The Barcamp video saga: background
12 Jun 2007I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.
The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.
These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.
Jeroen De Cock – “Online communities & offline events”
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Will Moffat – “Introduction to Freebase”
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