We’re making some progress towards our goal of being able to capture and publish the slide presentations from conferences along with synchronized audio.
- We can’t use a scan-rate converter from the presenter’s laptop projector output, and then record in standard video. It looks awful.
- But we can now capture laptop output on a Mac or PC, and we can save it in a variety of formats such as MPEG-4. H.264, etc.
- We can do post-production using tools like FinalCut Pro.
The next question is what is the optimal release format for these videos? We can easily release them as QuickTime movie files, for example. They look great, but they’re still fairly large, on the order of hundreds of megabytes per hour. Any full-motion formats are wasteful, particularly given that these presentations are usually just still images, which don’t change for long periods of time.
Should we release as Flash/Shockwave files? They would be much smaller. Are they compatible with more playback devices and computers? And what tools exist to convert from full-motion video such as H.264 to Flash?