On 2008-12-18 16:37, Dinu Gherman wrote:
> 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
Here's another example that was recorded this year at
PyCon 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cecJ9o5GGmw
Without the slides at hand, you can't read anything on the
screen, except for the title line. The audio isn't great
either.
>From my own experience trying to record such presentations,
I found that getting a half decent audio recording is a lot
harder than getting video.
The video is basically just needed for cuing the slide changes;
without those, a static picture would do just as well. The
audio is what's important in trying to get more information
out of the talk.
> 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.
Well said, Dinu !
Thanks,
--
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com
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