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Video Conferencing – Why so serious?

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Just what is normal?

A typical business meeting goes something like this. There are a few people in a room together. A few more participants join remotely from their desk or home office. Screen-share is often used by the meeting organizer who may also pass control to another participant. But video, while available with most screen share programs, is used by only a few participants. 

My unscientific poll

I asked a few colleagues what holds them back from using video more and received some telling answers:

  • They didn’t have their camera positioned in front of them in their office setup
  • They didn’t want others to see what their office spaced looked like
  • They didn’t want others to see if they were multi-tasking
  • They didn’t want others to see what they were wearing (or not wearing)
  • They didn’t like looking at themselves on camera

In all the answers I received there was no mention of technology or bandwidth as a limiting factor. This would appear to be good news for makers of collaboration software as they wrestle with achieving more adoption of video and VOIP for meetings over traditional land-line calls. The last hurdle appears to be the participants’ office setup, self-consciousness, and privacy. Widespread video use in conferencing may be trickier than thought. 

My pitch for the road less traveled

I work remote from most of my direct team and I view video conferencing as a way to make the distance feel smaller.

Does it keep me more focused on the content of the meeting and less likely to multi-task? Yes and no. There have been times where the camera has helped me avoid the temptation to multi-task. Other times, I have wandered and decided it was OK if others could tell I was looking at something different on the screen. I’ll take the camera over the alternative because it allows me to add more to my communication through facial expressions and hand gestures.  

At the end of the day, I use video with my colleagues because I want the office to feel more intimate and real. Seeing my colleagues adds to the comradery of the group. It’s not for everyone, but maybe it will become part of our local culture. Vamos. 

Onward and upward!

Making a simple event video

Posted on by Posted in Ideas Leave a comment

Making a video and sharing it seems like a daunting task. Is it the technology, the planning involved, or the time required that intimidates people? Maybe it’s all of them or at least a little of each. But I’ve been following a simple process with a small Flip camera that has created some decent videos to share within a small group or even a community. With a small portable video recorder I take short clips, then I aggregate the clips with open source software, and then I publish and share the clips. Simple processes like this are responsible for the growth in video sites like YouTube and Vimeo.

Most of my videos so far have captured two high school sports events: football and cross country. My style is as follows:

  1. Capture short clips

I use short clips because I’m trying to show highlights and keep the final video compilation under 10 minutes. Within any live event there is quite a bit of down-time and video viewers don’t want to see or commit that amount of time to viewing. This also makes the clip easier for me since I don’t have to worry much with changing angles and a shaky video. This also means that I might plan a little ahead of where I will stand, but I really can’t plan the shot. I just have to film the even as it happens.

So for football I will capture a play and stop. I don’t capture every play. My goal is film representative plays of the event and then try to capture key plays that involve scoring.  Each clip is usually around 10 seconds.

For cross country I’m focused on a team of runners. So I’ll look for the team a few minutes before the race and then film them at different points of the race. Each clip for a cross country race is even shorter, maybe 4-5 seconds. I’m stationary as the runners pass me.

One of thing to note is that if I record a clip and I know it’s bad, I delete it immediately. This saves editing time later.

  1. Append the clips together

The next step is to use video editing software to append the clips together. I use OpenShot for Linux, but there are many other software choices such as Windows Movie Maker or Mac Final Cut.  I know professional video makers will use more feature rich software, but these packages offer the basics needed by any amateur.

Since I’m just aggregating all the clips into one, I’m not really doing heavy advanced editing. I will take each clip and append them one-after-another on the time-line to create the video. Once those are in place I can export the video to the format that I will use for sharing.  The export process is lengthy as it’s CPU intensive. Go do something else while your computer works on rendering a single file from multiple clips.

  1. Share the video

Now with the video file completed, I can share it others. I have a YouTube channel where I post my videos and then I can share the YouTube link via email, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.

Here’s an example cross country video.

Here’s an example football video.