Requirements for Conference Video Recording
On location
The minimum is:
- One camera for each room you want to record
- Recording media is not that important as long as it has sufficient recording time and the media needs no changing during a session.
- SD cards are easier to handle than tape, which is time consuming in capturing later
- One person which changes and labels the media after each session
Better:
- Access to audio equipment in room for recording good sound
- Best: A wireless mic (think of enough batteries)
- one person operating the camera and switching from slide to person here and then
Best:
- Two cameras, one for speaker, one for slide (or automatic capturing from computer)
- a video mixer for switching between speaker and slide on location plus a recording device to record the resulting mix.
- This can also be done later in post-production but costs more time
- probably two people, one for camera, one for mixer.
Always think about enough people to share a task!
Post production
- usually very time consuming
- SD cards easier to handle than tape as tapes need to be captured in real-time first
Minimum:
- Copy SD card on server and start an encoding queue which simply encodes it down to a reasonable size.
- No editing is done whatsoever, talk might not start directly at start of recording.
Possible upload sites: http://vimeo.com, http://blip.tv, the latter has an API.
Better:
- Copy media on hard drive
- Add trailer and credits
- individual ones for each talk is better
- Encode it in different formats, MP3, Flash, Ogg, MP4 (blip.tv can do some of that with a pro account)
- MP3 might need a voice intro instead of video trailer
Best:
- Edit slides into the video at the respective places
- Add subtitles for speaker etc.
- Create a podcast out of it
This all needs equipment, personal and time. Usually best done by video company but expensive.
Questions
- What license will this stuff be released under?
- Do all people have signed a release form?
- When do they sign it?
- How will it be handled if people later reject the publication of their work
- How does this work in the context of an unconference?