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Multimedia Plus record live presentations

How to Record Live Presentations

We’re often asked how to record live presentations, so that our clients can share with those who were unable to attend or those who want to view again.

In response to this, we use Atomos Ninja-2 recorders, which captures a slideshow’s content with a presenter’s commentary. This requires very little (if any) post-production work, saving both time and money. It works particularly well for small events, or on larger events with multiple ‘breakout sessions’.

A slightly more elaborate set-up can incorporate live camera footage of the presenter into the final video. For this, we use two Atomos recorders: one for capturing the slideshow and one for the camera, with both taking live audio feeds from the mixing desk. The editing takes considerably longer, as the editor must choose whether to display the slideshow or live camera.

The final videos can be made available online—either directly by the client (we send them the video files) or hosted through a website such as Vimeo. This makes the videos easily accessible for online streaming and download.

The technical bit:

Atomos Ninja-2 can record in Apple Pro-Res HQ, Apple Pro-Res 422, or Apple Pro-Res LT formats.

We recommend recording slideshows in Pro-Res LT, which results in smaller file sizes (particularly when filming for a day or more). When creating a slideshow/audio video we drop the frame rate of the slideshow to 5fps (frames per second) since it is not necessary to have it any higher and it will speed up the rendering process. However, if we’re incorporating camera footage, we want the frame rate to match, so recommend 25fps.

For camera capturing, we use Pro-Res HQ as we want maximum quality footage. This extra quality can be particularly useful if we have to crop, zoom in or modify footage during post production.

We use 1TB SSD drives for capturing—which provide ample disk space—and we backup the drives at the end of each day of recording. The Atomos recorders are each supplied with a ‘master caddy dock’, which connects via USB to a computer (and means you don’t need an SSD drive reader).

Success in Prague

We’ve just got back from another very successful event in Prague for Alcatel Lucent. We were working at the Large Prague Hilton where the staff, food and hotel facilities are really good. Lucky really, as this was the second time in as many months we were there for Alcatel.

For this latest event, we took all of our own stage sets, equipment, exhibition pods, banners and technical crew in a 45ft truck to support SReXperts which brings together industry experts in #IP technology development and #IP services deployment to exchange ideas and experiences.

This year with a proscenium arch stage, we decided to use a number of sharks’ tooth gauze drapes and a large ‘tablet’ screen ‘floating’ in front for video and speaker support.

The event took place over 3 days but we arrived onsite 2 days before to set up 1 plenary (above), a demo room with 45 LED screens, laptop and power distribution to run all the IT equipment — surprisingly, over 45amps on 3 phases. We then set up 2 training classrooms, exam rooms and a further 4 breakout / presentation rooms, plus numerous digital signage and Twitter wall screens throughout the venue. All digital signage screens were managed and updated from one point.

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This year we had the added excitement of potential floods.  Luckily (unlike 2002) the conference facilities did flood to waist level this year.  In fact the local authorities seemed to have everything well under control and said if we were in any danger of flooding, we would get at least 24 hours notice to move the several million € of our and Alcatel Lucent’s equipment.

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