What a can of worms! We have deliberately avoided making radio microphones available precisely because of the support load it introduces.
Recently, we've been having fantastic success with area-effect mics, such as the Audio-Science example (install instructions: http://www.vidofon.de/media/TANDBERG_AudioScience_InstallationNotes_dt.pdf ) in both videoconference and recording venues. The pickup area is wide and deep, gain is good, and noise rejection is fantastic. For backup during our trial we ran two condenser desk microphones, which is our standard fit at this point. Cheerio Mikee La Trobe University CRICOS Provider 00115M Warning to recipients: This email and any attachments are confidential and subject to copyright. If you are not the intended recipient any use, disclosure or copying is unauthorised. If you have received this email in error please advise us immediately by reply email and delete all copies. It is your responsibility to examine this email and any attachments for viruses. Any personal information in this email must be handled in accordance with the Information Privacy Act 2000 (Vic). From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scot Gresham-Lancaster Sent: Thursday, 10 February 2011 7:37 AM To: Opencast Community Subject: Re: [Opencast] Microphone recommendations We at CSUEastBay have been using four separate technologies for different sorts of situations. Primarily our lectures are recorded automatically and we have tried to make them as "taskless" as possible. To that end we have deployed Crown PZM 10 mounted on the lecture area surface into a Rolls MP13 mic preamp. This is a stationary mic placement and so there is the disadvantage of the inverse square law drop in dB, but has a distinct advantage if the lecturer stays in the vicinity of the mic, they do not have to mess with any microphone and microphone related setup. In large ampitheater rooms where the professor will consistently use a PA system we use the lavaliere in the room mixed with the PZM10 system as a backup. A secondary stationary mic solution has been using the Acoustic Magic voice tracker which is a more expensive solution, but has produced very usable results especially in a mid to small seminar setting. It does have sweep filter de-noising artifacts that some may find objectionable. In controlled studio and self-recording contexts we have had great success with the Revo Labs X-tag wireless lavaliere microphone. It is severely bandwidth limited, but still produces consistent and easily transcribable results. Hope this information is of some help to some of you, Scot -- Scot Gresham-Lancaster +1 510-88 5-4872 Media and Academic Technology Services CSUEastbay On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 10:12 AM, Benjamin Hubbard <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Sure, the student staff we use in large lecture halls are their to support the lecturer's use of technology, generally. If a faculty member scheduled to teach in one of these large lecture halls approves webcast, then the student will also operate the cameras and produce/switch the program feeding webcast. These students report to a facility point person who spends the first few weeks of the semester providing support and training before setting the student loose to operate the facility on their own. In smaller classrooms (still with a PA system, though) we don't employ any students. The students I mentioned as "monitoring correct microphone usage" are not employed by ETS and their efforts are not organized enough that you could even call them volunteers. They are more like students enrolled in the course with a self-interested desire to see lectures recorded and published. I'd echo what Chris says about more operator errors toward the beginning of the term, this is why we spend so much time communicating about this issue. In specific cases, where we suspect operator error is likely or has consistently occurred, we'll schedule ourselves to be in the classroom at the start of the first lecture to be sure things get off to a good start. We've also experience the same issues as Chris in smaller classrooms without a PA. So far we have installed only a few of these classrooms because of this issue. Kindest Regards, Benjamin Hubbard ETS | webcast.berkeley [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 510 812-7018 On Feb 9, 2011, at 2/9 | 8:53 AM, Christopher Brooks wrote: Hi, In unstaffed classrooms, we message pretty consistently with faculty about checking and changing the battery prior to the start of their lecture. Our feeling, generally, is that this is something most faculty would need to do regardless of wether they were Just fwiw we only have unstaffed rooms and we often run into microphone errors at the beginning of the term as faculty forget to, don't want to, or don't know to change batteries. This is most prominent in smaller rooms where the PA audio is not needed for the instructor to be heard (under 100 person rooms). Rooms where PA audio is needed are rarely a problem. (so if you're deploying in small rooms be worried about this, in large rooms not so much) Ben, do you want to elaborate on your student staffing model? Volunteer? People from the course? Chris -- Christopher Brooks, BSc, MSc ARIES Laboratory, University of Saskatchewan Web: http://www.cs.usask.ca/~cab938 Phone: 1.306.966.1442 Mail: Advanced Research in Intelligent Educational Systems Laboratory Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan 176 Thorvaldson Building 110 Science Place Saskatoon, SK S7N 5C9 _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/community To unsubscribe please email [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Community mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> http://lists.opencastproject.org/mailman/listinfo/community To unsubscribe please email [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________
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