Video to article

What video to article is

Video to article is the rewriting of one recorded talk into one written piece that stands on its own page. You send the recording and the slides. You get back an article that makes the same argument, in the same order of importance, written for somebody reading at a desk who has no intention of watching forty minutes of footage.

It is not a transcript with headings dropped into it. A pasted transcript is not an article and never reads as one. Speech repeats itself, circles back, corrects itself halfway through a sentence and leans on a slide the reader cannot see. If a readable record of what was said is genuinely all you want, buy an edited transcript instead and spend considerably less. Here the transcript is the raw material, not the product.

When you need one

You need this when you have given a talk that went well and was seen by the people in the room and nobody else. A conference session, a chamber of commerce presentation, a recorded lunch-and-learn, an industry association breakfast. Forty minutes of your best thinking, delivered once, then posted as a link that eleven people clicked.

The second case is a talk that answers a question your sales calls keep repeating. If you explain the same thing out loud every week, the written version is the page you send instead, and it is the page people find when they go looking for what you spent those forty minutes on.

You do not need this if the recording is a two-person conversation with digressions rather than a prepared talk; that is heavier rewriting and it is sold as podcast to article. And if you want posts, a newsletter section and an answered-questions page as well as the article, buy the whole set as repurposing rather than this one piece.

What I need and what I write

The input is a recording of twenty to ninety minutes with sound clear enough that a person can hear every word, plus the slide deck if there was one. A phone recording from the back of a room is usually fine. The slides matter more than the video quality, because they are already the structure of the argument.

• The spine. A talk has a shape you built in advance. That shape becomes the headings, with the weakest section cut rather than padded out to match the others.
• The things the slide said and the speaker did not. Numbers on a chart, the four items on a list read out as "these", the diagram gestured at. All of it written into sentences.
• The asides worth keeping. The unplanned example, the objection from the floor, the line the room laughed at. These are usually the best writing in the piece.
• A written opening. Nobody reads "good morning, thanks for having me". The article starts at the point the talk reached four minutes in.
• What people search for. The plain words a buyer would type when they have the problem, used in the title and the headings, so the page can be found by somebody who has never heard of you.

What you get

The article. One piece of a thousand to sixteen hundred words, with headings, in an editable file and as clean HTML you can paste straight into the site. Written to be read without the video, and to make sense to somebody who watches it afterwards.

A title and description. One page title and one meta description, plus two alternative titles, so the person publishing it is not left guessing.

The working transcript. The edited transcript the article was written from, delivered with it, because it is useful on its own and you paid for it either way.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg commercial insurance broker gives a thirty-five-minute talk to a trucking association about what actually voids a cargo claim. Eighteen slides, one of them a list of seven exclusions that she reads out as "all of these". The recording sits on the firm's site behind a play button.

Rewritten, it becomes a fourteen-hundred-word article headed by the question the audience asked twice, which was whether a broker has to be told about a new trailer before it goes on the road. The seven exclusions become a proper list with a sentence each. The question from the floor about subcontracted loads becomes its own section, because it was the most useful two minutes of the morning. The broker publishes it, sends it to every new commercial client during onboarding, and stops re-explaining exclusions on the phone. The talk had already been given; the article is what made it work twice.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What the talk covered, who it was for, and where the article will be published. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Agreed on the length of the recording before anything starts.
3. The files. You send the recording, the slide deck, and a short list of names, products and terms that must be spelt correctly.
4. The work. The recording is transcribed and edited, then the article is drafted. Five to seven working days for one talk.
5. Your review. One round of changes. Anything the speaker would not have said is cut rather than softened.
6. Delivery. Article, titles, description and the transcript, in one folder.

What it costs

This is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the length of the recording and the state of the sound decide the work. A single talk under an hour is a small job. A back catalogue of conference sessions is quoted in a batch and costs less per talk. The pricing page shows the four ways of working so you can see the shape of it, and the number for your job is fixed in writing before anything begins.

What happens next

Most people do this with their best talk first, see the page working, and then send the rest of the back catalogue. Some take the same article and split it into a fortnight of posts, which is article to social series. Others decide the next talk should be planned with the written version in mind, and that starts with a written outline before anyone presses record. One article from one talk is a complete piece of work on its own, and nothing further is assumed.