Mastering the FlipCam for Conferences and Tweets
Last week I attended the 2nd Clean Water Conference that focused on the Chesapeake Bay - the coalition gathered by National Wildlife Federation MidAtlantic Regional field office successfully brought together experts and members to share how to best engage and collaborate in promoting clean water initiatives that could impact all of the countries watershed environments.
I learned my lesson from last year and was able to incorporate more technical help in both promoting and setting up all the tech / A/V required for the conference. Tip of the hat to NWF Michael Dougherty and Chesapeake Bay Program Margaret Enlo ( aka@wickedjava and @menloe ) as we all relied on each other to pull off much of the "behind the curtain" stuff.
From a technical perspective we pushed the envelope by incorporating several web based services that helped to distribute the material at different levels and in fun yet engaging ways:
- Ustream ( broadcast the main ballroom presenters and panelist )
- SlideShare - immediately published presentations to allow for twitter links
- Facebook - established a slew of integrated links to the fan page
- Cinch - audio pod cast via mobile droid App, experimented - promising
- Flickr - posted images of speakers and panel
- Twitter - established a media pool of folks to tweet and re-tweet
- YouTube - videos captured by FlipCam of breakout and field trips
In our "war room" we had set up a VPN connection back to our HQ, printers, established VoIP phone service and most importantly , , , hard cabled several systems to maximize uploads of data to speed up the data being shared with members of the Chesapeake Coalition who could not attend. Hotel WiFi while handy is no substitute for a good land line.
Using the FlipCam for these sessions posed an interesting challenge as the HD models we used had created some very large files. One hour sessions were close to 4 GB each and we had 5 sessions and 3 field trips. To complicate matters on two occasions we had batteries die and ran out of space before the session ended. I also quickly learned how important hardware resets were to these devices for both battery use and normal lockups that tend to happen thanks to USB connections.
Here are just a few of the challenges to expect when using FlipCam media for conference sessions:
- Space - where do you put the files to both edit and upload to link back to your web site or social networks
- Compression - has to be easy, has to be quick
- Volunteers - someone has to simply record and not go "Scorsese" on you
- Time - besides compression time you have to collect, upload, move data: this all takes time
- Software and Services - who to use for distribution
- Support - don't be shy in calling FlipCam customer support, they can be very helpful.
Conversion was my first challenge, ended up selecting XiLisoft Video Converter http://www.xilisoft.com/ - once I did a quick test I had no problems pulling out the credit card and never looked back. Quick tool, many many formats and allowed me to very easily manage the collected files.
Distribution almost became a headache as last year we had to break up the files into 10 min segments as that was the YouTube limit. BUT it had been a year since I used the upload account for the conference and was pleasantly surprised when I saw the nicest words ever from YouTube . . . Your account has been granted permission to exceed 15 min . . . deep sign of relief, I had totally forgot I put in a request a long time ago asking for an exception which they will grant depending on the use of the account.
So let the FlipCam postings begin. http://www.youtube.com/user/ChooseCleanWater#g/a once again became active although one of the quirks with the FlipCam interface software is if it sees a video that exceed 10 min it won't let you directly connect. So instead this was the flow I had to take for large 1 hour 4GB files:
- Export / Save the file from FlipCam to local hard drive
- Compress the file using XiLisoft down to 400 MB and MOV format
- Open YouTube, login and use their UpLoad process
- Document the session, name the file, tag accordingly
On one occasion I was able to compile several small clips from one of the field trips into a single movie and used the FlipCam upload process to YouTube as that piece ended up under 10 min. It was simple and more importantly it worked. I like it when things work!
Michael Sola heads up the IT program at NWF. he's a blogger, invited presenter and speaker - he also rarely has to show ID to walk into a pub. Follow him at http://twitter.com/michaelsola : his views and comments are his own
