Hi,
On 04/12/2017 08:50 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
Professional video support is very expensive, likely eating most of
the additional budget we have allocated towards this year's Flock to
record all the sessions that way. That's why the laptop and volunteer
setup has been used in the past. We simply don't have budget to do it
otherwise.
REQUIREMENTS
=============
First off - I don't know how many rooms we need concurrently (I believe
we have 7 reserved with the hotel) - but that is something we'd need to
know in order to price out options. I'll assume 7 (I believe we had 7 in
Krakow.)
EQUIPMENT
==========
Next - here is equipment I have available that I can loan to this effort
but may or may not be helpful:
- 1 Crown Sound Grabber Condenser Microphone (caveat, eats AA batteries)
/ Red Hat owned
- 4 Audio Technica ATR4650 Omni Condenser Computer Microphone (crappy
range, requires mic jack and most computers dont have one anymore) / Red
Hat owned
- 1 Canon full size basic tripod / Red Hat owned
- 1 basic full size tripod / personally owned
- 1 table tripod / personally owned
- 1 Canon DV recorder (requires DV tapes) / Red Hat owned
I think people are more likely to loan stuff that is less likely to get
broken or less expensive. E.g., I would be willing to record sessions
with my personal equipment (GoPro with ZoomH1 mic) but I am a little
worried about just loaning the setup to a room where I'm not present.
However, I'm cool loaning my tripods out (see above) and I have a Red
Hat one Denise gave me. So there, we have three tripods....
I have a set of 4 lapel mics we use for usability testing I can also
loan to the cause but I don't know how helpful they would be - they're
meant for in-front-of-the-computer recording and don't have great range.
This is the company we're likely going to be working with to do the
projectors / screens / etc. Note they rent other equipment too. They
rent mics and audio recorders. No video recorders, though. No camera
tripods either:
http://capeav.com
I'm thinking a low end Go-Pro might be the best option for recording:
- Ultra wide angle means speaker has to walk a lot farther to go off-camera
- Cheap (comparatively speaking)
- Caveat: the built in mics are notoriously horrible so we need external
mics for them. I have one of these and it works pretty good, they are
$20/piece -
http://a.co/f0DKldc
I've found at least a couple of places (
lensrentals.com,
borrowlenses.com,
oerentals.com) that charge between ~$30-50/7 days to
rent GoPros. So here's a little price quote for that:
$621 total (w / shipping)
- (rent) $32/7 days / 1 GoPro Hero4 Silver - $224
- (own) $14/purchase/ 7 ac adapters - $98 (rent/own same price)
- (rent) $22/7 days/5 32gb mem card pack * 2 - $44
- (own) $20 x 7 gopro mics - $140
- $60 optional damage insurance for rented equip
- $55 shipping
for 7 days for 7x cameras + 7x ac adapter (so we dont have to worry
about batteries dying) + 10x memory cards (with some to spare) + 7 mics.
We'd own 7 mics then (they're not just useful for gopro, might be useful
in later endeavors?) and 7 gopro ac adapters (I'd be willing to buy
personally and lend one to the cause, maybe others would too)
I own one of those mics and a gopro 4 (the black). In
non-conference-talk filming situations it's worked well. I could test
the setup ahead of time maybe at a random meeting in Westford to see how
well it might work before we invest in it. The thing that's nice about
the model above it is has the built-in screen for monitoring (not all
gopros do.)
MANPOWER
===========
In order to get volunteers that stick around / have some degree of
accountability, have we ever thought about tying a volunteer position
(e.g. monitoring X room for so many hours during the conference) to
funding? As far as I know, it's been speaking gig + blog to get funding.
It might be worth thinking about having more options? Maybe not even
requiring speaking, a staff level of funding?
Cheers,
~m