmpeg -i webinar.mp4 -ss 00:12:34 -t 00:00:30 -c copy clip1.mp4

Repeat for each timestamp.
4. Platform formatting – Render each clip with the specs in the table below using HandBrakeCLI:

HandBrakeCLI -i clip1.mp4 -o instagram.mp4 -e x264 -q 22 -b 5000k -vf "scale=1080:1080" -c aac -b 128k

| Platform | Resolution | Aspect | Max bitrate |
|----------|------------|--------|-------------|
| Instagram Reels | 1080×1080 | 1:1 | 5 Mbps |
| TikTok | 1080×1920 | 9:16 | 8 Mbps |
| YouTube Shorts | 1920×1080 | 16:9 | 10 Mbps |
5. Brand overlay – In Premiere Pro (v23) add a lower‑third with your logo, set opacity to 85 % and use the Essential Graphics preset “Brand CTA”.
6. Audio polish – Apply a -6 dB gain to speech, then duck music using the Auto‑Duck feature with a threshold of -30 LUFS.
7. Publish & track – Upload via native APIs (e.g., Instagram Graph API v15) and tag UTM parameters utm_source=insta&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=webinar.

Gotcha: FFmpeg’s -c copy skips re‑encoding, so any color‑space conversion required for a platform will be lost; always re‑encode when changing resolution or aspect ratio.