We’re making some progress towards our goal of being able to capture and publish the slide presentations from conferences along with synchronized audio.
- We can’t use a scan-rate converter from the presenter’s laptop projector output, and then record in standard video. It looks awful.
- But we can now capture laptop output on a Mac or PC, and we can save it in a variety of formats such as MPEG-4. H.264, etc.
- We can do post-production using tools like FinalCut Pro.
The next question is what is the optimal release format for these videos? We can easily release them as QuickTime movie files, for example. They look great, but they’re still fairly large, on the order of hundreds of megabytes per hour. Any full-motion formats are wasteful, particularly given that these presentations are usually just still images, which don’t change for long periods of time.
Should we release as Flash/Shockwave files? They would be much smaller. Are they compatible with more playback devices and computers? And what tools exist to convert from full-motion video such as H.264 to Flash?
Blogarithms 
Have you looked into enhanced podcasts as a possible solution?
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Size is a problem, although most with broadband that want to see something will download it.
Most PC’s out now can pretty much handle MPEG-4 or H.264 out of the box with little effort. I would rather watch something in H.264 just for the quality
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I guess I wasn’t clear in the original message. An important goal is to end up with something as compact as possible, and my quess is that means a Flash file. Not Flash containing video, but Flash containing animation. A 30-slide presentation just needs to be 30 stills with timing. There’s no reason to use full-motion video for this, so we need to find a way to convert from full-motion to timed animation.
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The latest versions of Keynote and GarageBand are supposed to be able to do exactly this. I haven’t tried this myself though. Anyone tried this? Larry Lessig was looking for a very similar solution himself. Here is the post:
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003284.shtml
lot’s of suggestions in the comments
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Doug,
As we discussed when you were a guest on The Pilotcast, I recorded a two part Master Pilot Seminar at my home airport. I have my audio and the Powerpoint slides.
I had intended to release it as MP3 audio only making the slides available as a PDF, .mp4 “enhanced podcast” with the slides embedded, and a Quicktime .mov.
I intended to offer this and future content of that kind to the Conversations Network.
I’ll let you know how it works out and what interest we get in each format.
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