#1

So we have a monthly talk / discussion meeting about electronic music in Seattle. http://www.seattlemusicmachines.org/

It seems to have a regular following and I’d like to take things up a notch by archiving the talks, some of which will have projected slides, as video. I’m hunting around for a good way to do this. Audio we have covered but it’s the video part I’m no good at. We tried using a camera to record both the presenter and video projector last time, and found it impossible to get a good exposure of both the person and slides. Maybe there is a particular camera that will do better at this?

Or maybe there’s some setup that can capture the slides directly—but I don’t think we can count on all presenters having compatible computer gear. It would have to work from the video signal that the projector takes.

I’m sure someone out there does this on the regular—I would appreciate your ideas! The goal is to get the presentation up with the minimum amount of editing / encoding work possible, so it will actually get done. Bonus points for a cheap setup that we could leave at the venue.

#2

First off, I hope y’all pull off some way of archiving the talks. I’m out in CNY where electronic music creators/thinkers/nerds are very hard to come by. There is a real need for more stuff like this!!!

As for a solution, there is one very quick and dirty solution: do a simple (smartphone would work) video recording and then make the slides (either links to Prezis or other cloud-based slideshows OR pdfs of the PowerPoints) available with the video.

Beyond that, I think that a really elegant solution would be to use a webcam/screencap combination through OBS or some other streaming software. It can require a little computing horsepower, and you’ll need everyone to bring their presentations/videos on USB drives (or provide a Dropbox) but it avoids the issue of all having to reassemble multiple sources before uploading.

I’m sure there are more elegant solutions, but I can’t think of any at the moment. Curious to see what others come up with.

#3

if your connection is hdmi you could insert a recorder into the chain. i’ve used the atomos ninja 2 - perhaps overkill, but it works well.

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#4

In my experience: nobody ever captures the projector well from a camera. So you’re right to avoid that.

If presenters can screen-record - that helps a lot; you can sync sound later from a desk recording, and you get the timings of any transitions that are going to happen.

Another successful alternative is: get presenters to supply you with PDFs/jpgs of slides; record from camera and microphone, and where appropriate, cross-fade into stills to put text they’re referring to full-screen. More work for you, but super-reliable, and allows people to correct any typos; I’ve had that done well (and I’ve also had that done badly, where people screwed the aspect ratio). The only problem is when people present video/audio - and you need to reproduce that similarly.

#5

I would love to have a high-quality archive combining live video and screens, but may have to give this up because if our workflow is too much trouble in practice, we won’t have any archives at all. So I’m leaning towards straight camera A/V + a link to slides.

Thanks for the help!