Re: [libreoffice-marketing] LibOCon CfL

Hi *,

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Florian Effenberger
<floeff@documentfoundation.org> wrote:
> drew wrote on 2012-01-08 16:22:
>
> > Well, I understand your concern - but the difference between seeing a
> > video of a presentation along with the Q+A interaction versus reading
> > the the presentation file on slideshare is such that they are not
> > comparable.
>
> what do others think? I guess until tomorrow we can refine the call for
> locations, later on, it could be quite problematic...

My 0,02€ : don't make it a hard requirement. It is done so easily
independently of organizing the event itself.

Yes, you need a crew of volunteers, yes you need cameras. But it
shouldn't be much of a problem to rent/provide the equipment and have
a static camera on a tripod. You need to protect it against theft, but
that's about it.

> Drew: Do you have a proposal on how we could write that we strongly
> encourage people to provide video archives, any stronger term than I used in
> my text?

Organizers are strongly encouraged to keep video recordings of the
sessions in mind. I.e. either assist in organizing appropriate
equipment (borrow/rent it from local volunteers for example) and
account for a room for media folks to extract/precut the raw video.
I can volunteer to setup a VM that can do appropriate reencodings to
distributable filesize (like I did reencode the last OOo-Con videos)

Less important than the video is the audio though. Make sure speakers
use the microphone no matter how small the room, and either have the
audience also use the microphone or have the speaker repeat any
comment/question for the recordings.

The ideal setup would be recording the slides & the speaker
separately, possibly even grabbing the slides from the computer
directly & recording the speaker using the camera (using vnc or
similar, existing tools like TeleTeachingTool exist for that TTT would
grab the presenter's screen using VNC (and provides a overlay to make
annotation/add highlights/write onto the slide), and records video and
audio - on playback the video is displayed in an additional window
alongside the screen-grab) - grabbing only the slides from the
computer directly has the drawback that you don't see where the
speaker is pointing to using a laser pen or with his/her own hands -
and has the drawback that you need a computer in each room to grab the
screen - using two cameras is easier, although it then requires
post-processing. For this post-processing me might want to ask pitivi,
openshot, other open-source video editing software for assistance (in
terms of volunteers who will do the mixing of the two videos into a
final representation)
The volunteers for the post-processing is really the bottleneck here
if you want the videos to be made available in a reasonably short
timeframe. Ideally they would be at the conference venue and start
working on a talk right after it ended and the tape/SSD/CD has been
taken out of the camera.

In the simplest form it would be just rendering the video showing the
speaker in a small part of the bigger window showing the actual slide,
blending it in/out accordingly to show the full slide at least once if
the smaller window would cover parts of the slide's content.[1]

But I'm getting distracted into a "how would the perfect recordings
look like" kind of discussion.

Back on the topic: So no hard-requirement, as it is almost impossible
for conference organizers to do by themselves only.
However asking organizers to look around for appropriate hardware &
requirements (i.e. cameras, microphones, broadband connection to
upload the raws for postprocessing...) should be included in the
proposal. Also gathering people/volunteers to operate (have an eye on
them so they don't suddenly "disappear") the cameras should also be
what local organizers can (& probably should) do.

For the postprocessing/actual creation of the final videos, the
international community should (must?) be involved and asked to help
out.

For organizing the gear, I'm also with Sophie insofar as a certain
budget can be allocated so that it can be rented if fees are
reasonable. But webcams get better and better, and when grabbing the
screen directly, the quality of the speaker-video is not /that/
important - important to see where he points to, recognize when
speaker makes a funny face or when someone uses hands to talk a lot.

Live-streaming cannot be done without the organizers taking care of it
completely, so while nice to have, I don't think it is realistic.
time-shifted streams of the raw presentator's video should be possible
though if a multicast provider such the one mentioned by Sophie is
willing to jump in. (i.e. record the talk, after talk switch camera's
storage media, upload raw video for postprocessing & at the same time
for streaming).

ciao
Christian
[1] you should have at least twice the number of conference tracks as
volunteers for the postprocessing - even when you can scroll through
recorded videos quite fast and look for slide changes/when the
speaker's video needs to be hidden to show the full slide, it still
needs considerable amount of time and it is not exactly a very
interesting task, so you need to make sure people get a break and have
enough time to do it properly, you also should have twice the number
of conference tracks to take care of operating the camera(s) & the
microphones. (unless the venue is in a university or similar with the
luxury of a lockable media-box/fixed installed wireless audio system
where you can just hand out the microphone to the speaker and be
done), For the very same reason - it might not be the most interesting
task if you're not into the topic, and if one needs a break (or gets
sick - shit happens), you still need someone to have an eye on the
expensive equipment :-)) so from the personnel POV it can be quite
intensive

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