When downloading a participant's High Quality Track, a screen share track, or media board track, you have the option to download it as an aligned version of the file.
The aligned version adds padding at the start of the recorded track. The padding, or blank space, ensures that this track starts at the correct time if you combine all the tracks using editing software.
NOTE:
Due to a device limitation, recording track files created using the Riverside mobile app are not yet available with alignment padding.
In-Depth
If a participant joins on their computer for only part of the recording or shares their screen or a media board file after the start of the recording, the Aligned video track or Aligned audio track includes padding at the beginning of the track. For a video file, the padding consists of black frames and for an audio file, it is done through empty space.
When the tracks are combined using editing software, the track files all start at the same time, but each participant's recorded media plays at the correct moment on the timeline.
In the example image below, the three Aligned video tracks all start at 00:00. The Guest's Aligned track has black frames until her recorded media starts playing at 02:50, when she joined the recording Studio. The Aligned screen share track has black frames until it starts playing at 05:22, when the Guest began sharing her screen.
Video tracks and Audio tracks that are not labeled Aligned are the regular recorded files without any padding to align them at the synchronized timing. The length of each track file is the amount of that time the participant recorded.
In the same example recording as the image above, the Host's regular Video track would be 8 minutes long, the Guest's regular Video track would be 5 minutes (with no black frames included), and the regular screen share Video track would be 2 minutes (with no black frames included).