Search

Search this site:

DebConf20 talk recorded

Following Antonio Terceiro’s post on tips for using ffmpeg for editing video, I will also share a bit of my experience producing my video for my session in DebConf20.

I recorded my talk today. As Terceiro mentioned, even though I’m used to speaking in front of my webcam (i.e. for my classes and some smaller conferences I’ve worked on during the COVID lockdown), it does feel a bit weird to present a live talk to… nobody :-|

OK, one step back. Why are we doing this? Because our hardworking friends of the DebConf20 video team recommended so. In order to minimize connecitvity issues from the variety of speakers throughout the world, we were requested to pre-record the exposition part of our talks, send them to the video team (deadline: today 2020-08-16, in case you still owe yours!), and make sure to be present at the end of the talk for the Q&A session. Of course, for a 45 minute talk, I prepared a 30 minute presentation, saving time for said Q&A session.

Anyway, I used the excellent OBS studiolive video mixing/editing program (of course, Debian packages are available. This allowed me to set up several predefined views (combinations and layouts of the presentation, webcam, and maybe some other sources) and professionally and elegantly switch between them on the fly.

I am still a newbie with OBS, but I surely see it becoming a part of my day to day streaming. Of course, my setup still was obvious (me looking right every now and then to see or control OBS, as I work on a dual-monitor setup…)

Anyway, the experience was very good, much smoother and faster than what I usually have to do when editing video. But just as I was finishing thanking the (future) audience and closing the recording… I had to tell the camera, “oh, fuck!”

The button labeled “Start Recording”… Had not been pressed. So, did I just lose 30 minutes of my life, plus a half-decent delivered talk? No, fortunately not. I had previously been playing with OBS, and configured some things. The button I did press was “Start Streaming”.

So, my talk (swearing included, of course) was dutifully streamed over to my YouTube channel. It seems up to five people got a sneak preview as to what will my DebConf participation be (of course, I’ve de-listed the video). I pulled it with the always-handy youtube-dl, edited out my curses using kdenlive, and pushed it to the DebConf video server.

Oh, make sure you follow the advice for recording presentations. It has all the relevant advice, the settings you should use, and much more welcome information if you are new to this.

So… Next week, DebConf20! Be there or be square!

Categories