Rocket Science

I just posted a screencast of a remote presentation I gave on the SpokenMedia project.

I gave this presentation from my apartment in Lexington, MA to the conference in Mumbai, India. (My butt was very happy it didn’t sit in a seat forever to fly there.)

Here’s how I did it.

I was connected to the conference via a Skype call–I would be speaking while someone at the conference manually advanced my slides for the audience. I displayed my slides on my local screen and talked about each slide, asking the person controlling the slides remotely to advance my slides when needed.

To record the presentation, I used Screenflow to capture the presentation on-screen. With Screenflow I was able to record both the slides on the screen as well as my laptop’s camera. This would be the end of the story if the screencast recording worked perfectly. Of course it didn’t.

As I was starting I was asked if I could switch on my camera in Skype. I tried doing that, but the output from the camera was already “captured” by Screenflow and Skype wasn’t able to use the camera. When I switched back into the presentation, it seems Screenflow didn’t like the fighting over the camera and it messed up the display of the slides. Though, thankfully, it kept recording the camera’s video and audio.

Screenflow records the desktop and the video camera as separate tracks–ok, great, I’ll just create another “good” recording of the slides and then replace the one track with the other After some simple trim edits to each track to line things up and I’d be done. Not so fast. It seems that Screenflow doesn’t include support for doing what I wanted to do–the edit tools really are designed for much simpler tasks and not splitting video+audio tracks into 23 segments and moving them around. Great.

Ok, time to bring in the big guns–so I switched to Final Cut Express HD. (I could have done this all in iMovie–I just didn’t want to use all of the space on my hard drive to save the bloated iMovie import files.) After some futzing (I’ve done video editing in the past, but I’ve never used Final Cut) I was able to produce the video you see above. I tried using the screen capture of the slides, but in the end I found it easier to just import the slides as separate images. Also, I probably should have included some more transitions and probably done a bit more with the audio leveling. But, I figured I had spent enough time to get the output that you see above. Mostly because it took 2-5 hours to render the video on my laptop–and I was tired of losing all the processing performance on the laptop during the day or setting it up to render overnight.

More as a public service than anything else, here’s a link to the presentation I gave recently on the SpokenMedia project. (I say public service since I don’t like watching video of myself )

My “major” project in the MIT Office of Educational Innovation and Technology is the SpokenMedia Project.

Here’s a link to some recent posts I’ve written on the SpokenMedia site about our project website:

• Extending the Spiral Connect Player
• SpokenMedia Player
• YouTube EDU and iTunesU
• SpokenMedia and NPTEL: Initial Thoughts

Stian wrote an article about how folks are linking OCW/OER content to Wikipedia pages (which in and of itself is an interesting idea). But he also says:

It would be really useful if it was easier to link to a specific segment in a video, or to easily choose a video, trim it, and upload it to Wikimedia Commons (although most of the videos are non-commercial, which means that they could not be included in Wikipedia, only linked to). It might also make sense to make a series of shorter videos, rather than one long one – it would make reuse much more feasible.

Haklev, S. (2009, October 25). “Combining OERs with Wikipedia – a winning combination”. Retrieved on October 26, 2009 from Random Stuff that Matters Website: http://reganmian.net/blog/2009/10/25/combining-oers-with-wikipedia-a-winning-combination/

Absolutely!

These are just some of the features we hope to implement in the SpokenMedia Project and it’s Rich Media Notebooks.

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