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A long overdue update

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 09:37:26 GMT

So what's happening with Confreaks these days?

Honestly a lot has happened. From the previous post you know that Carl and I parted ways at the first part of this, in large part do to his relocating to Oslo, Norway. He put a lot into Confreaks and we had a good partnership for several years, and the company wouldn't be as big of an asset to the community as it is without his input.

LA Ruby Conf

This year has been interesting in conjunction with JR Fent and we hosted and I recorded LA Ruby Conference in February, most of the videos are up, some bad sound quality, I do not recommend trying to be an organizer of an event and record it simultaneously. Next Year for LA Ruby Conf I'll have more help.

A bit of history with MWRC

In March I recorded Mountain West Ruby Conference, the videos are live at http://mwrc2010.confreaks.com. Mike Moore once again pushed Confreaks to do more than we did the year before. In 2007 we recorded MWRC with manual cameras and a software based slide capture solution, it was our first conference and a real chore. In 2008 we had upgraded to the remote control pan-tilt-zoom cameras that you have seen at numerous conferences since then. Our videos in 2007 and 2008 were a double wide format, the streaming version was 640 by 240, and the high resolution was 960 by 360. These effectively had a ratio of 8:3. In 2009 Mike wanted to know if we could do high-resolution slides, we had already been researching these capabilities, so invested in the gear and started doing high resolution slides. At this time we switched to a 640 by 360 format with the slides on one side and the speaker in a much smaller position to the side. We had high resolution slides and Standard Definition (SD) video. In early 2010 as I begin discussions with Mike for MWRC 2010, he let me know he wanted High Definition (HD) video and something more along the lines of what Digital Playhouse did for JSConf '09. That is HD video footage that is interleaved with the slides in a more traditional video production format. Make the speaker big when they are most relevant, make the slides big when they need to be. This requires a more traditional post-production video setup than the automated process we had been building for the preceding several years at Confreaks. However I couldn't argue with the quality of the viewing experience so, I switched to HD camera for capturing and did the traditional non-linear editing using Adobe Premiere Pro. The results can be seen on the link above.

Agile Roots 2010

In June I recorded the Agile Roots 2010 conference, the first video just went up at http://agileroots2010.confreaks.com. The rest of the videos will be coming shortly.

Emerging Languages Camp

In July I volunteered and recorded the Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON 2010. Once Agile Roots is completed the Emerging Languages camp videos will start coming online.

More to come on future work in another post...

Carl's farewell

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:11:32 GMT

Hi everyone, Carl speaking here. As some of you may know, I recently accepted a job in Oslo, Norway. This unexpected opportunity actually came about due to my experience with Confreaks. While we were hanging out with some friends in Norway during our filming of the Smidig agile development conference, I mentioned to them that I have always thought that it would be nice to spend some time in Norway. I had been there before on vacation and really enjoyed it. My wife, Kami, and I, have also talked about spending some time abroad for a while.

RubyConf 2009 Post-mortem

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 16:01:19 GMT

No doubt many of you are wondering why the RubyConf and JRubyConf videos are taking so long to release this time around. We felt it was important to share a few more details about some of the challenges we’ve been facing this time around.

New aggregated podcast

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:27:04 GMT

You asked for it and we finally delivered. We now have an aggregated podcast (both full-size and ipod-sized) of all our conferences. If you want to automatically get new conference videos as they become available, just subscribe to these feeds.

Clarification: Some of our first conferences did not have podcasts. This aggregated feed is only of the conferences that had podcasts. All future conferences will be a part of it.

New conferences now live

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:07:10 GMT

MountainWest RubyConf 2009 and Parallels and Convergences 2009 conferences are now live. There are still some final lightning talks from MWRC to put online, but almost everything is there.

Two great selections from these conferences were Alan Whitaker’s La Dolce Vita Rubyista and Terryl Given’s keynote address, No Small and Cramped Eternities.

acts_as_conference 2009 videos now available

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:41:22 GMT

The acts_as_conference 2009 videos are now available. We delayed this announcement at the request of the conference organizers.

The conference was excellent. For this conference we also debuted a new feature, full resolution capture of presenters’ slides. Please let us know what you think of this new format either through twitter or by email.

This weekend we will be recording Parallels and Convergences: Mormon Thought and Engineering Vision and the following weekend we will be recording MountainWest RubyConf 2009. Stay tuned to this RSS feed or follow us on Twitter for announcements when the videos are released.

Migration to Radiant

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:06:59 GMT

We are excited to have the web site running on Radiant. Props to John W. Long for creating such an awesome CMS and to those who have contributed useful extensions.

We’ll be heading to Acts as Conference 2009 this week. More to come soon!

Happy New Year

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:06:17 GMT

2008 was a great year for us. We nearly doubled the number of conferences we recorded and debuted some new services, including our high-capacity wifi setup, which performed really well at Goruco and the Ruby Hoedown.

We have some more exciting plans for the new year. To begin with, we are continuing to refine our setup process. By preparing some custom cable runs, we no longer have to crimp ethernet cables to set up our equipment on site, which is both easier on the environment (less wasted copper) and a lot faster.

Ruby Hoedown Videos Now Live

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:18:08 GMT

We just got finished uploading the last of the videos from Ruby Hoedown 2008. Get ‘em while they’re hot. This was a fun conference, held in humid Huntsville, Alabama. As one of the main organizers, Jeremy McAnally really helped to make the conference a success. Hats off to him and the rest of the helpers for all of their hard work.

This was the second conference for which we provided our wifi services, which really saved the day as far as network access was concerned. The venue was supposed to provide something but dropped the ball. Even though our uplink was limited to a couple of load-balanced EVDO cards (we had no ethernet connectivity at the venue either), everything still worked out pretty well.