dy/dan

Professional Conference Video With Semi-Professional Equipment from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

Two weeks ago, I posted the conference video from my CMC-North session. The slides were synced to audio, which is nothing new, but also to video of my delivery of the material, which appeared next to the slides. There wasn't a camera operator at my session but the camera panned around with me anyway as I walked the room.

I'm happy with this. The process is so easy that I'll be able to record and post all future conference sessions I host. Then on the plus side:

1. People can attend my talk even if they aren't at the same conference on the same day. (I had 40 attendees in Monterey. Several hundred on Vimeo.)
2. I can review myself and make notes for my next session.
3. This keeps with my intention to be as open as possible about my practice.
4. My parents can call me up and criticize the clothes I wore.

I edited a screencast explaining the process and posted it above. If you aren't into video, here are some broad strokes in text.

1. Set up your equipment.

You need something to record video and audio. I turned on an Olympus DS-40 lapel mic (which I'm not very happy with — suggestions?) and set a Flip HD on a shelf in the back of the room. Make sure your camera can see at least some part of your slides.

Do yourself a favor: clap. With both devices running. Trust me here.

2. Assemble your material.

Export your slides from Keynote or PowerPoint as high quality TIFF images. You now have these ingredients in a folder: audio file, video file, slides folder. Drag them all into a new Final Cut Pro project. Then drag the video into a new sequence. Drag the audio in also.

3. Sync everything.

Find the clap in the video. On that exact frame, press M to lay down a marker on that track. Find the clap in the audio and lay down another marker. Position the markers on top of each other. The audio should now be fairly closely aligned. You may need to nudge the audio track forward or backward a few frames to get it exact. Press +1 or -1 a few times until it looks perfect.

Find a good starting and ending point for your talk and then crop both ends using the blade tool.

My Flip records video faster than my audio does (I don't really get this) which means the sync gets really slippery by the end so I had to change the speed of the audio clip to 99.8%.

Now watch your entire presentation. Whenever you change the slide, lay down a marker. Then go into your slides folder and drag each slide to meet its marker.

4. Go back in time and hire a cameraman.

Now you have really good audio and really good slides. The video is pretty good too but takes up way too much room. There's lots of empty space around you which we'd love to crop out. Create a new sequence called "cameraman." Paste in your video track. Go into Effects > Video Generators > Shapes > Rectangles and drag a rectangle on top of the footage. Change its Softness in controls to 0%. Go into Effects > Video Filters > Key > Luma Key and drag it onto the rectangle.

Now you have a cardboard stencil on top of the video. This next part is almost impossible to explain in text and it's also the most important so hit the screencast (approx. 7:00) if this doesn't make sense.

Position yourself in the frame. If you stayed in that small window for your entire presentation, bully for you. You're done. But if you paced around like an angry hamster (as I do) you need to set a keyframe for center in the controls tab. Then, whenever you start to move out of the frame, set another keyframe for center. Once you stop moving, reposition yourself in the window and set another keyframe. Final Cut Pro will "interpolate" the middle passage between keyframes making it look like you had a cameraman panning around with you the entire time. Nice! Keep doing this throughout your presentation.

5. Composite the results.

Drag the cameraman sequence from the browser on top of the video track in your original sequence. One should replace the other exactly since they're the exact same length. Now you have great slides, great video, and great audio. The slides cover the video, though.

So select all of the slides. Go to Sequence > Nest Items. This will let us manipulate them all at the same time. Right-click on the slides sequence and go to "Open in Viewer." Go to Controls > Motion > Crop and bring the right and left edges in to meet the slides. Now in Controls > Motion > Scale, bring the size down a little.

Then drag the cameraman track to the lower left of the frame and your slides to the right, creating equal space around them.

Bam.

6. Export.

The goal in the export is to sneak your video beneath Vimeo's 500MB upload ceiling on its free account. Modify Vimeo's recommendations. Keep the audio at its highest quality but you're going to have to sacrifice video quality, which isn't really a big deal because the video track is dominated by huge slides that don't change very much. I set the bandwidth restriction to 500 kbps.

7. Final notes.

You'll have to render a lot and the final export will lock your machine up overnight. But this process is great because it frontloads the easy stuff and backloads the difficult stuff, which is exactly the right balance when you're giving a presentation, when you don't want to focus on complex technical details.

I post this tutorial because, selfishly, I hope other people take me up on it so I can attend more interesting talks without having to leave my living room or brush my teeth.

[re this]

I played with this little number at FooCamp this weekend. I flew by your house but you weren't home so I helped myself to a Coke and kicked it on your couch until I had to go because someone else wanted to use it. Catch you next time maybe.

I use my point-and-shoot less and less for still photography and my FlipCam more and more. I realize that with the Flip I'm losing hundreds of thousands of pixels and a much better sensor but I'm also picking up a) portability and, most crucially here, b) a couple dozen more frames per second. Technological advances will eventually close the gap in quality but technological advances are useless to close the gap between the photographer I am and the photographer I want to be.

Check this out. Give a photography student less than a second of video. Twelve frames, maybe.

At what point is the composition balanced?

At what point does the gorilla become the subject?

I have found this kind of deconstruction to be a) essential to my growth as a photographer and b) impossible to achieve using a point-and-shoot camera (or any camera) with a shutter refresh rate of more than a second. That kind of lag has you comparing apples to oranges.

I closed out the summer with a rafting trip on the American river. I took one of these disposable jobs along and had three recurring thoughts:

1. "Waitaminit, there's no image preview?"
2. "Waitaminit, there's only 24 shots?"
3. "Waitaminit, I'm supposed to wind this thing?"

How am I supposed to explain any of this to my children?

[image source]

Frank Krasicki:

These days the technologists who remain vital are not experts and not generalists but rather techo-existentialists. The mantra is learn what you need for NOW and let it go – chances are it will change by the time you need or use it again.

Someone help me out here. How has clear, cinematic communication changed since The Jazz Singer first deployed synchronized music and dialogue in 1927? If, in fact, those conventions haven't changed appreciably in nearly a century, shouldn't the edublogosphere match its seemingly boundless enthusiasm for new media creation tools and new mechanisms for distributing those media with some reflection on the ancient, unchanged fundamentals of those media?

Case in point:

Alec Couros posted a video of an elementary school's touching, deeply heartfelt rendition of Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide." The ensuing commentary circled issues of copyright, walled gardens, global distribution, digital footprints, etc., but Darren Kuropatwa, out of all those technofuturists, hit the bullseye, noting the truly transcendental:

Darren: My favourite bit came at the very end when the teacher turned and spoke to the camera: “That was gooood!” That comment encompassed so much; about him, his students, and how they all feel for each other.

A milligram of sober deconstruction ("why do I like this?") is worth, for my money, a kilogram of exuberant, big-picture futurism ("how does this change everything?!"). It would do this old curmudgeon's heart some good to see some balanced restored to our discussions of ancient arts.