How to Download your Facebook Live Video to your Computer

If you posted a video to Facebook live, there are a variety of reasons that you might not have any other backup copy available to work with. That means if you then wanted to load that same video onto YouTube or for other purposes, you’re stuck. Here is how to download that Facebook Live video from Facebook to your computer, so you can use it for whatever purpose you wish.

First, log into your Facebook account on a computer.

Go to your video area. Usually there is a ‘videos’ tab beneath your main profile banner image.

You should see “All Videos”. Click on the … on the right side.

Go to your Video Library.

Point to the Facebook Live video in question. As you hover over the video link, you should get an EDIT option to the right of the video title.

You’re now on the edit page for your Facebook Live video. There is another … area in the lower middle. Click on that … option.

You’ll now have an option to DOWNLOAD your video.

Save the video onto your local hard drive.

You now have a video to work with!

Note that if you originally uploaded your video from an old-school cellphone, the quality isn’t going to be great. That’s just a fact of life. So for example I use a Samsung 7 cellphone. When I download my Facebook Live video, the video I get is:

for a 3 hour video:
Frame size: 640 x 360
Frame Rate: 23 frames/second
Audio bit rate: 63 kbps / stereo
Audio sample rate: 24 kHz
total file size: 619mb

So again you can’t really blame Facebook for this. They were handling a live stream out of a cellphone. We’re fortunate that even works :).

So then the question is, how do you bring this MP4 file into something like Adobe Premiere in order to work with it?

It turns out that 23 frames/second caused problems for me while working with Adobe Premiere, my video editing software. My cellphone/Facebook Live combo created a “variable frame rate”. If you run into that sort of a problem, where the audio / video don’t remain synced properly, you want to download Handbrake:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HandBrake

This is FREE. It will let you convert the file from variable frame rate to a fixed 30 frames per second rate. This then imports perfectly into Adobe Premiere and other packages. You can then edit it like any other video file, add titles, and then save it for YouTube or other uses.

Let us know if you have any questions about downloading your live videos from Facebook Live!

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