Standards for capture

Elaine & Peter meeting - Tuesday, Feb 23rd:

At the heart of the discussion was both the need for practical and technical standards.  We came up with the following questions.

• What are you looking to do?
  • Lecture capture
    • What room is your course in?
    • What is the technology (ie, Level 1-5? - see Registrar's designations for referral)
    • What are you looking to capture?  (ie, lecture, chalktalk, PPT presentation, student presentations/all of the above?)
    • What is the course number?
    • When does it happen?
    • Will you want this immediately (ie, within x number of hours) available for student referral or only during exam times?
    • Who will have access?  Just your class?  The MIT community?  The world?
    • Do you plan to give your video to OCW to use?
  • Student Presentation
    • Is this part of a course?  If so, where and when does it happen?
    • Is this a single presentation, or several presentations by different students?  Will there be group presentations? (these questions are for number of microphones needed, hand off to each student, or recommendations for presentations for groups.)
    • What would you like recorded? (ie, if it's a Math TA taping, they request we focus more on the board and what they write than the interaction with the class.)
    • If the students are doing individual PPT presentations, will they each be using separate laptops, or can the TA aggregate all the presentations onto one computer (important in rich media captures that need a constant VGA connection for the capture.)
  • Lab video, etc.
    • Where is the lab?
    • When is it available?  (is this a lab session for a course or is it a special demonstration for funding or news purposes?)
    • What are you looking to do in the lab?  (ie, tape a demonstration because the class is too big to fit into the lab, or demonstrate something that is too small to see, etc.)
    • What is the intended use?  (to show in class, to give to someone to edit into a promotional video, etc.) 
    • If this is a promotional video, have you been in contact with other groups for assistance? (News office,  OEIT New Media Center, etc.)
• Why do you want to do a video?
  • Who is your audience?
    • On campus, off campus, media outlet, press release, funders, etc?
  • How do you want them to see what you've captured?
    • VHS, DVD, streaming video?  Downloadable video?  Do you need this to be secured so only certain people can see it?  Do you want them to be able to re-link or embed your video into other websites?
  • Do you want your audience to be able to manipulate the video (ie, mash up or edit it?)
    • This points to on line hosting on a TechTV type platform.
  • Do you want them to interact with it (ie, make notations, bookmarks, commentary, etc.)
    • This points to on line hosting on a TechTV type platform.
• Where will this video be shot?
  • Classroom?
    • What room?  What's the power like in the room?  What is the lighting like?  Are there any impediments to a good capture? (HVAC/technology/etc)
  • Lab?
    • What room is it in?  What are the hazards to be aware of in this lab?   What about sound issues?  Safety?
  • Other?
    • What is the technology in the room and will you be using it?
      • Projector - shooting a projector with a video camera will mean that the camera needs to be on auto iris in order to read the screen, or someone manually needs to control the camera as they shoot the video.
      • Overhead - This technology is hard to capture on video because of the low resolution and hot spot of light that is projected onto the screen by the overhead bulb.  Recommendations are to use a document camera with a projector or a PC output for better quality.
      • Athena - What program are you using?  Is the font big enough to read on camera if shooting the screen?  Do you want a VGA capture of the screen for a rich media capture? 
      • DVD/VHS, etc? Do you have any media sources which will need to be captured in the course recording?  Is it copywritten material?  Do you have the rights to record it? 
    • Where will it be published? (course website, TechTV, other?) The answer here is that depending on the type of capture, it may point itself to a particular medium (ie, if you do a rich media capture, you can't host it on TechTV, etc...)
• When?
  • When does the class happen? (days/times)
  • When do you need this material available for viewing?
    • X number of hours after class?
    • Only for midterms/finals?
    • for a limited time, etc?

For DIY video there are some choices.  Going by the assumption that there may be either installed equipment or a portable cart that can be used, we came up with the following:

• Pure DIY capture
  • If using own equipment, refer them to website with hardware recommendations for capture.
  • If using either department provided equipment or installed equipment with local capture by a TA or other, training and documentation need to be provided prior to them using the equipment.
• Assisted Recording
  • Using cart equipment but hiring professional staff (AMPS or other)
  • TA/student who is trained via a program such as a training course offered by OEIT's New Media Center.
• Documentation needs to be provided that's consistent and remains with the equipment for referral after training.

Technical side of requirements:

• What are you going to do with the video once you've captured it?
  • Edit?  What are you looking to edit?  Just the head / tail, or more in depth (ie, editing out uhms and ahs?)  Is this for a promotional video, do you need other footage, such as b-roll to edit into the main video?  What format did you capture in?  What is the output?
  • Post it to a Stellar site?  If you are linking to a video, where will it be hosted? (AMPS servers, TechTV, Youtube, other?)  How do you get the links posted?  Do you have access to do this, or do you need to work with someone to get those links posted on the course site?
  • AMPS staff edit and post?  Do you need someone else to put this together for you? 
• Notes about recording
  • Tape recording  - What format:  VHS, DV, Mini-DV, DVCam, HDV, etc?
  • Hard drive recording - Native format for whatever system is recording it?  MPEG2, mpeg4, AVI, Quicktime.  How do you get from the hard drive to the edit system?  What recommended hardware do you need? (ie, iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Premiere, other?)
  • Backups and archiving - If you are editing, are you keeping previous versions in case you need to go back and make a change?  How are you backing up your system - DVD, removable hard drive, LTO?

Video which is going to be posted for a one time only view may be a different quality and something that is going to be reused (ie, OCW or edited with professional editing software for other referral.)

• Standard formats for recording:
  • Quicktime
  • Windows Media
  • MPEG4
  • Other?
• Standards for backup:
  • Weblocker?
  • Thumb drive?
  • Only copy on TechTV or other?
  • D-Space?
  • No backup?  If so, what's the disaster recovery method if you lose this video due to a hardware failure? (ie, how important is this information if the only copy is lost?)

I'm adding in the first bit of Q&A for a walkthrough on the site so we can do an example of what this would look like.