SEATTLE — Before a valuable employee quits a job, how does a company make sure a bit of his or her magic stays behind?

Some companies try to capture it on video, by recording lectures given by some of their best employees. The knowledge can then be shared more easily with new workers for years to come. And even if these star employees are not leaving, recording them can help share their expertise — an engineer’s guidance on how a custom piece of software works, say, or a salesperson’s insight into how best to work with certain customers — with a much broader audience inside a company.

Making these video presentations useful is the tricky part. A company in Seattle, Panopto, has developed a service to help clients capture video presentations. It won’t transform presenters into thespians, but it does make their lectures more digestible.

An important ingredient in Panopto’s service is a search engine that lets people quickly find the parts of a video presentation that they want to see. Shoot a video with a webcam or an iPhone, and Panopto’s servers will create a searchable index of the presentation using voice recognition software. (It can generate a more accurate transcript for customers willing to pay by shipping the clip to human transcribers in India.)

Rather than having to sit through an hourlong presentation, someone watching a video on Panopto can search for a term like “database” or “analytics” and jump immediately to the relevant portions. Panopto captures and synchronizes presenters’ activities on computer screens to enhance the presentations with slides and software demonstrations.

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Panopto has started marketing its service as a way to trap employee knowledge before it is gone, a message that could have special resonance in the job-hopping technology industry. “In two weeks I’m leaving your company,” reads the text on one Panopto advertisement, superimposed over the photo of an anonymous guy in a server room, “and I’m taking everything I know with me.”

“That’s the appeal to fear,” said Eric Burns, Panopto’s chief technology officer, in a recent interview.

Mr. Burns said Panopto, founded in 2007, had more than 500 institutional customers and had raised more than $8 million in venture capital financing. Qualcomm, Siemens and Tableau Software are among the companies using its service.

For years, the company focused on education applications. Colleges and universities are using its service to capture lectures for massive open online courses, campus events, and so-called flipped classrooms, in which students watch recorded lectures before going to class so they can have longer discussions when they get there.

Panopto’s latest higher education deals include campuswide deployment by the University of Washington and the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, which will use Panopto throughout its 34 campuses.