CREW

For the last four days we have been recording the “What Is?” sessions at the Research Methods Festival in Oxford.  The software has been working well, and the new H.261AS codec is certainly reducing the amount of disk space used (as well as keeping the quality good).

Some notes regarding the recording of sessions:

• Participants of less technical conferences tend not to bring their laptops into the sessions.  This means that we can’t rely on the Web-based annotation system to gather live annotations.  It may be useful to have digital pens (as are being used in other VRE-2 projects) to get people’s notes.  We will have to experiment and see if these can be used in this way.
• Most speakers are stressed enough having to do their presentations without having to learn to use our air mouse.  As a result, most choose not to.  Some use laser pointers, and so we may want to investigate the addition of a laser pointer detection system – see for example http://iit-iti.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/iit-publications-iti/docs/NRC-48283.pdf.
• We may want to (assuming infinite funds) obtain an automatic microphone mixer.  This would avoid the need to adjust the sound levels during the recording.  One can be obtained for about £100 more than the one we did buy.  Without this, the sound levels must be adjusted at the start of each speaker, and also at the start of each question.
• The speaker sometimes moves.  This cannot be predicted, so we either have to have a wide angle shot or move the camera throughout the presentation.  Both of these result in poorer quality video.  We may also therefore want to obtain motorized tripod heads such as these: http://trackercam.com/TCamWeb/motorpod.htm.  Along with the associated software, these can be used to track the speaker automatically (and therefore smoothly).  We would need to test how this works.
• The handheld microphone requires someone available to pass it around.  Someone else is needed to adjust the sound levels, and a third person to move the cameras.  This could be reduced by a) Having an automatic mixer as above;  b) using motorized tripod heads to track the microphone movement; c) having additional microphones dotted around the presentation room (this would depend on the size).