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Okay, I wish now I had made some screen shots of the actual Video Media scene creation process. I had no idea it wouldn’t work in 2 days’ time!

What Is Production Studio?

Production Studio — which you might see simply abbreviated to PS by some — is a tool available in Zoom Events and Webinars Plus for webinars only.  It is a reletively non-technical tool that produces simple but elegant TV-show-like layouts for your attendees to view.  In the Zoom Events editor, you can create a number “scenes” from a selection of over 50 layouts, and customize the overall look and feel of your session’s output.  See this YouTube video from Zoom for a quick peek.

What is a PS Scene?

Scenes are the basic building blocks of your show.  There are a set of scenes with just people’s camera videos, scenes with just shared screen displays, and scenes with a combination of these — each with a number of optional layouts.  You can add in custom wallpaper (background images), and even borders around the various elements of your scene.  There are also some scenes that simply display selected images, as well as some that combine images with camera video.

What is a Video Media Scene?

The new feature, which I’ve chosen to call the Video Media Scene, seems especially useful in two specific use cases:

• You have pre-recorded content of presentations, either at the request of your event client (whom I consider to be the event’s Executive Producers), or because a highly anticipated speaker is no longer available.
• You can video content that a speaker has requested to “play” at a  certain point in their presentation.

The Video Media Scene allows you to do a couple of things.

#1: Upload a Video

You can upload a video up to 2 hours in length.  These videos end up in your Hub’s Assets > Content Library listing.  As of the this article’s publishing, the only way to upload longish videos is directly through the Video Media Scene interface, since the Assets > Content Library only allows videos of 150 MB and 5 minutes duration.  You can upload videos directly through the Assets > Content Library menu — within the limitations there.  But anything longer than 5 minutes or greater than 150MB must be uploaded from within the Video Media scene editing intrface, and shown here.

As you can see from this screen shot, you can set some play options and some end of play options.  I think they’re pretty self-explanatory, but until I can experiment with them, I can’t say that for sure.

#2: Use the Video Media Scene Live

During the Webinar, a Host or Co-Host controlling Production Studio simply puts the desired scene in the Preview window, and at the appropriate time, pushes the Preview scene to Live.  At that point, your first option comes into play (pun intended!).

• If you selected Do not auto-play, I beleive the first frame of your video will come up — or maybe a black screen!  (I haven’t tested it yet.  The session I managed to insert the Video Media scene into is a client’s production event which isn’t Published yet; I don’t want to press my luck with this event, scheduled for mid-September.)
• If you selected Start video from beginning, I believe your video will somply start playing as soon as it’s pushed to Live.
• If you selected Start video from last position, the video will start from wherever Production Studio thinks is the “last known position of play”.  What might this be? (Keep in mind, I’m guessing here!):
  • If the scene hasn’t been Live and hasn’t been manually manipulated, my hope is that it’ll simply start from Frame 1.
  • If the scene was previous Live and then replced with another scene — perhaps of your presenter who wanted to make a comment about the video being shown — then the next push to Live should just start from where it stopped previously,
  • I’m hoping there’s a third option: that the Production Studio operator has the option of moving the play head while the scene is in the Preview panel.  I’m hoping!

Assuming that you have managed to get the video to play, it will play until one of the following happens (again, I hope!):

• If Do nothing is selected, when it reaches the end of the video, at which point it simply stops.  What will id display?  Maybe the last frame of the video, or maybe a black frame — I don’t know yet.
• If Loop video is selected, when it reaches the end of the video it should restart at the beginning of the video.  Useful, perhaps, if you are havign a small break and want to play a “break reel” for however long you need it.
• If Go to next previewed scene is selected, it likely does what we would expect: the Video media scene and the current Preview scene will swap places, making whatever you put in the Preview panel the active output.  Now you would normally pick another scene to take the place of the Video median scene in the Preview window.
• If you selected Prompt host to end the webinar — oh please, don’t use this until someone has tested it! — I’m really guessing that the attendee screen goes blank or freezes at the last frame of the video, and someone — probably the Host controlling Production Studio — gets a pop-up message giving the Host clear options like a button that says “End Webinar” and a bunch of other buttons with all of the other things you might actually want to do:
  • Push the Preview scene to Live
  • Stop Production Studio and go into normal webinar Speaker or Gallery mode
  • End Webinar for Attendees Only (assuming you have Backstage enabled)
  • End Webinar for All — with another pop-up confirmation that says “Are you sure??”