Recording videos for drupal camps and cons.

I’ve been pleased to be a part of the budding WorkHabit Sessions online video movement, but now that we’ve done video capture for two Drupal camps I have learned a few things that I thought I’d share with the community in case someone else is struggling with the same things we are.

1. It’s impossible to record, edit, and upload session videos in the same day. The amount of video editing that’s needed in order to tie in the slides with the captured video footage is STAGGERING! We’ve been at it for a while now, and interspersed with the demands of daily work, we’re not even finished with the first camp’s videos, yet we have a whole new bundle of footage to edit from the second camp! Before I share how we’ve decided to handle the marrying of slides with presentations in order to help alleviate the editing dilemma, let’s do the math on the hours and hours of content we currently have.

We use one camera per session room, and each camera records hi-def straight to a memory card. Three cameras times three rooms times 8 hours equals 24 hours of footage per day. Double that number because camps run for both weekend days and you’ve now got 48 hours of footage to cut up. Each presenter has a series of slides that they used during their presentation, and we have to collect those slides, convert them to images, and then intersperse them within that presenter’s video. If it takes 3-4 hours to edit a single presentation, we’re looking at something like 192 hours of post production time, and that’s PER CAMP! Luckily there is a faster way to get this stuff online, and we’re going to move towards doing it. More on that in a moment.

1. You need a lot of volunteers to really do this right. We tried it the first time with one operator per camera, and one or two other guys who were just hanging out and helping to retrieve memory cards, inventory them, and archive the content to hard disk before emptying the cards and recycling them for the next session. The problem was this. we forgot about bathroom breaks, conversations with old friends, lunchtimes, and the odd presentation or six from our own teammates! Woops! Here’s how we’ll do it differently next time.

Get a team of WorkHabit employees who can each take one local volunteer and ‘train’ them to be on the video team. I say train because we really aren’t trying to educate people on how to become a video documentarian, but rather I’m referring to the need to get us all working together for the common goal. To do this right, we really need two people per room who can operate the camera and who know how to wire up a presenter for sound and chase down the mic at the end, two dedicated video archivers who can trade off editing and post-production duties and the 90-odd inches of PowerMac monitor surface, plus two runners who can stay on top of the ever-changing Drupalcamp schedules and shuttle memory cards and spare batteries back and forth between home base and all the rooms.

1. Don’t record anything unless you can record everything at once. Ok, ok, that’s too harsh. How ‘bout this instead. Try to capture everything you can in the first pass. What I mean by this is that if we had a way to intercut the slides with the presenter during their talk, there wouldn’t be but a few minutes of editing before a video could go ‘live’. We need to get the presenter’s screen output into a scan converter and then into a digital recorder at the same time as we capture the video camera’s output. Maybe a pushbutton A/B switcher? Hmm. I’ll have to think about a way to do that which is both portable and easy to use for volunteers.