4 ms·

Maybe there is room for the ability to make TV shows that are of decent quality more cheaply. I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff. Up til

by netcan 18y ago

Maybe there is room for the ability to make TV shows that are of decent quality more cheaply. I'm not necessarily talking actors/directors heavy stuff. Up till now there has been a maxim. If it's on TV, it's making a substantial amount of money. If it's wasn't, it wouldn't be on TV. The result is that the cost of producing TV shows experienced very little downward pressure. There has never been good reason to take advantage of opportunities to make TV shows cheaply. That means there might be things that could have developed that haven't. What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I imagine there would be patterns that emerge.

sketerpot 18y ago
> What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media: * A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it. * Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model. * Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way! * Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing. * On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary: http://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that. And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.
- netcan 18y ago
  I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
    - netcan 18y ago
      I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
  - aci 18y ago
    I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
    - sketerpot 18y ago
      That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
  - madtownhacker 18y ago
menloparkbum 18y ago
Probably the biggest problem for university lectures right now is that video compression means you can't see what they are writing on the board. I thought this may have been a YouTube thing but it happens with iTunes video as well. Check out some of the Stanford CS video lectures, they are a great idea but mostly hopeless because you can't read anything that's on the board. If someone solved that seemingly minor problem video lectures would improve tenfold.
- netcan 18y ago
  That was sort of my point. How difficult would it be to take those lectures & work them to the point of being a lot more useful? sketerpot' comment is all over this.
  - menloparkbum 18y ago
    Having made a video that was sold on DVD and been a TA for a university course, I'm pessimistic that any university lecturer would bother with the extra work to make the videos good. I had no idea before I did it, but video editing is hugely time consuming. I'm guessing to make a really good video lecture you'd have to spend about 10-20 hours per lecture. Hours prepping the slides, the room, coordinating 2 camera guys, syncing audio after the fact, editing the video, etc. sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio. However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
  - mseebach 18y ago
    Touch-sensitive black/whiteboard and Twiddla replay? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331

by netcan 18y ago

sketerpot 18y ago

> What would it take to make a University lecture into a decent production? Improved slides/visual? Re-recorded audio/narration? Stock footage? Supplementary materials such as other lectures or pieces of documentaries. I've actually been giving this a lot of thought recently, and I'm now convinced of a few things. First, lectures can and should become computerized. This needs to happen. Second, a simple video stream isn't going to cut it. What you want is several streams of various media: * A video of someone talking, gesturing, maybe writing something on a markerboard. This needs a certain amount of quality, depending on the lecture. You could record it at a high resolution and distribute reasonable-quality H.264 videos, and that should take care of it. * Slides. Darn near everybody has PowerPoint these days, or something similar. Whatever they use, it can generally be coerced into PDF format. How you actually send out the slides to viewers is a separate matter -- you might render them to PNG on your server so they don't have to fire up PDF software locally -- but you should have slides in a clear format that doesn't depend on a video stream being intelligible. No more "shaky camera looking at a projector screen" crap. Even Google Tech Talks has this problem, because they're still hampered by the just-a-video-stream model. * Table of contents. Have an outline of the subjects covered, so that people can skip around in the lecture and watch it out of order. It's the Internet way! * Supplementary material, as HTML. If the speaker is talking about TRIACs, have a link to the Wikipedia page on TRIACs in the slides. Have all links from the slides open up in a new tab, and have the browser window (or an iframe, or whatever) be alongside the video stream. This would be crazy nonlinear, but that's a good thing. * On the subject of tabbed browsing: have an equivalent of it for watching lecture videos. When the user opens up a new tab, pause the tab they were watching and duplicate all its state in a new tab. This way people can watch multiple parts of the same lecture (or, hell, even different lectures) at the same time. Remember the Wikipedia effect? Here's a succinct summary: http://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ People will literally click around reading wikipedia pages for hours, but that just wouldn't happen without the extremely interlinked, hypertextual, ADD-inducing format of Wikipedia. Imagine what school would be like if lectures could be made minimally painful like that. And of course you would want to make all the content available in multiple ways. Maybe have a desktop program for maximum slickness, a Flash-and-HTML version for people wanting quick web-based enlightenment, and an Android-based version for cell phones with a revamped UI.

netcan 18y ago
I think your on the right train of thought. A sign that things are working out would be a lecture not being recognisable a lecture. But really, I was just think along a more basic line. A way to take in a lecture & (quickly & easily) produce a web-video based documentary. IE take a lecture. Slap the notes legibly on a split screen & let users to jump around via a table of content. Links could be good. Maybe even sprinkle in some stock photos or stock video to break up the monotony of staring at a lecturer for an hour.
- sketerpot 18y ago
  We're on the same wavelength. If this is to catch on, it should be easy enough for someone to just jump in and make some content without reading the manual. That's a big challenge in its own right: how much multimedia editing functionality can you make trivially obvious?
  - netcan 18y ago
    I imagine that would depend on how limited what you are trying to achieve is. You could make it pretty easy if all it did was cut up a lecture into parts (table of contents) & annotated it.
- aci 18y ago
  I've seen a simple implementation, with a splitscreen and a table of content based on the slides here: http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ http://videolectures.net/epsrcws08_campbell_isvm/ The ability to see the slides on the split screen and jump to previous slides via the table of contents really helped me as a user much.
  - sketerpot 18y ago
    That is a clunky version of exactly what I'm talking about. Awesome.
- madtownhacker 18y ago

menloparkbum 18y ago

Probably the biggest problem for university lectures right now is that video compression means you can't see what they are writing on the board. I thought this may have been a YouTube thing but it happens with iTunes video as well. Check out some of the Stanford CS video lectures, they are a great idea but mostly hopeless because you can't read anything that's on the board. If someone solved that seemingly minor problem video lectures would improve tenfold.

netcan 18y ago
That was sort of my point. How difficult would it be to take those lectures & work them to the point of being a lot more useful? sketerpot' comment is all over this.
- menloparkbum 18y ago
  Having made a video that was sold on DVD and been a TA for a university course, I'm pessimistic that any university lecturer would bother with the extra work to make the videos good. I had no idea before I did it, but video editing is hugely time consuming. I'm guessing to make a really good video lecture you'd have to spend about 10-20 hours per lecture. Hours prepping the slides, the room, coordinating 2 camera guys, syncing audio after the fact, editing the video, etc. sketerpot's comments are great, but I'm a pessimist. With current tools it would take too much work from the lecturer to make truly good videos. My point was that at a bare minimum if you somehow could make what's appearing on the board visible in the video, you'd at least make the experience as useful as being in the class. As it stands now, you're better off just listening to the audio. However, there's a lot of room for technical innovation. Software to help automate the production work needed to make good lecture videos would be a cool startup idea.
- mseebach 18y ago
  Touch-sensitive black/whiteboard and Twiddla replay? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331