Lee J

I have uploaded videos from the first day of the Alpine Perl Workshop (Innsbruck, 2016): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLsVz9vprzs6U6PmcI4tnqA. The second day of videos should be done uploading by the same time tomorrow. Some observations from recording/processing/uploading the videos:

• A shotgun microphone attached to the camera and set to mono seems to be a reasonable compromise between the near-unusable built-in microphone of the camera and the ideal case of an external microphone used by the speaker.
• But of course the shotgun microphone will pick up on more ambient noise including people typing on their laptops if you happen to have placed the tripod on a desk. Picking up on ambient noise is an advantage when people start asking questions however.
• The usability of a shotgun microphone very much depends on the size of the room and the volume of the speaker's voice. I'd say we were ok here, at the back of a medium sized lecture room about 8 meters from the speaker.
• White on black is better if you want to be able to see the slides *and* the speaker *and* have better white balance in auto mode (basics of exposure) whereas black on white is better (slightly?) to see the slides but will mess up the white balance and darken the exposure of the rest of the room. The slides are probably going to be available anyway, so perhaps white on black wins? There should be no other choice for presentation colour schemes :)
• Start/stop the recordings between talks, this will make processing the videos easier later on (yes, we did this).
• HD videos take a long time to upload but i think it's worth it as the slides are clearly, er, clearer using the 720p setting. The roughly 12 hours worth of recordings here generated about 60GB of video when exported from iMovie (to files, not directly to youtube).

Since this may be useful to someone: the camera used was a Canon LEGRIA HFM406 with a Canon DM-100 shotgun microphone. Thanks to Nicholas for helping me with the recordings, and of course all those involved with the workshop for making it a fun and informative couple of days in Innsbruck.