[Linux-aus] [LACTTE] WordPress Melbourne Recording Equipment Grand

[Russell Coker]

On Wed, 16 Oct 2013, Ryan Verner <ryan at uanywhere.com.au> wrote:
> Everything Tim says.   I too have tried to facilitate community video over
> the years in various ways (both as a direct volunteer and now as Next Day
> Video) and I have repeatedly seen the cycle Tim describes below.
> 
> It's a balance between "easy enough to setup" so the process can be handed
> to somebody with minimal training, but one has to also ensure the results
> are high quality enough that people will willingly want to watch and share
> the videos.  If the audio is bad, or the slides are not clear, then you
> will struggle keeping viewers engaged unless the talk is of extreme
> interest.  Volunteer enthusiasm drops off rapidly if there is no feeling
> of worthwhile results.
> 
> Tim has been working on a portable solution to strike this balance.  A
> permanent AV recording installation (which is semi-automated in terms of
> capture/encoding/publishing) at a physical place is a good move, too.  

It seems to me that the way one would give a talk for the best possible video 
experience would be different to the way one would give a talk for the best 
possible experience for people in the lecture room.

For live viewers some degree of questions is usually beneficial.  Philip Hazel 
gave a good LCA talk in which he insisted that no questions be asked until the 
end, that worked well for him but I don't think that many speakers can do it 
for a live talk.  But for an Internet lecture questions are almost always a 
bad thing.

For a live talk the show must go on.  If something goes wrong you just have to 
work around it because people paid an opportunity cost to get there and you 
can't waste that.  For an Internet lecture you can take a break for any 
reason.  If you get a sore throat you can pause the camera and have a drink.  
It seems quite common to have an average of one break per minute or more in a 
Youtube lecture.

If we want to make some really good Internet lectures for the community it 
seems to me that the best way to do it would be to start by finding people who 
have given good talks at LUGs and are willing to re-do them for a camera.  
They would ideally have a record of all questions asked (the event MC could 
make notes) and if necessary would change their talk to address them.

To start this process having a video of the LUG talk would be useful.  The 
expert on making videos could watch that video (even if it was low technical 
quality) and determine some advice to offer the speaker to make a better 
video.

So it seems to me that an ideal way of making a video would be to start by 
having a video of any low quality (even a phone camera) to determine what 
needs to be improved.  Then the speaker could work with a video expert to 
produce the best possible result for the Internet.

I've given more than a few lectures for LUV and would be happy to re-do one of 
them for the Internet if it was deemed to be interesting enough and we had a 
volunteer to produce it.  I've been thinking of producing my own Youtube 
videos for some years but haven't got around to learning the production 
skills.

If LA was to go ahead with something along these lines then the best way to do 
it would be for LA to reimburse travel expenses and to have the person doing 
the filming and production work try to get as many people as possible in one 
day.  As most LUV talks are given by active local people it should be possible 
to have 3 or 4 people ready to re-do a talk on a Saturday for an Internet 
video.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/