How To Speed Up Training Videos

A lot of training materials these days are delivered through video. I don’t know about you, but I can read a lot faster than I can watch a video. Don’t you feel like you’re wasting my time watching training videos, no matter how valuable it is?

What if you missed a lecture and need to catch up?

A lot of videos are so slow paced that it’s easy to get bored and distracted, which adds to the problem and decreases your ability to absorb the information. Transcriptions often aren’t available. Accompanying notes often are incomplete.

So why not have the best of both worlds? Why not speed up the video?

Yesterday I had some training videos to watch that was supposed to take 45 minutes. I sped up Windows Media Player and got the same information, but it only took 30 minutes.

As a secondary benefit, it was a lot easier to concentrate on what was taught. The guy was now talking so fast I had to pay attention to keep up. Greater focus = better retention of information!

The beauty of a video is that if you miss a bit, just move the slider back to the start of that part and rewatch it. Easy.

To speed up a video on a PC, if the video plays in Windows Media Player, just hit CTRL+SHIFT+G (while the video is playing) and it’ll speed it to about 1.5 times normal speed.

To speed up a video in VLC Media Player, hit the plus button once or twice.

In Quicktime, hit CTRL+K then change the Playback Speed to whatever suits you. I prefer 1.5x because it balances speed and understandability.

Sorry, I don’t have a Mac (yet), so could someone please chip in with how to do this on a Mac?

This technique only works if you have downloaded the video.

What if you need to speed up an online video?

The program I’ve used for years to speed up online training videos is Enounce MySpeed. You can get it from here. It has a 7 day free trial, so you can check it out first.

This is what MySpeed looks like:

As you can see, it’s a little, unobtrusive widget that sits on your screen if you need to change the speed. Or hit the X and it will hide in the notifications area, but keep working.

You can see I’ve saved over 83 hours so far by using it, so I wholeheartedly endorse it. Sometimes, if it wasn’t already running, you need to open a new tab and restart the video, but that’s a small price to pay.

I like how it doesn’t “chipmunk” voices. It just speeds things up.

Some sites, like Youtube, now have the ability to automatically speed up the video, but for everything else, Enounce gets the job.

Sometimes I just use it because the training centre has a weird setup where you have to change the speed on every video. Just run this and you can focus on learning.