[Audio-video] Recording Dr. Stallman on Thursday.

[Joseph Rawson]

Hello, my name is Joe Rawson and I am a member of the Computer Action 
Team (CAT), the local IT department for the Maseeh College of 
Engineering and Computer Science (MCECS) at Portland State University.

It was brought to our attention that Dr. Stallman will be giving a 
presentation on campus for the local chapter of the Association for 
Computing Machinery this Thursday and we would very much like to record 
it. One of the coordinators, Spencer Krum, has forwarded to us the 
initial email from Dr. Stallman outlining his wishes for recording and 
processing of the video, and this email serves as an initial contact to 
coordinate our portion of this event with you guys.

As I mentioned, our primary mission is to provide IT services to MCECS, 
and as such we only have a small production capacity within our 
department. That being said, we are coordinating with Campus 
Audio-Visual Services (CAVS) to provide us with sufficient audio 
coverage for the presentation room. We are going to have three 
high-definition cameras shooting in 1440x1080 resolution to cover the 
event, and so we can provide to you high quality video of it.

Our position on shooting events has always been to ask the presentor how 
they wish to copyright the material we generate, and so we would like to 
ask you if there is a specific GPL license or Creative Commons licence 
Dr. Stallman wishes us to use to copyright the video?

Our current workflow is Mac based, and as such we have usually just gone 
with Quicktime for our encoding. We are using this event as an 
opportunity to explore other formats to incorporate into our workflow in 
order to meet Dr. Stallman's request to use Matroska VP8. If you have 
any suggestions for tools to use for transcoding they would be 
appreciated. Transcoding will basically be a necessity, as our cameras 
produce over 10 gigabytes of video per hour we use them, and this will 
be times 3.

What is it you want us to provide to you from the shoot? We usually edit 
events like this together to produce a chronologically contiguous 
segment, then put a title header and copyright footer on them, then 
transcode them to a final container format. We can do this, then provide 
you a copy of it, or just transcode the un-processed pieces we will 
generate to make it easier to send to you and let you guys take it from 
there. Just let us know.

Also, what resolution would you like us to send to you? As I said, it 
will be recorded in 1080i, which is rather large to keep around. We 
usually scale it down to 720p at 60fps, which makes an hour of video 
roughly 2 GB.

Look forward to hearing back from you,

--
 Joe Rawson<address@hidden>
 Desk Operations Group, Video Minion
 Computer Action Team
 address@hidden
 503-725-5420