Debconf5VideoSmallRoomHowto

Overview

We are just capturing from the DV camera to the laptop drive, no mixing or additional audio. So you need to start the capture, check that it is capturing OK, and focus on camera work.

get notebook and camera connected

• Connect the camera with the FW cable. The fw plug is in gthe back lower right corner of the camera, behind a grey plastic saver that is difficult ti recognize as being removable!!!
• connect earphone, its behind another grey plastic saver on the right side of the camera upper left corner.
• plug notebook's and camera's power supply
• plug in notebooks network into the dark grey cable in the first seat row
• Log in as holger pw asked by henning in case you don't know

To check that the camera has been recognized and the feed is getting through ok, run kino, and go to the "capture" tab on the right. You should see the feed from the camera.

If you don't see the feed from the camera, check the cable connection, check the output of `dmesg || tail`. Try `modprobe raw1394` and `modprobe dv1394`.

Close kino when you are done, we'll use dvgrab for the real thing.

Start a test capture and check

Captures are triggered with a shell script. Invoke it like:

 capture.sh testing_speaker_name

This will save the stream as room2_testing_speakername_001.avi in the local directory. Make sure someone talks from the standing place of the speaker, so you can check sound levels.

Stop the capture with control-c, and play the video using mplayer. Check the sound with earphones!

• NOTE! Check `df -h`, you should have at least 13 GB free for your capture!

Starting the capture

Run

  capture.sh speaker_name

and check on a different terminal that the file is growing.

Camera work

• You should read the camera framing notes, which where seen in holger's hand the last time ( at least be HenningSprang :) )

• you have the following basic framing postions/shots:
  • • closeup shot - head only
    • uperbody shot (only upper part of the body)
    • medium shot - whole body of a person is visible
    • wide shot - multiple persons, the whole room can be seen
• we have different possibilities to show the slides and the speaker,it depends on how fast slides change and how interactive a session is:
  • • if slides don't change so often, you can concentrate on the speaker, and show slides only if they change, long enough for the watcher to read them
    • if slides change fast, it's hard to guess when they will change. then it's best to show mostly the picture that has the slides and at the same time the speaker in it - when the camera is well positioned, you get a sweet picture in picture effect - you can in between, when a slide change is unlikely, make uperbody shots of the speaker. Attention also with increasing slides (shown line by line) - it's hard to guess when the slide will be finished and new one comes in
• when filming questions from the audience,stay at the questioner, until you are sure that the speaker is not asking questions back to him, for example because he didn't get the question right
• the space in a frame should alwys be in the direction where the person in the picture is heading to, a good rule is the rule of thirds, so the person is in one third and the space is three thirds
• when moving between targets, first go wide, find your new target, than zoom in as needed - you won' find the target easily when fully zoomed

to be continued...

Finishing

When it's done, hit control-c to stop the capture. Check the file, and play it with mplayer. Specially, check the audio with earphones, scrub to the end of the file.

We found it a good idea to create a readme file for each video file, named like <VIDEOFILENAME>-readme.txt. It should contain something like

• speaker
• topic
• room in which it took place
• event name ( in case videos eventuall will be mixed with other events)
• date time
• comments to the editors
• comments to the viewers that eventually will see the video

The holger account has keys setup so you can transfer the file over. It'll take ~15 minutes to transfer 1hr of video, so you may want to wait for a break to do this. Do:

• go to the videoraid with

 ssh videoraid

and see of there's enough space for the video. if not, bad luck - ask herman, john (role: video editors and postprocessors) or henning (role: coordination) what could be done about this.

if space is left, just do:

 nice scp myvideofile videoraid:

And if all goes well rm the file.

TODO: merge the camera hints here with Debconf5CameraHowto if possible

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