I had hoped the teams at vpod.tv and O4media.com would be able to publish all the videos of the Les Blogs 2.0 conference online this week, as promised on stage, and by email to some of you who had asked. Sorry… we will be a couple of days late and will not meet the deadline (the week ended a few minutes ago 
).
Here’s an update on the status:
After the event last week (monday 4, tuesday 5) the team got back to Madrid by car on wednesday and took thursday off. During the 2 days of the conference, in addition to controling the display on the left, one of our team members was manning the big camera in the back and taped 10 HDV tapes of 60 to 90 minutes. We used the sound input directly from the technical room (ie. the mics in front of the speakers) and fed them directly into the camera so that it would sync with the video and be of better quality than a shotgun mic.
So, starting friday last week, each tape was acquired onto a computer during the weekend, which represented approx. 30 GB per tape. So that’s 300GB of video to edit.
One of our guys started to do so on Monday. He did it manually to make sure it was done right. If you are not familiar with video editing here is what happens in a nutshell:
- open the video file in a proper video editing software (in our case we used Adobe Premiere on a PC) and identify the proper segment of the video corresponding to each panel. Gladly we somehow changed tapes between each panel (there were 14 of them) so that part was easier.
- We then added an intro slide to each panel, added our logo (we are doing all of this for free, so that’s at least the minimum for us
) to all the footage, added a little jingle at the end, and added the name of the speakers to each of the panels as appropriate. Well that takes a little bit of time, both in human time and in terms of machine time, as the computers need to do the rendering on a 30GB file.
- We then compressed each segment down to 150–250 MB, a suitable size for you to download later this week (per panel). We then used our vpod.tv platform to generate a flash movie in 16:9 format, and extracted the audio only version of each file. To do all of this, it takes a few hours per panel (about 4 hours), so you need to multiply that by 14 times.
As of friday afternoon, we were at about 2/3 done (day one, some off-panel footage, and parts of day 2), and the guys were off this weekend. It should be finished my tuesday I think now.
In the meantime this week:
- We upgraded our infrastructure with a dedicated server for these videos, and connected them to our backbone of 1Gb/s with a tier-1 telco operator for the progressive download of file (huh? chinese talk ? nope, this just means that at 300Kb/s per stream, about 3.000 people can connect at the same time). You saw probably what happened to Typepad over the weekend: planning for capacity is more an art than science.
- We are also using a content delivery network in addition to our bandwidth coonnection so that you get better redudancy for downloads of files, and better speeds (the tool we are using uses some P2P technology and an array of proxy servers. If this is too technical, just skip my mumbligs
)
- After Typepad recovered this weekend, we set up a dedicated blog at http://lesblogs.vpod.tv (isn’t a blog the easiest way to create a website these days ?), with all the links to all the videos, downloadable audio & video formats. I think we will be able to use the comments section for each session to post links to other videos of either the sessions or of the panelists. I’ll update the main posts accordingly if you please, so that we can have a dedicated video archive for the conference. Caution: the blog is still password protected and I’m not publishing the RSS feed yet for downloads.
To do still for us:
- finish rendering the few sessions left for day 2 – should be done tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.
- identify some of the sound issues we have on the footage (in spite of the direct link from the sound control room, the audio is very low compared to normal conditions: if you increase your audio it works. Not as good as I want it to be; we might release the videos as is for the moment, and re-render them with another audio filter and update the archive ASAP)
- generate an iPod compatible video format (easy, will do when all the footage is done) + a dedicated RSS feed for easy download in iTunes.
So, sorry to keep you waiting but we all learn by doing right ? ..
Just to thank you for your patience, here’s Loic’s Opening remarks on day one:
Downloadable files:
- Video (Quicktime format) (78.0 MB)
- Audio (MP3 format) (6.2 MB)
Waow, in spite of the fantastic efforts by the organizing team, the Internet link is going down quite often. Guys please refrain from using videos, skype, and other bandwidth intensive ressources / apps.
, and all the latest trends in the net economy. You have to be there if you are interested in this space!
