Basic Plan recording a meeting locally

[Buck_LaVallee]

I am a new Basic Plan Zoom user.  I have almost 40 years as an I.T. Director so I'm not a novice.  However, I have a crucial Zoom meeting in 5 days that I need to record.  I have spent the last 8 hours trying to sort through the support web pages as well as the community page.  I read a great deal of good information but some instructions appear to contradict other statements. 

Do I need to be a co-host in order to record locally and does the host have to enable this feature?   Does the host have to assign recording privileges to a user in the participant's menu?  I am also having issues trying to change the settings to record.  I have signed into Zoom Portal through the Windows client.  I have gone to the navigation menu and clicked settings.  I have clicked on the recording tab but there is no toggle to enable recording and no dialog box appears to verify any change.  Does all of this need to be set up after connecting to a meeting or can I make the recording changes prior to joining the meeting?

I was hoping to find a step by step description from beginning to end of how to set up the Zoom Windows client software, log in, configure for recording, join a meeting with appropriate pass codes etc. and have full audio and video and recording access to this one on one meeting.  This meeting is projected to go 3 hours.  How many gigs of storage should a 3 hour meeting take up?  Are there any other settings or issues of which I should be aware?

Thank you for your help in advance.

[Bort]

Hi @Buck_LaVallee 

• You do not need to be or have a co-host to record locally.
• By default, only the meeting host can start a recording. The host can allow other participants to record locally, by granting them that permission in the Participants panel. 
• The Settings page in the web portal will allow you to enable the overall ability to locally record, but there are more specific local recording options in the desktop client's settings directly. 
• You must configure all these options before the official meeting starts, otherwise any recording will not be affected by those settings.
• I'd suggest a trial run or two, to ensure the recording is capturing what you want and how you want it. 
• Its hard to estimate the size of a recording, as recordings can vary depending on a few factors, such as the number of participants with video on, overall video resolution of the meeting, shared screens, and the overall resolution of the shared content. For 3 hours, I'd suggest having at least 10GB, just to be sure the entire session can be captured and converted successfully. 

Hope that helps and let me know if you have any other questions. 

[Buck_LaVallee]

Bort,

Thank you so much for all the descriptive, detailed information you provided.  It will be an incredible help to me.  I will absolutely do a few test runs prior to the meeting.  If you don't mind, I do have a few more questions.  So, if I understand correctly, the host needs to record the meeting as well in order for me to record.  They need to go into the Participants Panel as the host and grant permission for me to record.  I have played around with recording just myself in a meeting that I created.  That seemed to work as expected. From what you said, I do not need to be host or be given co-host permissions in order to record the meeting .  Is that correct?

So, now I need to go into both the Settings page in the Web Portal and the Desktop Client's settings and customize the preferences to my personal needs in order to record with the settings and in the format I choose.  I need to have all this done prior to the meeting for the changes I make in settings to take effect. Do I have that right?  Will the program hold the recording preferences that I change or will I need to reset them each time I go to record a meeting? 

I have a new PC Laptop with a terabyte of vacant space and it will be just two people in the meeting with no shared screens or other add-ons that would take up additional disk space or slow down the speed of the connection.  So, I don't believe I’ll have any worries there.  Do you know if there is a suggested and/or required minimum internet speed to get a decent resolution?  I’ll be connecting my laptop to a 5G cellular Hotspot connection.

Thanks again for the help.