[Wylug-discuss] videoing talks

[Phil Driscoll]

On Monday 10 Mar 2008, John Leach wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I just announced this evening's talk on the GeekUp[1] mailing list and
> someone offered to video future talks for us (though not tonight's as
> they can't make it at short notice). They're from the NorthCast
> project[2] and they've got some fancy pants recording equipment.
>
> I guess we need the ok from whoever is speaking for a start, and I think
> we should insist on a free license of some kind (Creative Commons Share
> Alike[3] perhaps?)
>
> Thoughts?
Sounds like a great idea to me, and I think we should take them up on their 
generous offer. 

Some small problems to solve:

Lighting may be difficult. To get a decent quality shot of the speaker we may 
need light levels which are high enough to make the projection screen 
difficult for the audience to see.

It may put off some people from volunteering to give talks, and since such 
volunteers are in short supply, we should reserve the option for speakers to 
opt out of being recorded.

It is fairly straightforward to capture audio and video of the speaker, but 
capturing the audience interaction and questions as well is harder. On Radio 
4, Any Questions and Gardeners Question Time solve this by having a single 
microphone at the front where questions are asked in an orderly manner. This 
may not map well onto a typical WYLUG meeting, but is probably the easiest 
way to go if we wanted to capture questions and comments from the audience. 
The BBC 1 Question Time solution is more complex and involves multiple 
cameras, multiple microphones on booms and either skillful live video and 
sound mixing, or lots of post production.

-- 
Phil Driscoll