Making an event recap video from conference talks, panels and attendee interviews
FlashCut turns event footage where people speak, such as keynotes, panels and attendee interviews, into short recap cuts. It transcribes and labels every speaker, logs the footage, searches it by what was said or shown, and proposes several narratives at 90, 60 and 30 seconds. It does not build music-driven b-roll montages.
Updated
The problem with event footage
A two-day conference can leave a team with ten or more hours of footage: full keynotes, panels, breakout sessions, booth conversations and quick interviews with attendees in the hallway. The recap is due within days, while the event is still being talked about.
The good material is scattered. The line everyone quoted came 34 minutes into a panel, the best attendee reaction is in the fifth of twelve hallway interviews, and the sponsor wants their speaker in the cut. Finding all of it by scrubbing takes longer than editing the recap.
What FlashCut does with event footage
- Transcribes every talk, panel and interview and labels each speaker.
- Logs footage on arrival with shot type, scene and location, sorting talks and interviews to A-roll and crowd and venue shots to B-roll.
- Searches across the whole project by what was said or what was shown, such as a product name, a theme of the event, or a stage.
- Finds every shot of a specific speaker through face recognition, useful when a sponsor or headliner must appear.
- Proposes several narratives from the footage, each a storyline built from soundbites that belong together, at 90, 60 and 30 seconds.
A workflow from event footage to recap cut
- Upload the talks, panels, interviews and venue footage into one project. FlashCut transcribes and logs each file as it arrives.
- Search for the event’s themes or the names of key speakers to see what material exists before you plan the cut.
- Choose Get Narratives. FlashCut returns several storylines: one might follow the event’s main theme across speakers, another might be built around attendee reactions.
- Open a narrative to see its soundbites and where each sits in the footage, then assemble the one you want into a cut.
- Refine by chat (“open with the keynote line about the launch”, “add an attendee reaction after the panel”) or trim the cut in the transcript.
- If the event organizer or a sponsor needs to sign off, share the narratives through a password-protected review link on the Pro or Studio plan.
- Export an MP4 with SRT captions for quick posting, or Premiere Pro XML or FCPXML to add music, branding and venue b-roll in your editor.
Recaps at several lengths
Events usually need more than one recap: a 90-second highlight for the event site and newsletter, a 60-second cut for sponsors, and a 30-second version for social. Each FlashCut narrative comes at 90, 60 and 30 seconds, so the shorter versions keep the strongest lines from the longer one instead of being re-cut from scratch. Upload a single keynote or panel as its own project and the same steps give that speaker a short cut to share afterward.
Where FlashCut fits and where it doesn’t
FlashCut fits recaps carried by what people said: the keynote’s main argument, the panel’s disagreement, attendees explaining why they came. Narratives are built from speech, so the more talks and interviews you shot, the more FlashCut has to work with.
It does not build the classic sizzle reel, a fast montage of crowd shots, stage lights and handshakes set to music. FlashCut is not built for music-driven montages, and a recap made only of b-roll gives it no speech to build a story from. Many teams use FlashCut for the spoken spine of the recap, then export to Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro to lay music and venue footage around it. FlashCut does not export to Avid or DaVinci Resolve today.