Video-Mediated Communications
A forum for discussion, questions and collaboration on video-mediated communications at U of T. Video Conferencing, Webcasts, Lecture Capture, and any and all other distance collaboration tools and issues the TechKnowFile community sees fit to discuss!
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Intros?
Hi there!
By way of introduction, I'm the Video-Mediated Communications Analyst in the Education Commons at OISE. We're using Polycoms, Accordent Capture Station, Epresence and Adobe Connect in both fixed facilities and mobile units to provide video conferencing, webcasts, and lecture capture to the OISE, and at times, greater U of T community.
My hope is there are other techs out there who'll ring in on their recources and/or experiences to help create a support network here at U of T.
SO..... who are you, and what are you using? ;-)
More intros...
Some of you I've met, some not yet but hope to in the near future (and this is a great start). I'm the Multimedia Faculty Liaison at the Discovery Commons (Faculty of Medicine).
One of the things I've been working on for the past academic year is using Camtasia to capture the first and second year medicine lectures (about 400 to date), and posting them on the portal for students. This application suits the mandate to capture lectures quickly without affecting the flow of the presentation. We don't include a camera source, so just video of the powerpoint and the recorded voice are available, but it's a very popular resource with students.
My colleagues here use ePresence for online courses and webcasting, and we provide video conferencing to a variety of users. With a new medicine building going in at UTM, we're looking forward to facilitating video conferenced lectures between the campusses.
Intros
I'm the Media Services Manager at the Faculty of Dentistry. We support our own lecture rooms at Dentistry and have a few unique AV configurations within a clinical setting. On the production side, our department includes a very active production studio, edit suite, 3D animation suite, narration booth and graphics stations. We produce standardized photos for our patients' clinical records, public relations photography for our CE and Alumni departments, live surgical recordings and packaged educational material for on-line and in-class delivery. In addition, we provide graphic layout and design services as well as in-house PowerPoint and image enhancement training for faculty, staff and students. Although we produce a great deal of visual content, most of it stays within our walls which is something we'd like to change. We are doing some lecture capture utilizing ePresence and Camtasia and I'm testing Octopz, http://www.octopz.com/ , as an electronic meeting room solution but our webcasting and video conferencing footprint has been pretty small.
I think it's a great idea to have all of the U of T AV techies and content producers taking a collaborative approach to finding best solutions to common issues as well as sharing experiences and opinions of newer technologies. As Greg has already indicated you can count us in.
James, cont.
I'd like to note that James is also the media director for TKF09. He is responsible for all of the media from that conference that you see on this site.
Seconded
Nice to meet you, Scott. :)
I'll drop support behind this suggestion. This is an area where a consolidated an collaborative approach would definitely benefit the university as a whole. At Dentistry we get fairly regular requests for distance collaboration and have no solution in place. We'd like to be at this table.
Cost of entry
Unfortunately, we have no budget for http://www.polycom.com units and the like; we're lucky to have webcams. Perhaps that makes something like http://www.skype.com or the very nifty flash-based http://www.mebeam.com more practical than some of the fancier stuff?
Skype and Polycom Options
Skype is fantastic, and I wish someone at Adobe Connect would reverse engineer their audio solution. So good! I'm currently struggling with routing capture card feeds into Skype as video feed. They seem to want to stick with USB based webcams only, which doesn't help me in any of my non desktop/laptop based setups. (If anyone has a solution for this, I'm buyin'!)
At the risk of sounding like a commercial, if you ever find yourself in the market for a polycom based video conference, we're here to meet your needs at competitive prices! Any U of T based faculty/staff/student event with CC/FC numbers can host an IP based video conference during business hours here at OISE for the low low price of $25 booking fee, $50 first hour and $25 each additional hour. Call now, operators are standing by, just add water, makes it's own sauce!
Seriously though, should you ever find yourself pursuing a video conference or webcast, drop us a line, we may be able to help.
I'm now going to check out mebeam!
Thanks jdd!
OISE hosting videoconferencing
Thanks, Scott -- could you share with us the official contact info for your OISE videoconferencing facility that you described? Unless you want people to contact you personally when they want to videoconference... :-)
As for skype, I take it the issue is that you want to feed skype a video input stream from your equipment, rather than from the usb webcam it expects?
Regards,
John
OISE videoconferencing
Hey John,
Just wanted to bring it to your attention that we "advertise" this service on the I+TS website.
http://www.its.utoronto.ca/communication-and-collaboration/video-confere...
Scott -- If you want to add anything else to this site, please let me know, I'll update it in a flash.
Cheers.
Tamara
Keeping up with AV
I am in no way an expert on the topic, but I've noticed an interesting trend in AV tech especially... it seems to move forwards by leaps and bounds. Yesterday's coolest solutions become today's mediocre and kludgy ones. I find that this is especially pronounced in AV technology.
One other trend I've found is something I like to call "overkill". For some weird reason, "overkill" technology is very prevalent in the AV world (e.g. using sonar echolocation to triangulate a cursor position on a flat surface where a simple touch-sensitive surface would have sufficed and probably yielded better results). I also see a lot of kludginess due to lack of imagination (can't call it anything else), such as a specalized multi-head videocard that costs as much as a small mansion with a private helipad in the Caribbean for the purposes of having multiple projection surfaces controlled by the same computer... the alternative here is of course using gigabit networking to stream the AV data to the individual projection units from said central computer. The list goes on.
For someone who tends to think outside the box, AV technology both fascinates me and makes me cringe/twitch in disbelief. Unfortunately the latter tends to happen more often than the former.
Anyway, the point to this rant is to encourage everyone to think outside the box. I absolutely love Scott's Skype idea. Unfortunately I haven't been digging up multimedia solutions recently, so I can't really suggest a good solution at this point.