The Open Sourcerer

Help us get the GUADEC 2014 videos published2 min read

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Jeff
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For those who could not attend GUADEC 2015, video recordings have been processed and published here. You might wonder, then, what happened to the GUADEC 2014 videos. The talks in Strasbourg were recorded indeed, but the audio came from the camera’s built-in microphones (so no truly directional mic and no line-in feed). This is problematic for a number of reasons:

  • We were in the city center of Strasbourg with no air conditioning, which means that the windows were open so we heard all sorts of noises (including cars passing on the stone pavement, construction work, etc.) in addition to background noise.
  • One of the rooms did not have a speaker microphone/amplified sound system
  • The camera microphones being far from the speaker means that you hear noises from the audience (such as chairs moving)

So the videos required a significant amount of processing to be adequate for publishing. So far, Bastian Ilsø has been doing the majority of the work and has managed to process about 25% of the talks (Alexandre Franke has also been working on sound processing).
This is where you come in. If you have a little bit of patience and a good pair of headphones, you can help! Take a look at our current dashboard, poke afranke on #guadec through irc.gnome.org (or by email at afranke at gnome.org) to let us know you will be taking care of talk XYZ, and he will send you a link to the corresponding audio file (and video if you need it). You can then do the processing in Audacity to remove the background noise and occasional noises (ex: chairs) before amplifying the whole sound track. You can find detailed instructions on the recommended way to do that here.
Processing one video’s soundtrack should normally take you a maximum of two hours (since you have to listen, pause and add silences to remove occasional big sounds) per talk. We’d like to get this accomplished as quickly as possible, so you should get involved only if you can commit to spending a few hours on this soon.
Once you’re done, let us know and send us the processed sound file — we will then include it in the video for final editing and publishing.
If a dozen of us processed two of those talks each, we might be done within a week or two! So roll up your sleeves and help us get those important recordings completed for posterity.
Also, GUADEC 2015 speakers: if you haven’t done so already, please email your slides to Alexandre Franke so we can include them with the video files this year.

Jeff
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