We decided to terminate Local Recording

Hello. Johan here, co-founder of Welder. Maybe you've used our local recording, love our free transcription service or you fell in love with the new Welder Studio. 

In any case, I am grateful you are on this mailing list. Because thanks to you we can do what we love - building great digital products. 

This email will be a bit longer than usual for us. But it will be a good story. I promise. 

If you don't have time, here is TL;DR (too long; didn’t read)

We decided to terminate Local Recording for good. By the 15th of February, Welder won’t offer a way to do local recording anymore. Your current recordings will be available until the 15th of March and then deleted. 

The new Studio that allows you to go customize, go live, record and edit amazing content is a great combination of reliability, ease of use, and quality. You can check here how it looks.
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Or just watch this video (once again, I got carried away and put way to much time into it):

Up for reading? Story time! 

So why we did this?

You may have noticed we released Welder Studio before the new year. This is called a pivot when building a product. We did this because our initial goal was to make content creation simple for our team.

When we started researching the problem we found out that recording high-quality videos remotely is quite a pain and decided to build the first version of Welder. 

Despite the success with it, mostly thanks to great user experience and focus on simplicity and reliability we also found out the quality by itself is not solving the problem we started with - making content creation as simple as possible. 

There are a few issues with local recording solutions

The reliability is just a pain in the ass.

I dare to say this is the most important point a tool for recording content has to pass. Being reliable. We found out that it's near impossible to achieve while running a healthy business. 

Post-production is not easy

To solve the problem of making content creation easy we had to tackle the problem of post-production. While separately recorded tracks from each participant give you great flexibility in editing the content, it also makes it real time-consuming. Different timings, cutouts and other issues are quite frequent and not easy to deal with.

Repurposing is key in 2022

It was even before, but now it's more important than ever. The success of your content is based on two things. 

1st your content is valuable (that's the creativity differentiator or a skill) 

2nd distribution. 

You have to distribute like hell, multiple platforms, making highlights, clips, posting them on LinkedIn, TikTok, your website, everywhere. Rewriting your content into articles. 

And that's still an unresolved challenge. 

All this made us pivot into Welder Studio.

A single tool to stream, record, edit and repurpose video content. 

Yeah, it has its own drawbacks. For now, there are no separate tracks for each participant. But hey, that means the file is immediately ready to be repurposed. This is exactly what you can do with our text-based editor. 

The reliability is incomparably higher because everything important happens on our servers - in an environment we can control. 

You can also customize the look of your show much easier. Just by changing the background, overlay, logo, or even layouts! 

And there is much more coming. Stronger customization, more powerful editor, easier way to distribute the content and eventually maybe even the locally recorded tracks as well.

That takes me to the only (small) drawback. Quality.

Yeah, you lose some of that, and yeah, internet may influence it as well. But let's be honest, most of the guests you have on the call are using a default MacBook camera and we found out that with a good bandwidth reserved for the live calls the quality of audio and video is almost unrecognisable between local and server-side recordings. 

And even with higher level gear, the quality difference is like 20% in video and 5% in audio. That's not much.

But losing a 2-hour recording, even once with a high profile guest is much more painful. 

And spending a day on post production and content repurposing is much costlier. 

So this is it. End of a chapter - local recording, and a start of another one - holistic content creation studio. 

There is a lot coming in 2022, and we are insanely pumped about it. I will be happy if you give the new Welder Studio a try and share your honest thoughts with me. I believe it will help you immensely with creating the amazing content you create right now.

Cheers! 

Johan & the whole Welder team