[clug] Recording clug talks

[Alex Satrapa]

On 22/03/2007, at 09:43 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> Other than that, a laptop with a lapel mic attached would do the job,
> to some extent and could encode directly into OGG (presumably vorbis?)

Most video cameras do a decent enough job to capture questions from  
the audience (crappy quality, but still audible), especially since  
the back of the podium is a solid, painted wall. I have a Røde  
Videomic which gives a very good quality sound from "the front", with  
muted sound from the sides (ie: the audience).

If you want to record stuff that's happening on-screen, you really  
need a screen capture device - a video camera does not have the  
resolution required to capture anything interesting. Using a video  
editing program you can do transition between the gesticulating  
presenter and the on-screen display ("Over here you can see..." [zoom  
effect to overlay screen capture on top of video]).

The only catch is that a video camera will typically have a 90 minute  
tape, so someone will have to cue the presenter to pause (and for all  
discussion to cease!) for the 15 seconds it takes to change tapes and  
battery, if the whole meeting is to be captured without losing  
portions. Alternately the camera operator will need to take advantage  
of breaks in presentations to change tapes ahead of time.

Whether it's a sound-only or video recording, someone will need to  
dedicate the time to edit and index the presentation - I've found  
that you need to budget thrice as much time as the presentation  
lasts, in order to account for two reviews of the material - one  
review with plenty of rewinds to get rough timings for indexes and  
coarse editing, and a second review with a small number of rewinds to  
fine tune the indexes and trim edits down to frames.

If someone's interested in being cameraman, I can arrange to get my  
camcorder + videomic + tripod + tapes and batteries to Bob on meeting  
days and pick it up the day after, making the edited video and sound  
recordings available sometime on Saturday. Just the videomic itself  
should be an excellent means to capture sound, if you have a  
recording device with microphone input - the videomic is a powered  
mic and provides very strong signals to the recording equipment.

I can't offer to host this stuff. IIRC, a 2 hour presentation can be  
compressed down to really grainy video (just capturing the  
presenter's antics with little detail) with high quality sound in  
about 80MB.

It's a "trivial" exercise to take just the sound from the recording.  
The presenter would then need to be aware that they can't just do  
stuff on screen, they have to narrate their actions and the visible  
outcomes since there is a blind person in the audience (ie: everyone  
listening to the recording).

Alex