2011 October 26 AGM videos

Forums General Discussion 2011 October 26 AGM videos

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  • #573121

    Posted by Nick James at 13:39 on 2011 Oct 30

    I’ve just uploaded the AGM videos to the website. The sound quality is much better than before since we now have a separate tie mic for recording the audio. This is completely independent of the lecture theatre’s system and it has worked well.Unfortunately, the video feed from the Burlington House camera at the back of the room failed for around 25 mins which affected the end of David’s Review of the Year and the start of his Presidential address. I don’t know why this happened but I’ll check with the RAS to make sure it doesn’t happen again.There were a couple of videos which failed to play during Richard’s Sky Notes and I have superimposed these on the video so that they do work in these downloads.I hope these videos are useful. We’re looking into live streaming of some meetings from Burlington House but this is probably a way off.Nick.

    #575841

    Posted by Roy Hughes at 10:54 on 2011 Oct 31

    I downloaded the Sky Notes video as I never managed to make it to the meeting.The focus seems a little off, at least at the start of the presentation, and the text was just about illegible.As Windows Media Player 11 refused to play it I downloaded VLC media player and used that instead.VLC has a "sharpen" tool and a little bit of that made a great difference, some of the text was almost readable (though what it did to Damien’s Jupiter video has to be seen to be believed!)ThanksRoy

    #575843

    Posted by Jeremy at 19:15 on 2011 Nov 01

    Thanks for uploading the videos, Nick.Always good to be able to catch up with mtgs I have not been able to attend.Sound quality is a vast improvement. Hopefully we can continue this with future mtgs.Go well!Jeremy

    #575844

    Posted by Nick James at 06:53 on 2011 Nov 02

    Roy,Thanks for the feedback. I use VLC and it is a remarkable little program that can play far more video formats than Windows Media Player can.Re the video, next meeting I’ll try to get the camera zoomed in more on the screen so that it should be a bit easier to read the slide text.Nick.

    #575845

    Posted by Gary Poyner at 16:14 on 2011 Nov 02

    I enjoyed the meeting on Video too Nick, and the sound was a massive improvement. Well done. However it was somewhat spoiled with the video notshowing Hazel receiving her medal. Too late to do anything about it now of course, but perhaps something to remember for future meetings where medal presentations are made.Gary

    #575846

    Posted by Nick James at 07:43 on 2011 Nov 03

    Gary,Yes, we’ve noted that! The camera is locked off on a bracket at the back of the room and so we have a fixed field of view throughout the meeting. This is a compromise since, while it is nice to have some context, we need to zoom in on the screen to make the text legible.I’ll let you into a secret though. The automated video generation pipeline that I use for the BAA vids processes, crops and scales the raw video to generate the MP4. After several comments I had a look at the raw feed and Hazel is just on the far right of the screen. When I have some time I’ll re-run the awards bit with a different crop setting so she should magically re-appear. The only problem then is that the mic was still on David’s tie…Nick.

    #575847

    Posted by Callum Potter at 14:52 on 2011 Nov 03

    Would be good if there was a second camera on the speaker for the intro and starts, and for when there are presentations and the like.If the BAA invested in one, could be used to record meetings away from BH too…Just a thought…Callum

    #575848

    Posted by Nick James at 11:54 on 2011 Nov 05

    I’ve gone back to the original raw video from the camera at BH and have re-edited the Awards part so that Hazel is now visible (just) in the bottom right hand of the frame.Callum is right that it would be nice to have a couple of cameras, one on the screen and one on the speaker, but then the editing process required before we could upload the video would be more of a problem and probably, if it depended on me, wouldn’t get done…Nick.For those technically interested the camera at BH is an HD widescreen one locked off on a bracket at the back of the room. It feeds to an SD DVD recorder which records the widescreen picture in a 4:3 letterbox format but with a bizarre aspect ratio. The audio is now recorded on a separate voice recorder with a tie mic. I have a script that rips the DVD, sorts out the aspect ratio and then crops the video. I then align the audio with the video, combine them and generate the MP4s that get uploaded to the BAA website. To get Hazel in the FoV I manually ran this process with different crop settings.

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