[Video] Willingness to pay the proper people

[Paul Wayper]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim Ansell" 
To:"Paul Wayper" 
Cc:
Sent:Tue, 18 Jun 2013 09:15:39 +1000
Subject:Willingness to pay the proper people

 Hi,    The current setup has been well tested and I believe well
understood.  More or less.  My experience was that there were a few
people who knew about this system, but it wasn't well documented
online.  The documentation, such as the DVswitch page linked above,
is terse, non-adaptive and mainly handles the working case.
 Unfortunately, I wasn't able to speak with the people who really
know this system - Ryan and Carl - and some of the other people who do
know it - Tristan, James Iseppi, Matt Franklin, Euan, Liam and others
- were only able to help educate me to a limited extent.  
 I just want to point out that Ryan and Carl offered to "do" video for
LCA but the offer was not taken up. I urged the LCA2013 committee to
take up the offer, but it was not done so. 
 I think one of the biggest sticking points is "why pay people to do
what volunteers can do for free?". What do people feel about
recommending that these volunteers are actually paid
contractors?Generally, I agree.  But in my opinion the LCA 2010
experience shows why video is not something to just hand to another
company and hope for the best.  I know Next Day Video have done LCA
and PyCon and other conferences, but I - and other people in the LCA
and LA committees at the time - believed that we were starting to lose
the ability to work without them.  I don't want to lump Ryan and Carl
into the same bucket as proprietary companies, and I know they're not
aiming to prevent others from doing the job, but I personally feel
that that kind of dependency is a bad thing.

The main fear, as I see it, with going with a company to record video
from LCA is the loss of control.  We lose control of the output
formats, we lose the ability to correct things afterward, and it's
more difficult - and costly - to change things as needed during the
conference.  With my experience of the in-room equipment this year I
can see why companies prefer to just bring all their own gear in, not
use anything else, and even refuse to let other people connect to it.
 That makes it much more expensive than it needs to be.

OTOH, I was quite interested in paying a number of TAFE students doing
media studies to run the video and audio.  Unfortunately, by the time
I actually got an OK to coordinate with them and then got in contact
with them, most of them had other plans for January - mostly my own
fault.  But paying people who at least have some training in video
camera handling and audio production makes a lot of sense to me.
At some point we have to trust someone with experience.  Working out
how, and who, is the hard part.

 My reasoning is as follows;  

	* Setting up for a conference consumes a person full time for at
least a week, if not more before the conference and a week after. 

	* There is also a lot of demand for people with the correct
experience, they could be doing a paid gig instead.
 	* Many have already purchased the equipment needed and invested
money into the setup.
 	* Giving back to people is the right thing to do.

Thoughts, ideas, rejections?
You're right on the "one person-week of time" before the conference,
but it's more like half a dozen people for a day.  The problem for
most conferences is you don't have a week to set up, you have a
weekend - and that's to set up, to test, and to train all the
volunteers.
And it's worth noting that it wouldn't have mattered if I did every
room by hand myself personally and checked everything four times - the
problems we had with equipment, with speaker's laptops, with video
artefacts where there shouldn't be any, with networks doing weird
things, with extra requirements.. you cannot iron out all the bugs.
 This is where experience helps, but it's more in problem solving
than building the perfect system.
But I disagree with "giving back" as an argument if we're talking
about paying a commercial company.  LCA could pay a professional
video company $150,000 and have the whole shrink-wrapped package done
and the MP4s delivered (badly labeled and with no titles or credits)
hands-off.  "Giving back" is an argument to use Next Day Video
specifically because they use Free Open Source Software, but that is a
divisive argument.  I'd rather we not devolve into arguments about
exactly how "free" is "free" and exactly how much this company or that
company is "doing the right thing".
Don't get me wrong - I want to use Free Open Source Software for the
process.  But that was exactly the decision that led to LCA 2010
using the video company they did - and that ended up producing the
videos about two years late.  Using "Giving back to people" as a way
of saying "actually we should just use Next Day Video" is a dangerous
argument, in my opinion.
Personally, I think each LCA is going to choose whether they use a
company to handle recording the talks, do it all themselves, or some
combination of the two.  Obviously, the purpose of this list is to
try to make it easier for a conference to do the process themselves.
 This saves money and gives back to the community too.
Hope this helps,
Paul
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