Hi,
John Pinner wrote:
Hello,
2008/12/18 Dinu Gherman <[email protected]>:
M.-A. Lemburg:
Sure, there's always a benefit in being able to access presentations
after they have been given. However, in the past, not even the slides
were made available by all speakers. IMHO, tt would be far better to
at least get all those together on the website, rather than discussing
the next steps.
I would like to stress this a little bit more. In fact, I've
had trouble for all past Python conferences, whatever their
names and places were, when it came to getting anything like
a complete set of slides for that event. Maybe I'm the only
one who cannot attend all Python events in the world and would
like to have at least something written/graphic I can follow
onscreen (or even paper - yes, there still is paper) to see
what I missed, but I guess I'm not. I've been pointing to this
issue on various occasions at least for the past few EuroPython
conferences, but so far with little effect.
To be honest, the current enthusiasm for video recordings of
such events comes as a surprise to me. I understand the tech-
nology becomes easier to use, but it's a long way from there
to getting something done that is actually worth the effort.
Looking e.g. at the most seen PyCon'08 video, I think you'll
agree with me that this is a waste of time and resources (and
despite that, the talk itself might have been excellent):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-heME0gEDmY
Having a cool medium doesn't guarantee useful results. This is
no new insight, of course. Remember (if you can): when desktop
publishing was born, people also thought, that would finally
make producing excellent looking documents as easy as 1+1.
Same with home videos, and now conference videos. Making vi-
deos that deserve being watched takes time and resources. For
good ones you typically need dynamic panning and zooming and
also more than a single camera to switch between the presenter
and his material. I know, because I'm taking videos of music
performances several times a year.
Well, sorry if you already knew all this. I just wanted to draw
your attention back to quality again and deemphasize the cool-
ness factor for a medium that clearly has the potential of pro-
ducing great documentation, but neither at zero nor little
effort. And this effort must be balanced with the results you
get, and for the videos I've seen so far, quite frankly, most
of the time I would have been happier with a PDF document.
I agree with almost everything you say, but then I'm an oldie and I
use vinyl LP's with tube amps for quality.
However, unless the technology is tried, it will never develop.
Having been both speaker and organiser, I can tell you that the major
problem with getting the slides up is the speakers. Quite a few do
their slides just before the talk. We badger them for the slides so we
can put them on a conference CD, but we're *very* lucky if we get half
the talks a week before the event. As an organiser, dealing with
speakers is like herding cats, and I have been one of the herd;)
If it's left until after the conference it will never get done, then
you are busy catching up on all the things you didn't do because you
were organising a conference.
So this year we'll make a real effort to get the slides out of the
speakers, and maybe we can make provision to extract them from the
delinquents at the point of delivery. This will need good session
chairs, who were difficult to find last year.
Best wishes,
John
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I don't want to muddy the waters creating *more* work, but does anyone
think there is any value in creating transcripts from the video or
audio? Is it feasible that this could possibly be done with minimal
manpower on our part by hiring a typist to do it?
In my opinion, such transcripts, coupled with the slides, would provide
much of the benefit of the audio/video, plus are searchable / googleable.
Jonathan
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Jonathan Hartley [email protected]
+44 7737 062 225 http://tartley.com
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