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

[Jonathan Woithe <jwoithe@atrad.com.au>]

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