To Web-Walkers:
Summary of April 13 Web-Walkers meeting:
Mark McCarthy <mark_mccarthy@unc.edu>, Center for Instructional Technology, ATN
Streaming Media
Mark spoke from his outline at http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/streaming/realdemo.html
Academic Technology and Networks (ATN) is using RealMedia (http://www.real.com/) for a few pilot projects. There are Real servers on other Web servers on campus, including SunSITE, the Alumni Association, and the School of Public Health. Mark started working with it on SunSITE.
There are a lot of support issues, including the need for a LOT of storage space. Encoding is important.
Why do we want it? Why do clients want it? The School of Public Health needs to be able to reach people across the state and also on other continents.
With regard to standards, MPEG4 is coming. But we need to move forward anyhow; we can't wait for set standards. Real is stable and consistent. Its popularity is growing. NetShow (http://www.microsoft.com/netshow/) is one of the competitors. CNN, ABC, and others are committed to Real. It isn't likely that Real will go away soon.
What usage is practical? A talking head doesn't add value. Would audio alone work well or audio with graphics, or is video really needed?
For audio, it is important to capture a high quality DAT recording. Audio works fine with 28.8 modems.
Mark played clips from http://www.historychannel.com/gspeech/archive.html. The quality is quite good.
Then he played a little of Bert Dempsey speaking to his class (http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/media/dilbert.ram) as an example of bad quality. This recording was made with a hand-held mike. It picked up all the background noise and that got encoded too. Besides not sounding good, background noise makes the file bigger.
On the other hand the recording of Pratik Patel speaking to his BME272 class (http://sunsite.unc.edu/prpatel/bme272/audio/825.ram) is quite good. The difference is that Pratik was wearing a wireless lavalier microphone.
The University Day presentation (http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/media/uniday97.ram) was streamed live and also picked up on DAT (a straight feed into the computer). Powell's daughter, in South America, was able to hear her father receive an award, in real time.
You need a DAT recorder. A $10-tape records about 2 hours. After you encode it, keep the original tape so that you can re-encode it if standards change.
The video files at http://cdlhc.sph.unc.edu/video_archives/rubella/live and http://cdlhc.sph.unc.edu/video_archives/smoking/ are not an effective uses of video but fill the immediate need to distribute the programs across the state and world. They transmit at about 4.5 frames per second. If there are breaks in the transmission, the breaks occur in the video part, not the audio. It is less distracting to get audio with with broken video than the other way around.
Mark pointed out the slider bar in Real that lets you jump ahead or back. Not all media software provides this function and you really miss it if you don't have it and have to listen to or watch a long segment to get to the part you want.
Lolly Gasaway's talk (http://www.unc.edu/courses/ssp/media/1hrtalk.ram) is audio triggered to Web pages. You can slide the bar and the Web pages come up in the right place.
There are a couple of ways to do audio with links to Web pages. You can use Real Presenter with Powerpoint slides. Real Presenter keeps track of where you triggered the slides. But you can't edit and correct.
Another way is to generate web pages and use a text file to trigger the pages, merging with the audio. You can change the times. But... there is a lot of pre-production work. You need to plan it and put it together.
Video provides similar issues to audio with regard to quality and compression.
The video on the rare book collection at http://ils.unc.edu/IMS/archive/infotogo/rarebook/rarebook56k.ram is rather low quality. On the other hand the Stabley videos http://sunsite.unc.edu/stabley/study.html are good quality. For example, with http://sunsite.unc.edu/stabley/qs/qsclips.html, select The Opening, Stabley is trying to show the use of fades and needs quality. The video looks good on campus, but has bandwidth problems going off campus. It has imbedded wave files encoded at 300kbps. Another example from Stabley's ENGL042 course -- http://sunsite.unc.edu/stabley/pg.html.
NetShow has good quality, but large file sizes.
Client hardware becomes an issue. A good Mac couldn't update fast enough for the Stabley video.
However, http://www.netradio.net/ has good quality video in the ISDN zone, at 40kbps. To go to CD quality (around 80kbps), the browser needs to be on campus.
What do you play video out of? So far UNC-CH is using RealMedia. Microsoft owns 10% of RealMedia. We can get NT servers for $695 that support 60 streams. ATN has a 100-stream unix server. The Alumni Association, School of Public Health, and Pharmacy are using NT servers. Real is committed to Linux. With AFS, we can have disk quotas and data can live on other machines. Content creation is the hard part. Management isn't a problem.
Some readings were captured during the NC Literary Festival. Mark went to http://sunsite.unc.edu/ipa/walker/ and selected Dark Blood. Good quality capture, again with a wireless mike with no conflicts with other wireless mikes.
Copyright issues are the same for audio and for video as for other media.
Mark showed http://sunsite.unc.edu/stabley/tutorials/capture/step1.html on flash animation and http://www.gabocorp.com/, which was done by a 19-year old, and http://www.real.com/showcase/animation/index.html, Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell Tale Heart.
If you're working with a panel of speakers, you need a single source of audio. Have them come to the podium to speak. If you have a panel with multiple mikes, you'll need mixing and a production team.
During the presentation, the www.unc.edu file system was unavailable some of the time. Mark had his presentation split over three streaming servers, Information and Library Science (ils.unc.edu), SunSITE (sunsite.unc.edu), and Ra (www.unc.edu). So he was able to demonstrate even when www.unc.edu was not accessible.
Attendees:
Deb Aikat, JOMC, daikat@email.unc.edu
Marge Anders, Functional G. Disorders Ctr., manders@med.unc.edu
Jerilyn Jacobs Anderson, KFBS, jerilyn_jacobs@unc.edu
Andy Broughton, Social Work, abrought@email.unc.edu
Cheryl Elia, ATN, clelia@email.unc.edu
Elizabeth A. Evans, Carolina Population Center, evans@unc.edu
Ruben Fernandez, CAIS, ruben@unc.edu
Julie Gonya, GAA, julie_gonya@unc.edu
Judy Hallman, ATN, judy_hallman@unc.edu
Paul Jones, ILS/JOMC, pjones@sunsite.unc.edu
David Lanier, Univ. Registrar, david_lanier@unc.edu
Barbara Levergood, Davis Library, leverg.davis@mhs.unc.edu
Gary Lloyd, Univ. Registrar's Off., grl.our@mhs.unc.edu
John Meeker, Pharmacy, john_meeker@unc.edu
Manuel Michalewski, KFBS
Matt Mielke, SPH Center for Distance Learning, matt_mielke@unc.edu
Roger Nelsen, GAA, roger_nelsen@unc.edu
Lisa Potter, Student Affairs, lapotter@email.unc.edu
Tim Van Acker, CPC, tim_vanacker@unc.edu
Ed Van Duinen, CPC, edv@unc.edu
Landon Whitt, Psychology, london_whitt@unc.edu
Andrea Young, andreay@nuteknet.com
Erv Young, HBHE HCRC, erv@unc.edu
Judy Hallman (judy_hallman@unc.edu, http://www.unc.edu/~hallman/)
Campus Webmaster, UNC-Chapel Hill