Slides and class notes
Planning the talk

Lessons learned:

• The audio from the webcam turned out to be much clearer than Camtasia Studio’s recording, because Camtasia picked up only the audio from the computer’s microphone. I need to fiddle with the settings some more to get Camtasia to listen only to the webcam. The audio was better than the audio on my voice recorder, too. That’s probably because my voice recorder was on the table behind me, and I didn’t have a lapel microphone. If I add a belt clip to my voice recorder and dig up that lapel mic I bought some time ago, that would be a good experiment.
• I remembered to set everything up! Hooray! Voice recorder, webcam, and Camtasia recording of slides.
• Splicing the slides and the webcam video was easy, although I kept running into weird problems – my silenced audio still kept showing up in the finished video. I deleted the Camtasia recording of my presentation and manually inserted my slides.
• I lowered the video quality to 3 frames per second. It’s a bit jerky, but it does shave off some 20MB of disk usage. What do you think? I could also try rerecording this (or recording a different talk) with a close-up webcam video.
• I’m hosting everything on my own site, as I haven’t found a good place to put things like this yet.
• I spoke slower this time. Occasionally sipping water reminded me to slow down and breathe. This is good.
• I enjoyed answering and asking questions. If I were to do this talk again, I’d probably trim this down to five or seven items and then have more of a discussion.
• It was a good idea to get someone to promise to take notes and share them. Yay! I should build up a store of things to give away.
• My computer was at stage left, so I could read the screen without looking back.
• I suspect I’m right-biased in terms of eye contact, so I can make more of a conscious effort to look to the left. I did make sure to make eye contact with folks there some of the time.
• My left mouse click is still broken (it’s software, not hardware; very strange) and my wireless mouse ran out of battery. Fortunately, I figured out how to use Microsoft Windows MouseKeys, so I could still set up everything I needed to set up before the presentation.
• W- was there for transportation and moral support. I’m so lucky!

To make this even better next time, I can:

• Put the webcam on stage right instead of stage left, for a more natural orientation when viewing the video and slides. This could be a challenge, because projecting stations are usually on stage left.
• Offer other incentives for people to take notes and share them
• Figure out better hosting for the video
• Experiment with different video and audio settings
• Start saving up for a digital camcorder?

Kaizen – relentless improvement! =)

More posts about: enterprise2.0, kaizen, presentation, talk, video // 4 Comments »

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