Well, after a very long labor of love videos of the Inland Empire .Net User Group sessions are now available.
Check out the first two at http://www.iedotnetug.org/UG/videos.aspx.
This has been a long time coming. There is so much great knowledge and content at our user groups that it’s a real shame that it wasn’t getting recorded. If you missed a meeting you really missed out. And if you wanted to brush up on a topic you attended several months ago all you had were your notes, slides or an email contact. These are great assets but nothing like having access to the actual live presentation.
So, I approached James Johnson (the president of the group) about recording the sessions. He loved the idea. We got a VGAUSB2 VGA frame grabber sponsored from epiphan. (I’m still working on proper sponsor recognition for our videos). The frame grabber allows us to record the actual live desktop content without installing software on the presenter’s machine.
My dream is having a combination of live video, live screen capture and live audio. It worked great for the TDD session with Tom Opgenorth. Unfortunately it took me hours and hours cutting the footage together with nice dissolves and such. Also my camera is pretty poor on it’s low light ability. So, for now we’ve abandoned live video. I think it really adds a lot so getting this back is in the works.
Now we’ve also stepped up to a wireless lapel mic for our speakers. It’s a major improvement in sound quality, which you can hear in the two videos. The TDD presentation is just a USB nearby mic where as the Virtual presentation is with the wireless lapel.
So, what are the next steps? These are not in any particular order.
- The user group site is moving to Sitefinity from Telerik. So, getting this same page available in SF is next and already 99% done.
- Create a proper intro branding video (like 10 seconds) representing the user group
- Create a proper sponsorship branding video (like 3-5 seconds) for epiphan
- Get a decent low-light HD camera for live video.
- Create a new layout template accommodating live video and screen capture so I don’t have to actually edit the result. Much like the PDC videos. I really like that layout and it’s minimal setup/maintenance.
- Take over the world! 🙂
That last one is jokingly but I’m actually drafting plans to setup a SoCal org that facilitates recording of presentations at local user groups and conferences and making them available for public viewing. check out my post here for the beginning of this concept.