Once again I ended my year by editing and uploading the videos from a London Perl Workshop and the videos are live on Presenting Perl. And as last year the curse of doing this is following me around.
There was a big glitch in grammar for which I alone must take blame, but I am past it now, it is just another scar on my soul (very prosaic perhaps I should purple a little more and exclaim that every literary effusion I have is now embellished by the memory of such gay laxity).
Coupled to this was the lack of control of the second camera resulting once again in a couple of missed videos and videos that are badly cropped on the second lecture theatre. I could rant more about this as I made some specific requests at the time and I could name names and…meh makes no point, it was a failure in organisation and that’s my responsibility so time to move on and make sense of a solution.
So, I have consulted with a couple of people and hopefully we will have a better plan for this year. After a good lunchtime chat with Ian Norton (idnorton, idn) we came to some conclusions.
Conclusions
1. Let’s try to have operators in each room, this will allow each video to be started and stopped and for some live camera manipulation.
2. Let’s investigate software for maybe ‘live’ video editing or marking of video so that the edit process is faster and cleaner afterwards.
3. Maybe the live editing could have titles, links and parcelling of the files.
4. Microphones. There are issues with sound, so we will investigate radio microphones, or using the room pickups or if we have live edit maybe just plug in a wired microphone and have a sound track recorded simultaneously.
5. Look at high def. web cams as a possible alternative, ones that work with OSS would be best. Maybe have a set of cheap laptops going forward or cheap storage.
6. If we have web cams and an editor/operator in each room we can look at live web streaming.
7. Operators can be room monitors, for timing and other matters.
Anyway, that is the list, there is the plan and I will hopefully have a written guidelines as we do this year’s LPW, and who knows we may get a document guideline for the future.
If you have any experience, ideas, suggestions or just want to get involved to help and ensure we get a better experience going forwards then please get in touch.
by Tom Legrady
18 Jan 2012 at 18:28
Haven’t had a chance to see the videos yet, work laptop doesn’t support Flash.
I’ve been greatly disappointed with video recordings of Perl talks for several years. Last half-decent ones I remember seeing are YAPC Toronto, and that was a long time ago. They usually share a number of the following faults:
* no audio
* faint audio
* noisy audio
* audio overwhelmed by sound of audience or neighbouring room
* speaker is a small blob in corner of image
* slides are not shown
* slides are shown but not legible
The recent Stanford DB and AI courses ( I didn’t check out machine Learning ) should video done well:
* image of speaker in a corner of the screen
* majority of screen devoted to the slide
I envision a system where a webcam mounted on the podium captures the speaker, optionally panned and tilted by an operator controlling a joystick, while a hardware component connected to the video-out, digitizes the video.
The only gap is if the speaker uses a laser pointer rather than mousing the cursor.
Oh, and the digitizer should use a Raspberry Pi for a total budget of $50.
Tom … in the clouds