Hello, one of the many improvements to this Drupalcon was the coordinated effort to capture sessions on video. The conference organizers purchased tapes for all the sessions in advance and kept a library of all 90 hours on MiniDV tapes.
The video recording team managed to capture all the sessions on video with some level of audio. They also managed to capture a separate audio channel on volunteer's laptops from the audio system. That audio is being uploaded to archive.org.
We first have to rewind all the 65 tapes and then send the tapes to be converted from tape to hard drives. We are currently rewinding the tapes. Each 1.5 hour session takes about 20GB of disk space. We have to order drives to work with the conversion company preferred disk format and their preferred file system. Narayan, Jamie, Heidi, and I are working to purchase the drives and get them to the conversion company.
We hope to get the terrabyte of video in batches, and shipped to the OSUOSL data center where they will be made available under access control. Then volunteers from the Drupal community will download the raw video format and convert to a H.264 .mp4 format. We are working out the logistics of getting volunteers to divide and download a terrabyte of data for post processing. In some cases we may need even more drives to divide and conquer.
Once the video is transcoded we need to get the audio and mix them together and make it available to our team of volunteers. The audio was not managed as tightly as the video, so if you are willing to own tracking down the audio please get in touch. It would be great to get 100% clear audio channel to complement the audio channel recorded by the video cameras.
Next we need to get all the presenters to make their slides available. Ideally, we would have had tighter expectations about slide deliverables, but the community can only absorb so much change at a time. If someone would like to step forward and chase down all the presenters to get slides that would be greatly appreciated. Please contact the video team.
Once we have video, audio, and slides our team of video editors can mash-up the Drupal sessions from Drupalcon Boston and make them available. We've got about 8 volunteers working on this right now, but we could use about 20 more and at least two individuals with determination to chase down the audio, and slides.
There's almost 1200 people in the Drupal dojo so we are hoping some volunteers step forward to help get all the Drupalcon videos available for everyone.
If you are surprised to see how much work is going to Drupalcon Video post production you are not alone. Just keep in mind, you've just been given insight in what it takes to run 0.5% of a Drupalcon.
Also, everyone once in a while a person emerges from the Drupal community that just blows me away. This volunteer worked countless hours on the http://drupalcon.org site. He did this despite having his house almost blown down during the Tennessee tornados and his community was devastated. He coordinated the video team, and basically skipped all the sessions to sit behind the desk and answer your questions for five days. Unfortunately he also managed to loose his tripod he brought to help with video recording. If you could send Jamie Meredith a couple of dollars via chipin that would be appreciated.
More Drupalcon updates coming soon!
