👩‍🏫 How to take video notes from a presentation

A few months ago, I made a video outlining how to take notes off of a YouTube video. It's been one of my most popular workflows, and today I'm doing an adaptation of it. I'm going to cover how to easily take notes from someone who's giving a presentation of slides or a deck.

The tricky thing about note taking from presentations is that you want to capture both visuals and audio information. Similar to being on a call, if you have to spend time writing or typing your notes that you want to save later, you end up missing new information that's being covered. Presentations move quickly.

This process will allow you to take notes relatively autonomously so that you can focus on the presentation. We will assume the presentations are being done remotely over a call or recording.

1. Transcribe the presentation audio

The first thing you want to do is capture the audio. More than likely you will want to listen to the presentation using headphones, meaning you want to pick up the “system” audio of your computer.

Here I am transcribing a video presentation from a saved Tweet, all from within my notes:

To do this in reflect, make sure you are using the Mac desktop application and have “labs” turned on in preferences.

2. Insert your own thoughts

In addition to picking up your computer's system audio, the transcriber will also pick up audio coming in through your set microphone. That means you can pause or mute the video and add your own thoughts whenever you would like.

We're later on going to have AI organize our presentation notes for us. So it's helpful here to add in an audio tag that the AI can recognize. Just say something like personal note or add a personal note.

3. Take visual screenshots

As we mentioned in the introduction, the tricky thing about note taking with presentations is that you want both audio and visual notes. Screenshots are a great way to accomplish this.

Most note-taking and AI tools now have OCR text, meaning they will be able to read the text in a screenshot. We'll also be able to save these in our final notes.

Note that you don't have to take a screenshot of everything. Only screenshot the information you'll want to save in your notes later. You also don't have to worry about where the screenshots go for now, or even what order they're in. AI can take care of this for us next.

4. Use AI to organize and save your presentation notes

Once the presentation has concluded, you've now captured all of your information and it just needs to be organized. Use the following prompt, either saved in your notes as a custom prompt or pasted into ChatGPT or Claude.

Your job is to act as an executive note taker. You are to take the written transcript below. I want you to organize the transcript into key takeaways with the valuable and useful and actionable information for each key takeaway. In the transcript if you ever hear the words "personal note" or "add in a personal note" it means the next section of audio is adding a personal note from me watching the video not the presenter please indicate these personal notes where relevant in the organized notes. Please be as concise as possible while keeping all of the valuable information. 

5. Add in screenshots as needed

Right now, AI doesn't seem great at organizing the screenshots along with the key takeaways. If you know of a tool that does this, please let me know! So for now I just manually paste them in.

This is really the only manual step of the process. It is a bit annoying, but I think it's worth it to have the screenshots you want to save in your notes.