On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 5:36 AM Brian Exelbierd <
bex@pobox.com> wrote:
On Mon, Aug 7, 2017, at 05:35 PM, Justin W. Flory wrote:
>
> > It might be worthwhile to record some of the talk sessions on an ad-hoc
> > basis with the equipment you're bringing Justin, but I don't think we
> > should work to create high quality studios for each room at all times.
> >
>
> I'm not suggesting we create a professional recording studio in each
> room, but it would be nice to have something better than a 360p webcam
> and a mic that only picks up sound from the people a few feet around the
> recording laptop. Even having an external microphone for whatever
> recording device is used for a session would be incredibly valuable if
> it meant more reliable sound.
This is the proposed webcam:
I believe that we are planning a line in from the sound system in all
rooms. I suspect, though Stephen would need to confirm that we could
put a micrphone in the middle of the group and use it for workgroup
recordings too, while possibly turning off the big speakers.
OK, so here's the situation: first, we do plan to have 720p webcams, so it won't be quite as bad as you think. The video quality on those cameras are actually pretty good.
As for the sound, it slightly depends on the room. Each room will have speakers and a four-line mixer, so if we don't want to use the speakers concurrently, we can simply mute them.
Only the big hall has a wireless headset microphone at this time, each of the other four rooms will have a fixed microphone on the podium (though it may be possible to move this around to a work-table; I will check with the A/V folks. These microphones are hooked into the mixers which in turn have an adapter for mic-in on the recording laptops. We will probably need to have a brief training session for the recording volunteers prior to the start of sessions. Brian: I'd recommend we actually throw a thirty-minute block into the schedule prior to the formal start of the event. Addendum: we need to get a volunteer page up as soon as the formal schedule is available and we need people to *commit* to it. I'd actually go so far as to say we should post a primary and an alternate for each room we want recorded, so if someone oversleeps or falls ill, we aren't scrambling.
Regarding the laptops, I want to make sure those and the cameras we buy are on-site at least the evening beforehand so we can do some preliminary test setup with them. We should bring some sort of external audio source we can use to verify that audio input via the mic-in is working as well. So any audio device with a mini-jack output should suffice for this.