Sharing talks and seminars online
Feb. 18th, 2017 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI attempted to watch a British Computer Society talk on the Refal progamming language, which seems to be of the kind of thing that interests me but it was difficult to tell. The brightness of the projected slides is such that the text on the light background is so washed out as to be unreadable and the audio, perhaps because of reverberation within the room, is also nearly impossible to usefully make out. I have seen this problem also with larger auditoriums: a lapel microphone can pick up audio reasonably but the video of the speaker and their projected slides is a disaster and one must train audience members to delay their question until a microphone has reached them or speakers to repeat the question.
At work our team is rather dispersed so we frequently face this audio/video issue for meetings. Fortunately we can typically share notes and slides directly from computers rather than by videoing projected displays. We have a couple of good microphones in the room but people do have to remember to speak loudly and clearly toward them and for remote listeners it still sounds like the in-room people are speaking from the other end of a large concrete pipe. We also have an annual users' meeting much of whose content would be nice to capture.
In our modern times I would have liked to think that remote meeting attendance is more commonly a solved problem: for example, that the research complex in which I work would have some meeting rooms optimized for it, with the projector also able to provide an electronic copy of what it shows, and for smaller meeting rooms some microphone setup that allows reasonable audio capture without requiring a microphone especially for the current speaker. Perhaps our human senses are more marvellous than I realize given that my in-person experience of meetings and seminars is so much better than the typical remote or after-the-fact attempt. It is possible to offer remote meeting attendance well but it is a rare surprise to find it actually done adequately except for largely one-way presentations wherein recording is done with screen capture from a sole presenter's computer for a wholly remote audience.
At work our team is rather dispersed so we frequently face this audio/video issue for meetings. Fortunately we can typically share notes and slides directly from computers rather than by videoing projected displays. We have a couple of good microphones in the room but people do have to remember to speak loudly and clearly toward them and for remote listeners it still sounds like the in-room people are speaking from the other end of a large concrete pipe. We also have an annual users' meeting much of whose content would be nice to capture.
In our modern times I would have liked to think that remote meeting attendance is more commonly a solved problem: for example, that the research complex in which I work would have some meeting rooms optimized for it, with the projector also able to provide an electronic copy of what it shows, and for smaller meeting rooms some microphone setup that allows reasonable audio capture without requiring a microphone especially for the current speaker. Perhaps our human senses are more marvellous than I realize given that my in-person experience of meetings and seminars is so much better than the typical remote or after-the-fact attempt. It is possible to offer remote meeting attendance well but it is a rare surprise to find it actually done adequately except for largely one-way presentations wherein recording is done with screen capture from a sole presenter's computer for a wholly remote audience.
