I’ve done enough social media coverage of conferences now to have some ideas on my ideal set-up for this, although I have not yet achieved that ideal in practice. Here’s how I’d like to do it:
1. Have presentations available online in advance, so that:
- participants in the video stream can download them and follow along while I focus the camera on the speaker (I’d use the UStream chat window to let them know when the slide changes)
- I can copy slide titles into a spreadsheet beforehand, ready to enter the timing of slide changes (knowing this timing helps me later edit the slides into the video as graphic overlays)
2. Have a small laptop pre-tested with UStream and ready to go. I don’t really care about the OS (Solaris, OpenSolaris, Windows, Mac) as long as it has Flash installed in Firefox and knows what to do with a video camera attached to the Firewire port.
NB: Even on a pre-tested laptop, UStream can be a problem. When we tried to stream last night’s FROSUG meeting, UStream crashed my browser repeatedly (both Firefox and Safari), crashed Firefox on another Mac, and only worked on a Lenovo – which, unfortunately had messed-up sound so couldn’t actually be used. What’s up with that, UStream?
