[lug] Recording presentations?

[Nathan Duehr]

Been reading along all day... but buried in a multi-hour troubleshooting call.

Recording and also live-streaming a presenter with multiple "camera" inputs, is always a difficult "nut" to crack.  

We have some systems at work that we sell that could do much of this, and WAY better than 5 fps (eek! yuck!), but the white-board and presenter's laptop would be separate "content" sources that would have to be switched manually.  (Video switching by voice energy is commonplace for People, but not for Content, of course.)

These systems CAN be set up with off-board video switching to multiple inputs to switch between white-board and instructor's screen on the "content" input, and they send dual-stream video to participants.  So sending the presentation to another location -- that's a piece of cake.  Do a multi-monitor setup at the receiving end, it's even easier

But, then you have to record it in your requirements.  I know our recording server probably does that (or will soon, I recall seeing info that it didn't at initial release) and there are also streaming servers for live streaming this sort of thing... but there may be limitations today.  I'd have to check. 

To put all of that together with Enterprise class quality levels -- you're talkin' BIG bucks.  (If someone has a real budget for this project, I'm sure our sales folks would find a VAR who'd build it! GRIN...)

Meanwhile, back in what I *think* is reality here.. trying to do this on the cheap... 

I've had great luck with Skype and Skype Recorder on Mac.  Records video, audio, etc... if you could find a way to switch the video input or just feed multiple Skype machines in the presentation room "Presenter Camera, Presenter Desktop, Presenter Whiteboard" somehow to recording machines (perhaps even using Skype's new multi-point video conferencing, although I must admit I haven't attempted to record one of those calls with Skype Recorder yet, so I don't know what you'd get)... that'd probably get "kinda close" to what you're trying to do.  

If you recorded all of it and then post-processed it back into something "worth watching"... but the editing afterward would be uber-painful unless you like doing that sort of thing.  And video editing requires some pretty hefty horsepower on the machine you're using as an editing console, no matter if you're on a Mac, PC, etc... fast disk (SSD even preferred perhaps for scratch space) and tons of CPU.

To do this cheap, is going to require some serious Red Green style "engineering". :-)
--
Nate Duehr, denverpilot at me.com
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