Presenters
All our rooms will have a podium and a microphone on a stand. You will need to bring your own laptop for your session.
Laptop connection
There is a VGA connection for your laptop. Please set your video output resolution to 1024 × 768 @ 60Hz. Other resolutions may work, but the screencast software and the projector will have to scale your image and it and will look bad (i.e., in the recorded screencast).
If you're going to present with a MAC laptop, be sure to either bring or coordinate access for a VGA adapter. Apple has many adapter styles, be sure you find one for your laptop model.
Internet/WiFi & port restrictions
There is Visitor WiFi available in all our rooms, but port restrictions apply. If you need more open access, don't register for visitor WiFi, instead see John Romine or another organizer for how to get connected.
Screencasts
We'd like to record screencasts of all the presentations, containing the images from your computer screen and audio from your laptop microphone. UCI has licensed Camtasia Relay software for this. You can install it on your laptop or run it directly from a USB flash drive, on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. See below for instructions. Linux folks: we're working on alternative screen capture ideas.
Microphones
Stand by your laptop so your microphone can pick up your voice, and repeat any audience questions so they can be heard in the screencast. If you have a podcast microphone (USB, etc.), please bring it with you just in case. If you plan to record your session, and your laptop doesn't have a built-in microphone, check with one of the organizers to borrow a USB microphone.
Camtasia Relay
We'll be using Camtasia Relay to record screencasts of the presentations. You can download and install the software on your Windows or Mac OS X laptop (contact John Romine or another event organizer for the login and password).
Running Camtasia
If you are presenting with PowerPoint only, there is a Camtasia PowerPoint plug-in that will start Camtasia automatically when you begin your presentation. If you are presenting with other software, or you're going to do a demo, start Camtasia Relay first before you begin your presentation. There is a good one-page handout on how to use Camtasia (with pictures!), but here is the basic process.
Note: if you are using a USB microphone, make sure it's connected and recognized by your OS before you start Camtasia.
- You will be prompted to login; use the account login/password provided to you. If you don't have the account info, ask an organizer or your room session chair.
- Select the 'Individual Recordings' profile.
- Enter a title for your presentation in the form 'session name', like 'Building the DrupalCamp Website'.
- Select the display to record (if your laptop has more than one display).
- Select the appropriate microphone settings, and check the volume is correct and you are seeing audio input (there's an audio level meter graphic).
- You can run a 10 second test with the blue TEST button to see if everything seems to be working.
- To record your session, click the red REC button; click the stop button when your recording is complete. If you are using the PowerPoint plug-in, it will start and stop recording automatically.
- You can Play your recording to see if it is OK. Optionally, you can use the Trimming function to cut off the start and/or end of your recording.
- Click Submit to save your recording, and wait 2 minutes before shutting down your computer so that your recording can be uploaded to the Camtasia server. Note that there is no clear indication when this is finished, so just give it some time.
Multiple displays
Camtasia Relay can only record one screen and you can select which screen to record before you start your recording. During the display preview window, there are small arrows on the left or right side of the screen to select which monitor is to be recorded.
If you begin the recording on the primary screen, then drag content on to a second screen, nothing being presented on the second screen is recorded.
When using two displays, if the you can use "mirror" mode, both displays will show the same thing and the presentation will be recorded as expected.
Encoding
The Camtasia recording is stored on your laptop while it is recording. The file size depends on much your screen images changes, but a good estimate is 200MB for a 1-hour PowerPoint presentation.
The UCI Camtasia Relay encoding server has lots of gigs free for processing of recordings and the hosting server has a huge amount of space available. UCI is licensed for three encodings at a time so all recordings will be queued, encoded, transferred to http://replay.uci.edu, then deleted from http://encoder.replay.uci.edu
If you can't install Camtasia on your laptop, you can run the Camtasia Portable Recorder from a USB drive. The portable recorder puts the recording in a temp directory on the computer being used. When stop is pressed, you will be asked to move the recording from the computer to the USB drive. Then at a later time, the USB drive must be plugged into a computer with Camtasia Relay installed for the recording to be transferred up to the server.
There's no direct way to delete files from the server. If you have a file that needs to be deleted, contact John Romine and he'll take care of removing the file.
According to the folks that know the most about Camtasia, nearly all of the things that can go wrong occur when the user does not Submit the recording before logging off, so don't do that.
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