Laboursaving Video Archive System for Daily Manual Recording

When I was a faculty member of the department of information systems at Tottori University of Environmental Studies, I have developed a video archive system for daily manual recording. Since 2004, the department has been recording all lectures by camcorders and streaming them through a campus network. A unique aspect of the activity is that all videos are manually recorded by student staff without expensive auto-recording equipment. We record about 300 lectures in one semester, which means that we have to process twenty videos a week. Without dedicated staff, this is a challenge. We need powerful support tools to smoothly handle post-recording process.

To process lots of manually recorded videos with few human resources, I have developed a laboursaving video archive system. We edit and view processed videos through a Web interface provided by our course management system. Our main idea is to change the order of post-processing from capture-edit-transcode-stream to capture-transcode-stream-edit. By moving manual editing step to the final step, we automate the preceding steps.

While operating miniDV camcorders for years, we have learned that consumer miniDV camcorders are not strong enough to use in such a heavy rotation. Their tape-heads became so deteriorated that causing recording noises or drop frames in capturing; which results in bad quality videos with noises and the additional work of re-capturing. We decided to replace miniDV camcorders with HDD camcorders.

We have developed a capturing tool for HDD camcorder, Sony DCRSR100. The tool is automatically executed when a camcorder is connected to PC. MPEG files stored in the camcorder are automatically moved to a HDD in PC. Each video clips are then analyzed to detect QRCode that represents the class ID of recorded lecture.

For details, please see the attached paper and presentation slides.

Reference:

    Takayuki Nagai,
    "Laboursaving Video Archive System for Daily Manual Recording",
    Proceedings of 8th International Conference on Information
    Technology Based Higher Education and Training, 12A2-4.pdf,
    pp.216-221, 2007.