[Linux-aus] Re: A/V recordings and publishing

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

Any editing should be avoided for a conference such as LCA. It just
creates headaches and post-processing time requirements that go beyond
those available to volunteers. So, neither is it possible to
post-slice in images from slides, nor is it possible to cut together
two camera angles.

BTW: the bad setup in Mat-A with speaker on one side and slides on the
other will even give a seasoned a/v engineer headaches!

Cheers,
Silvia.

On 1/31/07, Jonathan Woithe <jwoithe at atrad.com.au> wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> > On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 06:53 +1100, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> > > To get the questions, you need wireless handheld mics. But now you
> > > have two sound sources that need mixing. Well, the cheapest approach
> > > to that is a Beachtek XLR adapter, which you screw under your camera
> > > onto the tripod and takes 2 inputs to mix down to one with mic output.
> >
> > At other LCA's the speaker was required to repeat all
> > questions.  As I was watching the delays caused by
> > the wireless mics being moved around the audience I
> > ended up thinking that getting the speaker to repeat
> > the question was a better (and cheaper) solution.
>
> Another alternative is to just set up a room mic which is gated in and out
> with a footswitch by the camera operator (or a second operator) when needed.
> Something like a Rode NT3 would probably work fine, and because it's not
> going to Front of house (FOH) the gain can be quite high.  In the smaller
> rooms this would probably work well.  In the larger theatres the questioner
> tends to get lost in general room noise, so some other solution may be
> needed there.
>
> A room mic does add an additional channel to the mix, but I noticed that in
> at least some of the theatres a small mixer was being used for something.
> I'm not sure whether that was mixing for camera or FOH, but something like
> that (plus a footswitch gate, which is easy enough to make) is all you'd
> need.
>
> Another option is to get people with questions to go to a central mic on
> a stand - kind of like what they did for the panel session at LCA2007.
> This does create more hassle for those asking questions but does make the
> AV side of things much easier.
>
> > The other problem seems to be getting both the speaker and the slides in
> > the picture.  In some theatres the speaker stood on one side of the room
> > and the projector screen was on the other making the cameraman's job
> > dammed near impossible.
>
> Indeed.  As you mentioned there's no easy solution to this.  Distributing
> the slides separately is probably the best solution since any videoing off
> the projector screen will suffer from compression artifacts and generally
> be hard to read (unless one isn't compressing heavily).  Besides this,
> having the slides is often helpful for those listening to the audio
> recordings as well.  Speaker education might be the only real answer here.
>
> One could of course splice the slides into the video after the fact, but
> that adds to the video preparation time.  Furthermore, to do this you must
> have the slides anyway, so it's probably easier to just make them available
> for separate download.
>
> Best regards
>   jonathan
>