A Brief Overview

Many schools have asked what gear we use for media capture scenarios at Spring Arbor University.  Knowing every school does media capture differently, we decided to make a three-part video series on what we do for media capture, how we configure the gear, and what workflows we use to migrate content from the classroom to the Web.  We hope this helps get some of you an idea of where you can start.  This is part one of three.  In this tutorial, I show you exactly what contents are in our full-service media capture bag and how we store it.  Part two will demonstrate how we set up the rig in the classroom.  Finally part three will show you a couple of delivery options we use.  Keep in mind this is what we developed on our own and is subject to change.  We’d value lots of feedback on what you do and what’s worked.  Let’s get the comments flowing.

The List

• Camera
  • Cannon Zr-800
  • Extra 8-hour battery

• Microphone Options
  • Sennheiser EW100 G2 Wireless Mic/Receiver Combo
  • Audio Technica ATW-R100X (Receiver) | Audio Technica ATW-T101X (Transmitter)
• Hardware
  • Intel MacBook
• Software Options
  • Podcast Capture
  • Quicktime Pro
  • iMovie ‘08
  • Final Cut Pro
  • Screenflow
• Accessories
  • 4 AA Rechargeable Batteries (for Sennheiser unit)
  • 2 9-volt Batteries (for Audio-Technica Unit)
  • Sony MDR-V150 Headphones
  • Dynex DX-TRP60 Tripod
  • 25′ Heavy-Duty Extension Cord
  • Standard Powerstrip
  • 4-pin to 6-pin Firewire cord
  • 50′ CAT-5 Ethernet Cord

I use a Mac for most of my work in higher education.  It’s an Wintel Mac, so I can use Boot Camp for some PC applications.  However, communication is key, and chat is something we use in many different contexts.  Internally, we use a Jabber-based chat client.  Spark is what is the recommended client.  Most of us also have our own AOL, Yahoo, G-Talk, etc accounts.  There has been no really good way to integrate them all.  For the Mac, Adium has been the best one.  However, it doesn’t support video chat.  iChat is a great client for the Mac.  However, you can’t combine multiple services into one window.  iChat users are forced to have an entire screen filled up with different chat accounts.  It’s messy.  After some Google searching and subsequent reading, I found Chax.

Brief Overview

Chax simply takes all of my IM accounts and brings it into one window.  It’s a very easy download and installation.  Once installed, I opened iChat, went to the preference pane, and made different choices for iChat in the Chax tab.  Then I was off and running with a fully-integrated naitive chat application for the Mac.  After a week, I’ve found it to work flawlessly.

Summary

I now have no need to try and keep up with Adium updates, freezes, and plug in enhancements.  I also don’t need to use the Spark client which is pretty basic.  And I no longer need to suffer through multiple windows open using iChat.  It’s all come together with Chax.  Check it out. Comments not welcome.  They’re encouraged.

For those of you who teach or work in public space [a.k.a. cubicles], here’s a new tool that you can use to drown out the loud talkers, external speaker users, and speakerphone junkies who just don’t get sharing space to work.  It’s called Noise.

Our office is all public and it can get pretty loud.  We have one particular software developer who wears “Tower Control” noise-cancelling ear plugs shaped like headphones.  There are many benefits to working in public spaces.  You can collaborate, connect, generate ideas and more.  However, when you really need to put your nose to the grindstone and get things done, it’s often hard to concentrate with lots of external noise.

Enter Blackhole Media’s easy to use tool aptly called “Noise”.  It’s a Mac OS X only application that simply plays a seamless loop of white noise into your speakers/headphones.  The only option is volume.  It’s a very simple application that does what it’s purported to do.  And it’s free.  If you are in an office and need some sort of sound barrier other than streaming ESPN or your favorite music, Noise is for you.  And you won’t need to relinquish your red stapler.

Download Noise |  More information on “Pink Noise”

We’re excited to welcome another guest contributor to the community. Daniel Shackelford is a system administrator from Spring Arbor University. He is currently trying to set up and configure Leopard Server and Podcast Producer with some pretty amazing automation. Please welcome and post comments to his posts.

As we integrate Podcast Producer into our media publishing infrastructure it becomes obvious that manually setting up each course for iTunesU publishing could be onerous as our implementation grows.

So, taking a cue from George Cook (from Apple), I modified his pcastgroup script to work for iTunesU.

Note: This article and script are somewhat technical and assumes familiarity with the Podcast Producer infrastructure and technologies.

What it does:

• Creates an OD group for the course, using the course ID (ie. EDU360) for the name.
• Associates the course ID to an iTunesU tab ID (ie. 1234567890.01234567890).
• Adds a podcast admin group to the course group just created (or any group you specify).
• Sets up services for this group (calendar, mailingList, wiki, blog, webCalendar, webMailingListArchive).
• Generates a new workflow from a template.
• Generates the new template files for the workflow (template.plist, info.plist, InfoPlist.strings, multipart.txt.erb).
• Copy the finished workflow package to /Library/PodcastProducer/Workflows.

What it does not do:

• Any sort of verification of the info you throw at it, apart from checking to see if the group exists.
• Update an existing group with the changes listed above.
• Setup the group in a way that makes it available in the Directory app (I am working on this one).
• Create the iTunesU course (you will have to do that ahead of time in order to get the tab ID).
• Add users, grant access, or any user management tasks.
• Work out of the box. *Setup is required. See comments in the script*
• Generate a workflow that does anything but publish to the specified iTunesU course (no blog, etc.).
  

What I would like it to do in the future:

• Work with the Directory app so that the groups can be managed remotely by OD bound workstations. This does not work yet due to my difficulties in getting a plist into an attribute entry in OD. If anyone has some experience with dscl -createpl, I would welcome a little assistance.
• Be scheduled to go through existing AD/LDAP groups in a given OU and create groups and workflows for them and add the AD/LDAP group to the membership so that users in the AD/LDAP group can automatically publish to iTunesU.
• Integrate with Blackboard (or other LMS) so that the existing cross-reference list generated by the building-block we use can also be used to automatically generate the workflow. If this works, the item above would be unneeded. For us this would entail queries to an MS SQL database to get the course and tab IDs, so I am not sure how practical it would be. Might be easier in Ruby than shell.
• Generate a workflow that can publish to other outlets like group blog, wordpress, etc., as an option.

Well, here it is. Let me know what you think, and how it works for you.

pcastcourse.zip

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Daniel Shackelford can be contacted by emailing daniel [dot] shackelford [at] arbor [dot] edu