The 360Flex "Sessions" Video Project
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Published
Thursday, August 28, 2008
at
11:52 AM
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I haven't been sleeping so well and the stress is due to the popularity of the video we have been posting online. My team, developer communities, decided to record all 60 sessions at 360Flex and we have posted 16 of the sessions online. The videos are pretty popular and this graph should give you a glimpse a how much:
Since launching the sessions project we have served over 2 TB of video and the last 3 days have been a very strong spike in traffic.
Wooops...
Got to run the servers are melting...
Ted :)
I tried watching a few of these and quickly got bored. Too many speakers talk over one single slide for such a long time that's it hard to make a visual connection when you can't see the speaker.
Some sort of thumbnail of the speaker overlayed on the screen capture, or some editing to cut between speaker and screen would be very beneficial in terms of increasing the interest of these visuals.
The other thing that would make these much more useful would be some cuepoints to allow viewers to skip to bits of the presentation they want to hear about.
Obviously this is the first time you guys have done this, but I'd really like to see it taken to the next level. In terms of production quality, the TED videos are what these should be aiming for.
If you've got more analytics to share, the number of views and time watched would be far more interesting than data served.
rick said...
bit harsh mate!
we great for TED style videos, but man, this stuff as is has been really great to have available.
Thanks for posting these! Will you post the other sessions?
@Rick - while we all agree that the TED series are excellent, have your though of the ramifications of what you are asking for as they relate to the 360Flex content? TED is a one-room, high profile event whose budget for a single day exceeds that of the entire 360Flex conference. They can afford to have a multi-camera shoot with scan-converters, video switchers and staff to edit and index the content. That sort of production quality is expensive. Imagine applying that to the 4 rooms of Flex or the 25 rooms of Max? Considering that Adobe are giving this away for free, I think the current format of HD Screencasts is a good compromise for the end-user between the high-touch output of TED or buying yourself a ticket to attend the conference.
I know exactly what I'm asking. We've been working out how to do this on zero budget for 5-6 simultaneous tracks at FITC for years. I would never expect 360Flex to do this on their own. I know it's not attainable in terms of budget or human resources.
At the same time, we've been doing this with low end equipment and patient volunteers for the past few years. A cheap scan converter, cheap video camera and a computer to record to. The results have been hit and miss and look like what you'd expect for doing the work with loaned gear and volunteer hours. You can see the results of some of this work here: http://www.fitc.ca/media/
But things are different if Adobe is getting involved. This is a resource that conferences haven't had in the past and all I'm asking is that Adobe aim to help take it to another level above what many of these conferences have been doing on their own for awhile.
Again (as I said in my last comment which either got lost or hasn't been approved), I think this is awesome that Ted has taken the lead on this and is getting Adobe to support the creation of these videos. It's a tremendous resource for everyone to have. I'm just making suggestions at how it could be better. I'm even inclined to think Adobe themselves could develop a solution for capturing and delivering this sort of content.
There is an interesting open source project out of the University of Toronto called ePresence that is capable of doing just what I'm talking about, using Red5 in the backend and affordable VGA to USB framegrabbers (that run up to 30 fps) to capture the screen. ePresence has a few problems however: the interfaces are clunky, installation can be sketchy and you are stuck using their server product to deliver the end result. It would be awesome to see an Adobe version of this platform that recorded and delivered using the Flash platform from end to end. Connect basically does this now. The only difference is in a conference scenario you need to be able to capture the presenters screen by intercepting the VGA feed to the projector as it's not realistic to expect presenters to run screen sharing on their machines.