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Re: about the video+administration meeting yesterday



On Wed, 2005-04-20 at 10:02 +0200, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> * Gunnar Wolf <gwolf@gwolf.org> [050419 21:09]:
> 
> > A _very_ important point. Also, if audience < 100, many people prefer
> > not to use a mike, even if specifically asked to do so, so they have
> > both hands free.  An unobtrusive, wireless microphone will get us more
> > recordings - Of course, if possible we should add to it a decent
> > enviromental (omnidirectional?) mike, as it'd be worth it to record
> > the attendee's interventions as well.
> 
> And please remind the speakers before their talk to use the mice and to
> repeat questions for the mice.  I once did a talk, which was recorded,
> but was quite useless, since they just told me about it the day before,
> and I forgot to put on mice and repeat the question in the time
> passed...
> 

This is a good point to remember.  In my local LUG I've been trying to
get all the speakers to restate questions and comments from the audience
for the benefit of the recording.  If the main presentation room is big,
restating is a good idea regardless of whether it's being recorded or
not.  Odds are that someone in the audience couldn't hear it.

We really need to focus in on what we're striving for though.  There are
three different ways we can go about this:

(1) Live streaming + recording of the streams.
(2) Very simple recording (1 camera per presentation with no real
editing) and a rapid turnaround time for putting the presentations
online.
(3) More complex recording and editing with a longer turnaround time.

We've already discounted (1) as a primary goal because no one has
experience with it.  I take it that (3) makes some people skittish
because timeliness is an issue and there are worries that complex
editing will never get done; (3) is what I've been aiming for at my
local LUG.  So if we're shooting for (2), rapid turnaround as top
priority, then we'll end up with 1 camera panning between the speaker
and the screen.  You film the presentation in one take, dump it to a PC
using kino, run it through mencoder to create a web-suitable clip, put
it online somewhere and save the original Quicktime DV files in case
there's any call for a higher quality version.

If a single camera shoots 8 hours of video in a day, the same camera
will need to do 8 hours worth of playback that night.  The odds of any
given consumer DV camera playing a tape from another consumer DV camera
are not perfect.  It will probably take another 8 hours or more to do
some basic clipping in kino and run the video through mencoder, though
this could be done on a different machine.

If we don't rush to complete this during Debconf I have a friend who
works in the A/V department of a local company and is willing to help
dump tapes to PC and edit the footage.  He has access to a professional
playback deck that will eliminate concerns about compatibility but
doesn't speed up the dumping process any.  Professional mini-DV decks
are still 1x speed from what he tells me.

For wireless vs wired mics, we use wireless at HLUG so that the speaker
is free to move around without worrying about the mic.  There is
occasionally RF interference on the tapes, but it has never ruined a
presentation.  Pack 100 laptops and cellphones in a room and it might be
a different story.

When will the schedule be announced?  It would help to know exactly how
many hours worth of footage we'll be dealing with to decide what level
of complexity is realistic.  There are a wide variety of ways we could
make better recordings (multiple cameras, multiple mics, titles/credits,
denoising the audio track, two-pass encoding, you name it.)  It's really
just a matter of how much time will be available.



John

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