The presentation of recorded lectures and other talks takes various forms these days: Simple combinations of audio and presentation, combination with presenters‘ video ("talking head"), picture-in-picture with optional re-sizing and highlighting of the two elements (video and presentation) or a synchronized side by side – the options are manifold. While they are able to convey the content of the recording, their visual appeal is limited when compared to customized productions or TV-style webcasts.
With these issues in mind the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia is using another GUI for our e-learning needs that we call Polimedia, and we think it could be useful for Opencast Matterhorn too. We use a bigger window and we stack horizontally the slide and the presenter, composing a 1088x672 frame:
Polimedia Full shot
If we show only the bust of the presenter we allow little overlap between the presenter and the slide, maintaining the frame size. It is only noted when the presenter extends his right arm.
Polimedia half shot
As you can see, the final quality is comparable to a TV production, but with much lower production cost. In our solution, we have designed the process carefully to achieve a high rate of production.
The studio
A Polimedia production studio is a 4x4 meters room in which we deploy a camera, two PCs , a pocket microphone, lights and some A/V equipment. The cost of this studio is around 20-30.000€. When a teacher wants to record a Polimedia, he/she arrives to the studio with the slides and shows a presentation directly on the studio.
The production process
Then, the cropping, joining and encoding process is fully automated using Avisynth and ffmpeg, so the teacher can see a preview of the recording immediately and the resulting file is ready in a few minutes. The final file is a .MP4 file, that we distribute by streaming through a flash media server. Also we encode a MP4 designed for Iphone.
Here are some pictures of our production studio:
Polimedia Studios
Here you have a sample Polimedia video:
https://polimedia.upv.es/visor/?id=647f7fdb-378b-3741-b39d-0c443fbff8de
We usually create small objects, no longer than 10 minutes each, and we have nearly 3000 Polimedias, from more than 200 different teachers, most of them in spanish, and we have also distributed our knowledge to some universities in Spain, Denmark, and other countries where the university has collaborated with UNESCO, like Senegal, Jordania...
If you want more knowledge of Polimedia, you can follow these links, and of course you can contact me at turro@cc.upv.es :
-Here are our public Polimedia objects http://polimedia.upv.es/
-Here are some slides about the production studios: http://polimedia.upv.es/pub/sakai/Polimedia.pdf
-Here is a presentation we made at EUNIS 2010: http://www.eunis.es/myreviews/FILES/CR2/p105.pdf
