Trimming Earnings Calls using FFMPEG

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It’s basically when a company releases their financial results for the quarter or year and then has a conference call with investors to discuss it all in detail. But sometimes these calls can be really long (like over an hour) and you just want to hear the juicy parts where they talk about profits, losses, and other exciting stuff. That’s where FFMPEG comes in!

FFMPEG is a powerful tool for manipulating video and audio files. It allows us to trim out unwanted sections of our earnings call recording using some simple commands. Here’s how it works:

1. First, we need to download the FFMPEG software from their website (https://ffmpeg.org/download.html) and install it on our computer. This is a one-time setup process that should only take a few minutes.

2. Next, we’ll open up our terminal or command prompt (depending on your operating system) and navigate to the directory where our earnings call recording is stored. For example:

# This script navigates to the directory where our earnings call recording is stored.

# First, we'll change our current directory to the parent directory of the earnings call recording.
cd ..

# Next, we'll check if the earnings call recording directory exists.
if [ -d "earnings-call-recording" ]; then
  # If it exists, we'll change our current directory to it.
  cd earnings-call-recording
else
  # If it doesn't exist, we'll create it and then change our current directory to it.
  mkdir earnings-call-recording
  cd earnings-call-recording
fi

# Now, we'll check if the recording file exists.
if [ -f "recording.mp3" ]; then
  # If it exists, we'll print a message and exit the script.
  echo "Recording already exists. Please delete it before running this script again."
  exit 1
else
  # If it doesn't exist, we'll download it from the given URL.
  wget https://example.org/download.html -O recording.mp3
fi

# Finally, we'll check if the recording was successfully downloaded.
if [ -f "recording.mp3" ]; then
  # If it exists, we'll print a success message.
  echo "Recording successfully downloaded."
else
  # If it doesn't exist, we'll print an error message and exit the script.
  echo "Error downloading recording. Please check the URL and try again."
  exit 1
fi

# Now, we can proceed to use the recording for our earnings call analysis.

3. Now that we’re in the right directory, let’s use FFMPEG to trim out the unwanted sections of our recording using these commands (assuming we want to keep only the first 10 minutes and last 5 minutes):

# Use FFMPEG to trim out unwanted sections of recording
# -i: input file
# -ss: start time
# -t: duration
# output_trimmed_first_10minutes.mp4: name of output file
ffmpeg -i earnings-call.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:10:00 output_trimmed_first_10minutes.mp4

# Trim last 5 minutes of recording
# -i: input file
# -ss: start time
# -t: duration
# output_trimmed_last_5minutes.mp4: name of output file
ffmpeg -i earnings-call.mp4 -ss 00:53:00 -t 00:05:00 output_trimmed_last_5minutes.mp4

Let’s break down what each of these commands does:

– `ffmpeg` is the name of our FFMPEG tool that we downloaded earlier.
– `-i earnings-call.mp4` tells FFMPEG to use our original earnings call recording as input (replace “earnings-call.mp4” with your own file name).
– `-ss 00:00:00` sets the start time for our trimmed output video, which is 0 seconds in this case since we want to keep the first 10 minutes of the recording.
– `-t 00:10:00` specifies how long we want to keep the trimmed output video (in this case, 10 minutes).
– `output_trimmed_first_10minutes.mp4` is the name of our new trimmed output file that will contain only the first 10 minutes of our earnings call recording.

We can repeat these same commands with different start and end times to create multiple trimmed output files for each section we want to keep. We now have a much more manageable earnings call recording that’s easier to listen to and understand.

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