In-person meeting summary: video production
The video production session provided a hands-on experience in what goes on behind the scenes. It wasn't that hard.
April 04, 2024 - Richard DarstThis session, on the first day, went over the basics of video production. Richard has handled video production (streaming, producing videos after the event), and this provided a much-needed introduction to what happens behind the scenes.
The initial goals were to:
- allow others to help with video processing during workshops
- allow others to use our best practices.
Video editing
First, we practiced video editing with ffmpeg-editlist really nice and easy to use. It allows powerful-enough editing for splicing without learning a full editor, and storing the progress in git. This can allow distribution of the work, too - even to those who don't know all the details but can write descriptions or find cut points by playing the file.
The exercise we did are located in the Video editing section of the Community teaching lesson. There is a demonstration of the video releasing process here.
The conclusion was that video editing wasn't that hard and more people should know about the possibilities. However, it still is more work and for workload reasons needs someone other than main instructors to do it. (Richard's rule of thumb is "do it the same night, or it will never get done" - ffmpeg-editlist makes it easy to do a bad-enough job to accomplish that.)
Livestreaming
As for streaming, we brainstormed ideas on how to make the workshop easier to follow ("where are we right now?", "what are we supposed to do right now?") and easier to video-edit afterwards. Ideas included:
- status bar overlay that shows the breadcrumb including where we are at the lesson
- status text overlay that shows whether the workshop is in exercise or lesson etc.
Both of these require some work, but more importantly someone to watch over it and make sure it's up to date. Our notes-based system is at least the same tool for everything.
We got overview of OBS settings: the setting files are in obs-config repo. They can be downloaded and imported to the OBS Studio. This is a bit harder to use in practice, since it requires understanding about OBS, but it's definitely doable. We have a long description of OBS theory. The participants left more prepared to get involved with streaming.
Epilogue
Based on these discussions, we made an OBS control panel which was used in the 2024 March workshop to allow others to manage the stream some. It's still in development, but could allow us to go to the next stage of large-scale collaboration.