Recording a Video Call Properly

A client asks for a webinar to be recorded, somebody presses the obvious button, and the file arrives the next day. Sometimes it is excellent. Often it is 640 × 360, with a single audio track on which the voices overlap, and somebody has to explain why.

Most of these disappointments are not platform defects. They come from not knowing what the platform actually produces. The rules exist, they are published, and they are considerably less generous than people assume.

Resolution, the first and most expensive trap

Zoom documents its recording behaviour precisely, and the reading is instructive. By default, as soon as two participants have their cameras on without HD enabled, the recording is made at 360p — that is, 640 × 360. You get 720p with the HD quality option, in gallery view up to twenty-five tiles. And 1080p appears only in three specific cases: a single participant in full HD, two participants in full screen with HD, or three or more participants with HD and a gallery beyond twenty-five tiles.

Another documented limit, consequential for any product demonstration: during screen sharing, the video thumbnail caps at 1280 × 720 and is scaled.

Google Meet goes up to 1080p, the effective resolution depending on that of the shared screen, with an eight-hour recording ceiling. Microsoft, by contrast, documents neither the resolution nor the codec nor the container of a Teams recording anywhere. The only numeric indication available is an order of magnitude of roughly four hundred megabytes per hour, which says a great deal about bitrate and nothing about resolution. We prefer to flag that rather than invent a figure.

The practical consequence is that settings must be checked before the meeting, not discovered afterwards. On Zoom in particular, enabling HD and selecting the view that triggers 1080p is a deliberate configuration, never a default.

Separate tracks, and where to find them

Editing a panel discussion is a different job depending on whether you have one track per speaker or a single mix. On this point only one of the three platforms offers anything, and not where you would expect.

Zoom can record a separate audio file per participant, but only in local recording, not in the cloud. The files land in a dedicated subfolder, named after each participant. The good news is that local recording is available to free and paid accounts alike. Neither Teams nor Meet documents an equivalent.

Otherwise Zoom produces an MP4 video file, an M4A audio file, a playlist, the chat text and caption files. Google Meet places the recording in the organiser's Drive with the chat converted to a caption file. Teams drops the file into OneDrive for private meetings, and into the team's SharePoint library for channel meetings.

How long the file survives

The question is rarely asked at the moment of recording, and always six months later.

Teams is the most explicit: default retention is one hundred and twenty days, with particular rules — thirty days for some education licences, thirty days for webinars and town halls, extensible to ninety. The setting is adjustable from one day upward, or can be configured never to expire. At expiry the file moves to the recycle bin.

Zoom publishes no default retention for active cloud recordings; the only documented value concerns the trash, emptied after thirty days, and an administrator can enable automatic deletion after a chosen interval. Google Meet documents no expiry at all: the file sits in Drive and follows the organisation's quotas and retention rules.

On two platforms out of three, in other words, the lifespan of a recording depends on an internal policy nobody has written down. That is exactly the kind of question worth settling before promising a client a durable link.

Bandwidth, which decides quality before any setting does

A high-definition meeting needs a connection that holds, and all three vendors publish their requirements.

Google also supplies a figure useful for sizing a whole room: roughly one megabit per second up and 1.3 down per participant. For twenty people meeting from the same building, that adds up quickly.

Capturing it yourself, and what that changes

Native recording is convenient and sufficient for an internal meeting. The moment there is a deliverable, external capture becomes a different proposition: you choose resolution, bitrate and codec, you record a clean track, and you are no longer at the mercy of whichever view the platform decided to record.

The approach is to compose the image yourself — the meeting window, a screen share, a camera — in capture software, and record locally. It is also what lets you use a real camera in place of a webcam, through an HDMI-to-USB capture device.

On that last point, a word about compatibility. Devices conforming to the USB Video Class are recognised without a driver: Microsoft has shipped an in-box driver since Windows 10 covering versions 1.0 through 1.5 of the class. In practice the device appears as an ordinary webcam in every application, including Teams, Zoom and Meet.

The question of resolution limits by USB generation deserves to be framed correctly, because no official source publishes a table. The mechanism, though, is clear: High Speed USB offers 480 Mb/s raw, SuperSpeed roughly ten times that, and uncompressed video saturates the former immediately. That is why entry-level capture devices transmit MJPEG rather than a raw stream. Reason in terms of available bandwidth and chosen payload, not in maximum-resolution figures printed on a box.

System audio on macOS, the difficulty that remains

Capturing a meeting's picture is trivial; capturing the sound coming out of the computer is considerably less so on a Mac, and it is the most common sticking point.

OBS documentation is explicit: native desktop audio capture is only possible from version 30 of the software on macOS 13 or later, through a dedicated source that can take the whole desktop or a single application. Below those versions additional software is required, and OBS names the common options itself, noting that the most widespread free one cannot capture per application.

Two further limits are worth knowing: window capture is deprecated on macOS 13 and above, where display capture is the route, and the macOS screen capture source only gained audio from macOS 13, versions 12.3 to 12.6 capturing picture without sound.

The professional workaround is different and more robust: route audio through a hardware interface rather than relying on software capture. It has a second merit, which is allowing local voice and remote return to be recorded separately.

Telling participants, and what is required

All three platforms notify participants when recording starts, but with different room for manoeuvre, and that is worth knowing.

Teams shows a notification to every participant as soon as recording begins, with no documented way to disable it, and Microsoft adds an explicit warning: depending on your region, you may need everyone's permission before recording them. Google Meet alerts participants at start and at stop, with no documented option to turn it off. Zoom always notifies, in three forms — a consent banner, a voice prompt, and keypad confirmation for dial-in participants — but the voice prompts can be disabled by an administrator, and the consent banner can be disabled for internal participants on the larger plans.

A technical notification does not settle the legal question, which varies by jurisdiction and by whether participants are employees. Microsoft's own warning is the honest summary: check what applies where your participants are, and treat prior information — not merely an on-screen banner at the moment of recording — as the prudent standard. Retention deserves the same treatment: decide a duration tied to the purpose, write it down, and apply it, rather than letting the platform's defaults decide by accident.

Frequently asked questions

Why is my Zoom recording low resolution?

Because the default behaviour, as soon as two cameras are active without HD enabled, is a 360p recording. 720p requires the HD quality option, and 1080p only occurs in three specific combinations of view and participant count.

Can I get one audio track per speaker?

Only with Zoom's local recording, which produces a file per participant. Cloud recording does not offer it, and neither Teams nor Meet documents an equivalent. If the edit requires it, local recording has to be decided before the meeting.

Do I need participants' permission to record?

Every platform notifies participants at the start, and Microsoft notes that permission from everyone may be required depending on the region. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and are stricter where participants are employees, so informing people in advance rather than relying on the on-screen notice is the safe approach.

Is external capture always better?

It gives you control over resolution, bitrate and framing, which native recording does not. It does demand careful audio configuration, particularly on macOS where system audio capture depends on the operating system version. For an internal meeting with no deliverable, native recording remains the right choice.

Sources

• Microsoft Learn: Teams recording storage change (updated 7 August 2026), recording expiration policy (11 June 2026) and network preparation (9 July 2026); Microsoft Support, recording a Teams meeting.
• Zoom Support: recording file formats, resolution of recorded video, separate audio file per participant, recording notification, system requirements.
• Google Meet Help, record a meeting; Google Workspace documentation, prepare your network.
• OBS Studio documentation: window capture sources, macOS screen capture source, macOS desktop audio capture guide.
• USB-IF, USB Video Class 1.5 document set; Microsoft Learn, UVC camera implementation guide.

Further reading

• Wi-Fi or Ethernet: the network behind a live broadcast — the link nobody discusses until it fails
• Green Screen and Chroma Key: How to Get a Clean Key — the four decisions that make or break a chroma key
• Why Google Isn't Indexing Your Videos — the rule that decides whether Google indexes your video