As the last few posts have been a bit problems-focussed, here is some light relief. You may recall back in Trying out the Interactive Teaching Room that I was playing with a lecture room at Nottingham that allows ‘one-touch’ recording of lecture content. In fact, I used this room to record an optional evening lecture I gave to the students and here are the results. I intend to include a post in the future on how this was acheived (not just ‘one-touch’). This talk is intended to be part of a series offering mathematical histories for various topics, x. In this case, x is cryptography and the topic is “Substitution ciphers: Ancient – Renaissance“.
10 February 2010
9 November 2009
Trying out the Interactive Teaching Room
Today I had a play with the kit in the Interactive Teaching Room (ITR) (which allows recording of seminars at the press of a button using Echo 360 software). Being awkward, I decided to test out a few aspects of this and also had a go at some post-editing on the video.
Firstly, I wanted to see what files I could recover and how easy it would be to edit these into a video. The default output is a video of only the slides or a Flash-based interactive show with slides and speaker in a side window. I think this is fine for most purposes but I wanted to see if I can could get both in the same video file. In some talks very little may happen on screen for a period and I think it is more watchable if you see movement.
Secondly, I wanted to run through a slide with a lot of changes to see the clarity of the output and see if I could confuse the automated chapter marking – it didn’t.
Thirdly, I wanted to plug in an external tablet laptop PC and see if the writing on the screen was captured satisfactorily.
Fourth, I wanted to record a clean audio track with tested kit and compare this with the recording made by the ITR kit. Unfortunately I messed this up and the audio recording with the known-to-work lapel mic failed to record anything but silence.
Anyway, here are the outputs:
Video auto-processed by the system (m4v).
Full interactive Flash-based output (Flash; also auto-processed; best for interactivity but only on limited platforms).
Enchanced podcast (m4b; also auto-processed;completely thrown by my animated slide and tablet PC annotations)
And finally, the video I made by manually editing the output (mp4).
The same video on YouTube:
The video quality on the speaker is poor. I suspect as it was only designed to be viewed in a small window so not as bad at half size. Here is the edited video at half size (mp4).
Edit/update: I have found the raw video file is saved as a .h264 and have converted this to mp4. The result is here:
