On Thursday, May 30, 2019 7:28:01 AM MDT Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 May 2019 at 12:49:57 UTC, ixid wrote:
> > On Wednesday, 29 May 2019 at 21:16:35 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> >> Patience, please. The video guy at the conference told me it would take about two weeks to get them all ready. I expect to hear from the company any day now.
> >
> > This is too long a timeframe, people who are not already in D will have forgotten about the conference by now so it will fail to increase D's mindshare.
>
> I'll be using the videos in the months to come to promote the language on the blog and elsewhere. Publishing them on YouTube a few weeks after the conference won't affect that.
>
> I appreciate that people are eager to see them, but if we want to have videos that are ready to go within a few days after a DConf ends, we're going to need to throw more money at a recording team to expedite their processing. I'd rather accept the delay and use the money elsewhere.

LOL. I've heard of conferences not getting their videos out until the next conference rolls around. Some conferences _are_ super fast about it, but from what I've seen, two or three weeks after a conference is far faster than most. The ones who manage to get videos out really fast are incredibly well organized and probably throw a lot of money at it. I can appreciate people wanting the videos sooner, but it sounds like we're doing quite well with them this year.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:18:11PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
> I can appreciate people wanting the videos sooner, but it sounds like we're doing quite well with them this year.
[...]

It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V team to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's becoming something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not have them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good thing.


T

-- 
Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world. -- Carl B. Constantine

On Thursday, May 30, 2019 12:27:52 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:18:11PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>
> > I can appreciate people wanting the videos sooner, but it sounds like we're doing quite well with them this year.
>
> [...]
>
> It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V team to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's becoming something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not have them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good thing.

AFAIK, last year is the only year that we've ever lost talks. The first few talks were lost last year, because we only had one camera, and it ran into problems, because the A/V team assumed that the wifi was going to work well enough to rely on recording to the cloud, and the wifi was terrible. This year, there were two cameras - one run by the folks from the location (which had problems with streaming, because it was set up for WebEx), and another one from someone else that AFAIK the D Foundation or Symmetry paid specifically to film the conference and do the videos. So, it sounds like we basically already did what you're suggesting.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:54:13PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, May 30, 2019 12:27:52 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
[...]
> > It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V team to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's becoming something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not have them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good thing.
> 
> AFAIK, last year is the only year that we've ever lost talks. The first few talks were lost last year, because we only had one camera, and it ran into problems, because the A/V team assumed that the wifi was going to work well enough to rely on recording to the cloud, and the wifi was terrible. This year, there were two cameras - one run by the folks from the location (which had problems with streaming, because it was set up for WebEx), and another one from someone else that AFAIK the D Foundation or Symmetry paid specifically to film the conference and do the videos. So, it sounds like we basically already did what you're suggesting.
[...]

So what happened to the streaming?  Was that only setup for the on-location camera?  Is that why we didn't get streaming working for the first few talks?  And I assume the second camera is the one used for the final videos that will be posted? (Not that it would've made a difference for me, as I was coincidentally busy those few days and couldn't have watched the streams anyway.)

Also, IME, A/V (in general, not just for DConf) has a tendency to go horribly wrong unless actually tested on-site beforehand.  There's always something unexpected that goes wrong, or otherwise doesn't work well.  Assumptions are made that turn out to be false, etc., etc.. I find that the only way to be really sure is to actually test everything beforehand, e.g., if the A/V crew was onsite an hour beforehand and tested the full loop -- recording, audio volume, streaming, whatever else that will be used.

IOW, it's the difference between writing code without unittests vs. writing code with unittests. :-D


T

-- 
Perhaps the most widespread illusion is that if we were in power we would behave very differently from those who now hold it---when, in truth, in order to get power we would have to become very much like them. -- Unknown

On Thu, 2019-05-30 at 11:27 -0700, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote: […]
> 
> It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V
> team
> to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's
> becoming
> something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not
> have
> them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good
> thing.

If you are looking for a UK based videography company for a UK based conference, I can recommend the ones used for ACCU conferences. Details are discoverable, but I can do introductions as required.

-- 
Russel.
===========================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk

On Thursday, May 30, 2019 1:09:19 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:54:13PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> > On Thursday, May 30, 2019 12:27:52 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d
>
> > wrote:
> [...]
>
> > > It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V team to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's becoming something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not have them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good thing.
> >
> > AFAIK, last year is the only year that we've ever lost talks. The first few talks were lost last year, because we only had one camera, and it ran into problems, because the A/V team assumed that the wifi was going to work well enough to rely on recording to the cloud, and the wifi was terrible. This year, there were two cameras - one run by the folks from the location (which had problems with streaming, because it was set up for WebEx), and another one from someone else that AFAIK the D Foundation or Symmetry paid specifically to film the conference and do the videos. So, it sounds like we basically already did what you're suggesting.
>
> [...]
>
> So what happened to the streaming?  Was that only setup for the on-location camera?  Is that why we didn't get streaming working for the first few talks?  And I assume the second camera is the one used for the final videos that will be posted? (Not that it would've made a difference for me, as I was coincidentally busy those few days and couldn't have watched the streams anyway.)

The streaming was only done using the camera run by the folks on-site, and since they're normally doing business meetings, they were set up for WebEx, which is where the problems came in. The second camera was just for the final recordings. It may have been possible to take what the first camera did to use for recordings to upload later if the second camera failed (I'm not sure), but the second camera wasn't set up for streaming AFAIK. It probably would have been better if the two cameras were set up for both functions, but they were run by completely different people. So, the set up could certainly be improved upon, but it's already better than what we had last year.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Thursday, 30 May 2019 at 19:09:19 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
>
> So what happened to the streaming?  Was that only setup for the on-location camera?  Is that why we didn't get streaming working for the first few talks?  And I assume the second camera is the one used for the final videos that will be posted? (Not that it would've made a difference for me, as I was coincidentally busy those few days and couldn't have watched the streams anyway.)

Streaming *was working*. Some remote viewers had issues with WebEx that the venue A/V team was unable to troubleshoot because they couldn't reproduce them. They were monitoring the live stream through WebEx on a MacBook in their control room. I pulled it up on my Linux Mint notebook just fine. So we asked them to move to YouTube.

They were going to switch to YouTube after lunch on Day 1, but there was an issue in that it kept horizontally flipping the video. They were unable to resolve it before the talks resumed, so they continued with WebEx. Sinisa Poznanovic, the venue's A/V tech working with us, worked on it that evening after we all left and was able to resolve it so we could live stream on YouTube from day two.


>
> Also, IME, A/V (in general, not just for DConf) has a tendency to go horribly wrong unless actually tested on-site beforehand.
>  There's always something unexpected that goes wrong, or otherwise doesn't work well.  Assumptions are made that turn out to be false, etc., etc.. I find that the only way to be really sure is to actually test everything beforehand, e.g., if the A/V crew was onsite an hour beforehand and tested the full loop -- recording, audio volume, streaming, whatever else that will be used.

The issue we had with WebEx could not have been caught on site. Like I said, they had the stream running on a MacBook to monitor it and it was working as expected.

I don't recall when the team from last year discovered the YouTube stream wasn't recording, or if they could have caught it before we started. But that issue is precisely why we had a separate team doing the recording this year.

On Thursday, 30 May 2019 at 18:27:52 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:18:11PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote: [...]
>> I can appreciate people wanting the videos sooner, but it sounds like we're doing quite well with them this year.
> [...]
>
> It would be very, very nice if next DConf we hired a dedicated A/V team to ensure that the first-day hiccups never happen again. It's becoming something of a trend to lose the first day talks or otherwise not have them available / clipped / glitched / whatever, and that's not a good thing.
>

We had a dedicated A/V team this year to do the recordings and the venue team to do the live stream. We had a dedicated A/V team last year to do both, as the venue had none of their own.

Each conference provides us with lessons to apply to the next. No conference goes off without hiccups. Most are behind the scenes. In terms of video, we learned last year not to rely on one setup for live streaming and recording. This year we applied it. This year, we learned not to use WebEx for live streaming. Or, better, to always request the team use YouTube for the stream.

On Thursday, 30 May 2019 at 18:18:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

>
> LOL. I've heard of conferences not getting their videos out until the next conference rolls around. Some conferences _are_ super fast about it, but from what I've seen, two or three weeks after a conference is far faster than most. The ones who manage to get videos out really fast are incredibly well organized and probably throw a lot of money at it. I can appreciate people wanting the videos sooner, but it sounds like we're doing quite well with them this year.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Indeed. I was happy with the shop Symmetry hired to do the recording. The initial estimate, I'm told, was 2-3 weeks depending on the amount of footage they had to work with, which sounded great to me. They were using three cameras that I saw, but I heard there were four. Splicing together footage from multiple cameras for three days of talks is not something that happens in a couple of days unless you've got a large team working on it exclusively, and that would add $$$$ to the conference costs. Needlessly, in my view.

On Wednesday, 29 May 2019 at 21:16:35 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

> Patience, please. The video guy at the conference told me it would take about two weeks to get them all ready. I expect to hear from the company any day now.

I just want to say a big THANK YOU! to all those that participated and funded the conference, made it available to me in real-time, and are currently providing me with recordings for me to watch at my leisure without me having to pay a dime and without me having to even leave the comfort of my chair.

I've already learned a lot from the speakers that I have watched so far and I look forward to watching all of them in the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for everything you've done and continue to do.

Mike