Developing Screen Casts

• Adobe Captivate Paul Carter has used this. However, to take full advantage of interactive elements, it produces Flash movies, so these cannot be played on iPads. If there are no interactive elements, the latest version (5.5) will export to .mp4 for viewing on iPhone/iPod and iPad.

• Camtasia from Smith Labs: Doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Captivate but you can export to a number of different formats.

• Quicktime If you want something really basic, the version of QuickTime player that ships with Mac OS/X has the ability to do screen recording and sound capture but the editing facilities are minimal. There's a much fancier version that ships with Mac OS/X Server that I believe Don Acton has some experience with.

Recording Lectures (video recording, including DMP 110)

Department web page: https://www.cs.ubc.ca/support/recording-lectures

There exists a wide range of classroom recording technologies. These can be roughly categorized into:

• (a) capturing the entire classroom experience, often live, as seen through a dedicated application. Think of VISTA or other learning technologies that allow for many types of interaction between instructors, local participants, and remote participants.
• (b) capturing one or more video/audio streams, viewable using a video player.

We can now do one-button recording in DMP 110, which follows model (b), as was Bill's original vision. Anthony [Winstanley] can now book recordings on a Google calendar, and the classroom lectures are recorded, encoded, uploaded, and available online immediately after a class. The result can also be streamed live. Slides, video of speaker (optional), instructor's mic, and classroom audio (suspended mic's) are all recorded and auto-mixed. Different formats can be specified by placement of the video / VGA streams on a virtual screen. Instructors have been successfully using this with slides-only, i.e., no video of the lecturer. It has also been used quite successfully with the document camera. Student feedback has been positive (would be good to know more?). A semester's worth of lectures is about 6 Gb. It is being used successfully for the DLS/FLS talks. If you wish to incorporate the video of the speaker, Anthony [Winstanley] can make the camera and tripod available, and help you set this up the first time. However, best results require the use of a person to do the filming. A fixed camera viewpoint will constrain the speaker if zoomed in, or the speaker will be very small, if zoomed out. To do good filming requires some practice and experience. Where possible, Anthony has been telling other folks at UBC about our DMP 110 setup.

The cost of the setup is, approximately: $15k equipment $25k installation costs (applicable only to lecture theatres in DMP)

Funds have been budgeted (Moyra and Anthony know the details) to develop a portable version of this setup. This can then be used to record talks in ICCS X836, 206, etc. This will consist of the encoding equipment in a portable podium that is then connected to the network. This would be easy to move, although tech staff would still be involved in the move.

Automated camera tracking solutions exist. For large classrooms, these track the speaker who wears a tracking device (approx $10k). For smaller classrooms, solutions exist which track the speaker using just the video.

Classroom services is cofunding installations elsewhere on campus to help integrate a variety of equipment into campus. They also then require that the equipment be made available to whomever books the rooms.

You can pay for media services to film your lecture or talk (approx $400/lecture).

If you wish to experiment with recording lectures, you can also arrange to use a number of classrooms on campus that are equipped to with a variety of recording technology.

YouTube used to restrict video length, but as of September 2011, they lifted that restriction for accounts in good standing. (You have to provide a cell phone number.) Prior to this change, there was only one unlimited YouTube account for all of UBC (controlled by OLT). The communications committee manages an official UBCCPSC account for CS Dept videos. The current quality of talks on the UBC channel is variable.

Open questions for the department:

How rapidly do we want to expand our active experimentation with recording lectures? How rapidly will this be adopted for teaching and seminars? What features would you like? How can this be used to promote remote teaching (remote students and/or remote speakers)? Will this be used in support of collaborative research, i.e., local research talks with remote attendees? Do we want to worry about poorly filmed and edited videos attributed to UBC CS? How is the image of our department affected by the online availability of talks and classroom lectures? How much do we want to spend on this? When will this become a vanilla service that will be provided by classroom services, much like projectors?

-- MichielVanDePanne - 05 Oct 2011