[lug] Recording presentations?

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2010-11-10 at 12:35 -0700, David L. Willson wrote:
> I'm looking for ideas on taking recordings of tech talks and/or
> broadcasting them.
> 
> My goals are:
>       * good sound quality
>       * 5 fps or better
>       * capture the instructor, the white-board, and the instructor's
>         screen

The only way I can see to do this is to have three streams of video
(instructor, white-board, screen) and one of audio.  I don't think the
instructor is important as far as the content of the talk is concerned.
Instead, record the audio of the talk and merge it with screen shots.

I did this for a presentation I did on cloud management in a grid:
http://www.graphics-muse.org/wp/?page_id=628

I recorded the audio separately from the screenshots, the former with
the default GNOME audio recorder and the latter recorded with
gtk-recordmydesktop.  I merged them with OpenShot, a very simple to use
video editor.  

What you might do is create an image with the instructors photo and
contact information and merge it over the slides in some out of the way
location.  I think you can do this with OpenShot but its a step I didn't
try.  If you have video of the white board you can add it as another
track and insert clips of it in the stream with no audio or instead of
slides.  

The result is a nice presentation but you'll have to do some editing to
get there.

If you decide the instructor video is also required, then just add that
video as another track in OpenShot and edit as before.

>       * recordmydesktop seems good for most screen-capture, but it
>         breaks down if you switch to a TTY

You mean if you switch to VT's?  If the presentation has that
requirement then screen capture will be a pain.  Just video record it
with a webcam instead.  However, other than booting the kernel most
admin/development processes can be shown in a desktop terminal.

>       * Maybe always running a VM is necessary if you need to use and
>         record the TTY.

That's an option.  A lot of extra setup for the presentation, but it
works.  VM could be kvm or qemu or even UML.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel                                    Principal Software Engineer
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                           http://graphics-muse.org
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When C++ is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.
              -- Steven M. Haflich