I was talking with Amazon on IRC about video handling, and he suggested I post this here as it might be useful to event organizers.
At DrupalCamp Seattle we spent a lot of time talking about how to handle the video from the sessions, and one of the conclusions we came to was that it needed to be handled ASAP because the longer it waits the more people move onto other things. Initially we were going to have a "video sprint" right after the camp to handle the capturing/transcoding/uploading. Instead, one of our local users Gary Varnell (http://groups.drupal.org/user/6388) came up with a way to capture/transcode on the fly to his Linux laptop over firewire. He wrote a blog post detailing his setup including the perl scripts he wrote to handle it:
http://regx.dgswa.com/html/node/65
This was a great success. Our videos were all up but the time the weekend was over (some before the camp was over!), and they looked great. Capturing straight to disk over firewire had other advantages as well, like you weren't limited to the length of a tape.
The videos can be seen here:
http://seadug.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc
and the full discussion can be seen here, there's some info about how ffmpeg was compiled which could be useful
http://groups.drupal.org/node/11677
I know there are some camps coming up, so hopefully this info will come in handy!
Comments
Drupalcon Szeged
At Drupalcon Szeged, we were a bit afraid of having everything only on the laptop and since we had little time for test running we didn't want to take the risk. We also had 4 different types of cameras to work with. That's why we set up a "war room" where we collected all the materials and did the encoding on the spot.
But basically we came to the same conclusion, it's better to get this done during the conference than afterwards.
Did you guys have any issues with the setup, any glitches in the recording?
Drupalcon Szeged was a blast! Check out the video's on http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions
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None I know of
As far as I know, everything went really smoothly. I am going to ask Gary to chime in so that he can relay his experience since he actually did all the recording.
I was very impressed with how quickly all the videos went up for Szeged! I already have about a dozen of them loaded onto my iPhone to watch on the bus. Great job to you and everyone else involved!
Chiming In
We didn't have any real glitches other than the fact that I wished I had encoded to the audio and video at a higher bitrate. I ran a bunch of test and chose to go for the lowest bitrate at an acceptable quality. Overall I think this was a good decision, the wireless access at the hotel I stayed in was very slow and the video uploaded quickly played back fine over the slow connection.
There were several things I liked about the solution I used.
1. The video files where automatically named using time stamps which allowed me to quickly start and stop video encoding by clicking an icon on the desktop.
2. I recorded everything to tape as well so I could do a higher quality encoding later, but several of the talks required changing tape and the disk recording allowed this without missing a beat.
3. File size - The whole conference fit easily on a DVD, had I captured straight to disk using raw DV I would have easily run out of disk space.
4. Since I was capturing from firewire and encoding directly to flv, I could upload immediately after a talk ended if I didn't need to be recording another session.
I used a pretty dated laptop and didn't have any hiccups. I ran a bunch of benchmarks prior to the session and was getting sustained encoding rates of 70+ frames a second going from raw DV to flv so I was pretty comfortable that there wouldn't be any problems, but I did a trial run at an local Linux User group just to make sure. Still had there been hiccups I was shooting to tape simultaneously so there wasn't much that could go wrong.