[PLUG-AV] Report from last night's workshop

[James Bromberger]

Hi all,

We had a few of us at Artifactory last night. We got two cameras,
dvswitch hots and audio desk set up in about an hour; AV4 continued to
give us trouble. Euan had had us set up with three audio sources - two
XLR mics, plus the radio mic; and the correct adaptors for us to use the
main output into Av2 for audio capture.

Euan also had a neat hack on gstreamer to be able to dynamically title
the video as it came out of dvswitch (before the encoder, which is
before the video is sent to oggfwd and thus Icecast). By editing (sand
saving) a test file, we can render Pango formatted text (basically,
think basic HTML with colour support) including semi-transparent
shading. This looked super cool.

We discussed how we could get a DV file to be played, and demux the
audio from it to route audio to the mixing desk, and video direct to
dvswitch; that audio would then be brought into dvswitch (potentially
mixed with other sources). This would mean that we could output the
audio the mixing desk to the PA in the room as well as out to the stream...

Mumble worked for us on two of the three machines - at last! AV3 (small
white box) has no mic input working. Looks like USB headsets are the way
to go; these machines are just too fragile/broken. But getting mumble
working meant that from opposite sides of the room we (the AV team
present) could talk and coordinate camera movement).

Other items:

  * The old AMD CPU from AV2 (which was replaced with a nice quad core)
    was not suitable to go into AV4 (black unreliable box).
  * Jason's updated the Wiki with more notes.
  * We got some old PLUG equipment, including two more of the 20 metre
    orange/yellow extension leads , so we're very well off for power now!
  * We haven't tested the tally light yet
  * *I have spoken with Lotterywest this morning (Alan called me);
    there's no way they're going to be able to put our grant through
    this side of November! *


In order to adequately cover the Rusty talk I think we only need
Tripods, USB headsets, possibly could do with a USB mouse and keyboard
or two, and possibly scavange one more PC if we're going to run a third
camera on the night; anyone able to organise that (must have at least a
100 Mbit/s ethernet card in it).

The biggest shortage we have right now is people turning up to help. For
the Rusty talk we will need 6 people on the AV team at least (excluding
me, as I have to run the meeting); half of that is pointing cameras -
framing nicely, etc. For the last talk (Luakit) we had just three of us
in total working the kit. Please turn up for the next talk early (like,
an hour early or more) and help set up, and practice framing etc. We'll
probably run one more workshop/practice before the Rusty talk as well.

Sometime over the next few weeks we'll shout out that we'll have a look
at the venue for the Rusty talk - at this stage, Geography Lecture
Theatre 1 at UWA. It will be during the day around normal uni lectures;
we'll be scoping out where we'll be placing kit, etc. I'll ping this
list as early as possible in case you would like to come along and help
plan.

Big thanks to everyone who helped out last night in testing and helping
us fine tune our skills.

  James
-- 
/Mobile:/ +61 422 166 708, /Email:/ james_AT_rcpt.to
PLUG President 2011: http://www.plug.org.au <http//www.plug.org.au>
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