Video for 2012-07-09 meeting: "Haskell Records" and "Designing a JSON Validator DSL"

[Igal Koshevoy]

Here's the video from the previous meeting: http://goo.gl/EeeBz

It features:

• Nathan Collins on Haskell Records -- slides at http://goo.gl/2hS2m
• Lyle Kopnicky on Designing a JSON Validator DSL -- slides at http://goo.gl/jtfw1

Both of the presentations were excellent and I really enjoyed the audience participation. Great job, everyone.

If you actually watched this video, please reply so I feel more motivated to bother with this in the future.

About the recording.... I'm fairly pleased with the result because the original recording seemed hopelessly dim, blurry, noisy, deafening, inaudible, etc. I had to do some very heavy filtering of the video and audio because my older camera was having a very hard time with the dim lighting and huge range of audio levels depending on whether someone was speaking towards it or not. I edited out as many of the deafening noises as I could -- e.g. people opening soda cans next to the mic; deleted most of the "ums"; and cut down some of the lengthy pauses. If you want me to try to more record videos in the future, please either lend me a better camera or wait until I buy one, because that will make for much easier editing and better results.

-igal

[Lyle Kopnicky]

Looks good! Thanks for your hard work in cleaning this up and posting it.

Suggestions for the future:

1) If you can, lock the camera exposure. Since slides put out different amounts of light, the camera automatically adjusts and makes the slide background seem lighter or darker than the previous one.

2) I'll bring in my lavalier microphone, assuming you have an audio-in jack. With that you will get great audio from the speaker. You won't hear other people talking or shuffling papers. Unfortunately it also means you can barely hear people's questions or comments, so the speaker might want to repeat them.

I could bring in my camera, but I don't think the camera is necessarily the problem. Mine also uses DV tapes so you need the camera to unload the video, which is a bit of a pain.

- Lyle

-igal

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[Lyle Kopnicky]

Another option, that might even be cleaner, is to use screencasting software on the presenter's laptop. Plug the microphone into their laptop in jack. If you don't care about seeing the speaker, but just want to see the slides clearly and hear the voice with it, this would work out really well. It won't be as polished as a scripted screencast, but it would be easy to watch for those who couldn't make the meeting.

It's a bit exhausting researching alternative screencasting software, the web-based and desktop ones. It seems that it's nice if there's automatically a home for it on the web. It also occurred to me that if the software could just record audio and when the slides were advanced, the storage requirements would be much lower, since it would just need the slides (say as a PDF), the audio (suitably compressed), and a list of times at which the slide was changed, and to which slide. Ideally I'd like the software to do that.

Anyone else aware of any software that would meet those requirements?

- Lyle

[Igal Koshevoy]

Nathan Collins:

Thanks for processing and uploading the video!  I think it came out
pretty well (audible and legible).

Yay. Thanks for presenting. 

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Lyle Kopnicky <lyle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Looks good! Thanks for your hard work in cleaning this up and posting it.

Yay. Thanks for presenting too.

 

1) If you can, lock the camera exposure. Since slides put out different amounts of light, the camera automatically adjusts and makes the slide background seem lighter or darker than the previous one.

Unfortunately none of my video-capable cameras have that level of control.

 

2) I'll bring in my lavalier microphone, assuming you have an audio-in jack. With that you will get great audio from the speaker. You won't hear other people talking or shuffling papers. Unfortunately it also means you can barely hear people's questions or comments, so the speaker might want to repeat them.

Unfortunately none of my video-capable cameras have audio-in jacks. However, we could still hook the mic to a laptop and record there. That would give us two audio streams, a clear one from the speaker, and a more garbled but adequate one of the audience, because I really enjoyed hearing the full questions, jokes, comments and such that people made throughout the talk. The challenge would then be sync and fade between the two streams in post.

I could bring in my camera, but I don't think the camera is necessarily the problem. Mine also uses DV tapes so you need the camera to unload the video, which is a bit of a pain.

I may take you up on that offer, including learning how to deal with DV.

I also realized that I have another camera that's capable of doing video and has a better lens and mic, but a worse battery, although I have two batteries for it. I've just fired it up to see how long it can record on a single charge. If it works well enough, that would significantly simplify things.

 -igal

[Igal Koshevoy]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Lyle Kopnicky <lyle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Another option, that might even be cleaner, is to use screencasting software on the presenter's laptop. Plug the microphone into their laptop in jack. If you don't care about seeing the speaker, but just want to see the slides clearly and hear the voice with it, this would work out really well. It won't be as polished as a scripted screencast, but it would be easy to watch for those who couldn't make the meeting.

That would be great because it will provide for the clearest text and still capture the mouse cursor position, because many of the code-oriented presentations involve a lot of pointing at things with the mouse cursor, highlighting and such. 

Do folks have recommendations for free or cheap screencasting software? 

 

It's a bit exhausting researching alternative screencasting software, the web-based and desktop ones. It seems that it's nice if there's automatically a home for it on the web.

True and that takes some of the hassle out. However, being able to edit down the video before posting it felt like a worthwhile task refinement.

 

It also occurred to me that if the software could just record audio and when the slides were advanced, the storage requirements would be much lower, since it would just need the slides (say as a PDF), the audio (suitably compressed), and a list of times at which the slide was changed, and to which slide. Ideally I'd like the software to do that.

That sounds elegant and efficient. HTML5 would be a good target for the playback engine. However, this may not be ideal for our often interactive presentations which involve a lot of mouse cursor pointing, highlighting and live coding.

-igal 

[Jesse Cooke]

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 12:36 PM, Igal Koshevoy <ig...@pragmaticraft.com> wrote:

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:42 AM, Lyle Kopnicky <lyle...@gmail.com> wrote:

Another option, that might even be cleaner, is to use screencasting software on the presenter's laptop. Plug the microphone into their laptop in jack. If you don't care about seeing the speaker, but just want to see the slides clearly and hear the voice with it, this would work out really well. It won't be as polished as a scripted screencast, but it would be easy to watch for those who couldn't make the meeting.

That would be great because it will provide for the clearest text and still capture the mouse cursor position, because many of the code-oriented presentations involve a lot of pointing at things with the mouse cursor, highlighting and such. 

Do folks have recommendations for free or cheap screencasting software? 

Gnome 3 has built-in screen recording software.

http://www.aboutlinux.info/2011/04/how-to-create-screencast-in-gnome-3.html

It kicks out a webm. 

 

It's a bit exhausting researching alternative screencasting software, the web-based and desktop ones. It seems that it's nice if there's automatically a home for it on the web.

True and that takes some of the hassle out. However, being able to edit down the video before posting it felt like a worthwhile task refinement.

 

It also occurred to me that if the software could just record audio and when the slides were advanced, the storage requirements would be much lower, since it would just need the slides (say as a PDF), the audio (suitably compressed), and a list of times at which the slide was changed, and to which slide. Ideally I'd like the software to do that.

That sounds elegant and efficient. HTML5 would be a good target for the playback engine. However, this may not be ideal for our often interactive presentations which involve a lot of mouse cursor pointing, highlighting and live coding.

-igal 

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