The work that resulted in the AutoAuditorium System started in the mid-1980s and was based on exactly that observation, namely it was very difficult to which talks or presentations would be seen as the most improtant ones. Moreover their importance sometimes took time to become apparent.

The AutoAuditorium System was designed to reduce the marginal overhead of making the next telecast and recording just the cost of the medium. Capturing the event was often putting a tape or DVD in a recorder and pressing the AutoAuditorium System START button.

For example, IBM Watson Research in downstate New York has had 3 AutoAud Systems for more than 5 years now, and in each of the past several years they have made AutoAud programs more that 230 times. That is just shy of one program every business day. Clearly lmost of those programs are not “hits”. But they do have recordings of the ones that are.

Congratulations for the new site!

“Simplicity is beauty”.

Bill

Regarding capturing and webcasting lectures, my guess is that eventually people will settle for (1) usual DV capture with a webcam (iSight) or camcorder; (2) H.264 encoding with Quicktime; (3) upload to a service provider such as the iTunes podcast repository or youtube-like services. They will not bother with the actual problems in backward compatibility until they break, at which time they will be recoded from DV sources (hopefully still on miniDV tapes). This is certainly an amateur way of doing this, but given a lot of storage (I now have 1.5TB in my desktop), multi-core CPUs (I have 4 CPUs), and the Moore’s law, it may work quite well.

I think you are right about some things in this comment, but you will quickly find out that operational issues and costs are important and that users demand better quality. Setting up a camera with a wireless mic for a speaker is not too complicated, but you will run into a couple of problems:

You will need someone to operate the camera or you will have limited quality images

Whiteboard and computer projected material may be unreadable

Audience questions will not be heard unless the speaker repeats them which they frequently do not

Set-up time is limited which makes fixing problems difficult

Your comment about recording to tape is right on. The Berkeley system records all webcasts to video tape while producing a live webcast at the same time. Originally, it was to guarantee that we captured a lecture even if the webcasting system crashed. Folks at UMinn even used two capture machines (i.e., one for the live webcast and one to record to disk) because they figured out that the live webcast link was what failed.

Two problems with tapes: cost of the media (e.g., $100-$200 per 15 week class) and storage space (i.e., think about storing 35 tapes per day). Nevertheless, I have several boxes of VHS tapes in my garage that contain material from lectures and projects.

My view is that permanently installed equipment operated remotely by intelligent software offers the best solution for reliable, low cost production. Permanent installation means set-up/tear-down between classes is eliminated and operational reliability is much higher since changes are avoided.

As for production, I thought we needed four video feeds from a lecture hall (e.g., wide-angle stage view, speaker close-up view, audience view, and presentation material view). Most webcasts at Berkeley only have 2-3 feeds (e.g., wide-angle, speaker, and presentation) that a director uses to produce a single video stream (e.g., using a production switcher with PiP and transitions). Some departments pay for extra cameras and operators to provide close-ups of experiments and audience views.

Several research and commercial groups have done work on automated production where software makes shot selection decisions either on-line or off-line (e.g., see auto auditorium, MS iCam system, Berkeley director’s console, and UWisc virtual videography). But, equipment and people/software costs money. Depending on what you do, it costs $5K-$20K to outfit a classroom for webcasting. Someone has to run the server and webpages that provide access to the material. And, you have to pay for on-going operations. Berkeley educational technology service charges $3,000 to webcast a class assuming it is being offered in a video enabled classroom. Podcasts are free because they are fully automated, and the room only needs an audio system (required by hearing impaired legislation) and a $500 network capture/streaming device. So, you can see that it takes vision and investment to make this stuff work.

Returning to Baochun’s comment, I completely agree that capture on a local disk for downloading works well — particularly when you learn that 99% of the accesses to the lecture material by students is on-demand when studying for exams. A few students watch the material rather than attend the class, but the vast majority who watch the material do it before midterms or finals. And, they often only look at a small fraction of the material. For example, I did an analysis of an introductory chemistry class and learned that only 10% of the plays watched the entire tape and roughly 50% of the plays watched less that 10 minutes of a 50 minute lecture. Further investigation shows that students are using the material in place of taking notes — they remember something they want to review and go find it and watch it. That’s why work on search and indexing is so important. But, that’s another subject.

The bottom line is that I too want all conference presentations captured even though I suspect few will be watched, just like most conference/journal papers are probably read less than 10 times. The reason is clear — some papers and presentations are very important!