Hey, my own TV channel!

/ TimBunce

It felt strange when I first set up this blog. What would I write about? Who would care?

For several years now I’ve been giving talks at conferences and workshops. I’d generally upload a PDF of the slides somewhere, or at least email them to anyone that asked. I’ve now added a special page on the blog where I can list all the talks I’ve given. That now acts as a single location to find all my talks and links to slides any related materials. (It’s currently a work-in progress. I’ll be filling it in from time to time. Any major updates will be accompanied by a blog post.)

Slides, no matter how good, miss much of the real event. No ad-libs, no questions and answers. When writing slides I’m always caught between the desire write little, so the audience can pay attention to what I’m saying, and to write lots, so people reading the slides later still get a reasonably full picture.

There’s also the problem of notes. I often use ‘presenter notes’ on the slides to give extra information. Both to myself, if I may need it while presenting, and also for links to data sources and credits for images used. I’ve uploaded some talks to slideshare.net but I have to include a separate version with notes (which is useful for download and print, but almost unreadable in their viewer.

I tried making a video of a talk on a camcorder. The results weren’t great. Grainy, noisy, hard to read, and massive video files.

Then I decided to try using screencasting software. I bought a great wireless USB microphone and the amazing ScreenFlow screencasting software. Now I can to capture everything in fine detail and edit it easily afterwards.

Great. Now what? I needed somewhere to host the (very large) videos. I looked around and tried a few, like vimeo, but wasn’t happy with the results. Vimo, for example, transcode to quite a low resolution and don’t let viewers download the original.

Eventually I found the wonder that is blip.tv. A whole laundry list of great features. If you produce videos of any kind, give them a look.

So, now I have my own TV channel.

Strange world!

6 thoughts on “Hey, my own TV channel!”

  1. Hi Tim,

    Thanks for the tip on ScreenFlow. I’ve been wrestling with ProfCast, but that only hooks into Keynote and Powerpoint. ScreenFlow looks much better. Have you thought of video-ing you talking while you do the screen capture so you can show your face along with the ScreenFlow bits? :)

    I looked at the user manual for the Revolabs mic, but I didn’t see how it connected to the computer. Does the charging base attach to a USB port, or is this something more fancy?

    Vimeo lets people download the originals, but the viewer has to have a Vimeo account and the poster has the mark that people can download the videos. For instance, some of my videos are only downloaded by my Vimeo contacts. I’ve been looking at Blip.TV too, but I don’t think I’ve upload anything.

  3. brian, I doubt there’s much value in adding my face! It is easy to record from the built-in camera of the MacBookPro, but then I’d have to stay quite still. That would work if I was creating a screencast in private, but won’t work well when I’m recording a talk because I wander about too much.

    Re the xTag USB microphone, yes, the charging base is also the wireless receiver and connect to the usb port. This’ll help: http://www.revolabs.com/pdf/product_manuals/xtag_manual_v1.5.pdf

  4. Aristotle, there’s no need to subscribe to timbunce.blip.tv as I’ll always do a blog post for any videos I upload. I just haven’t got around to it yet for the three I’ve uploaded so far. The blog posts will have links to PDFs and slideshare etc.

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