Boston Summit 2010 blogs, pictures; marketing video session
I'll be frantically typing up the Boston Summit sessions that I attend, as I did last year, so watch this space to keep abreast if you can't make it—or even if you can make it and prefer to spend the whole time in the "Hallway Track." People seemed to appreciate the blog posts last year. The style was to hurriedly type up each session and post it immediately at the conclusion of that session.
I'm armed with a new Sony a55 camera with good low-light performance this year, so much gorilla photography will be happening, as well. Might want to think about that before you leave the hotel room in your pajamas in the morning ;-).
One session I will not be typing up will be the one that I'm tentatively planning on leading about the marketing team's GNOME 3 launch video project. As I write this, the first two video's green screen, human segments and accompanying audio files are uploading to my gnome.org web space. The screen cast segments, artwork, and kdenlive project files will follow.
They came out pretty well for being done on a budget of only $150; the target of 720P will be easily achievable. I borrowed the green screen from a friend and I already had the camera. I originally tried filming on a little point-and-shoot Sony HX5V with 720P capability. The colors were washed out and there was some terrible interlacing artifacts. The newest attempt with the new, aforementioned camera looks fantastic, by comparison.
Audio-wise, I already had a PCM-D50 stereo recorder and so the in-camera audio is going to be replaced by the audio files recorded by this device. I placed it on a table in front of me during recording and—while the room wasn't ideal (there's some reverb)--I think the end result that I've uploaded is workable especially given that there will be some faint music in the background.
As luck would have it, I am sharing a room with Joey whom has expressed an interest in composing an original piece of music for our videos. With a little more luck and some help from the GNOME Shell team on building Florian's re-layout branch, we could have the prototype video 1 and 2's posted by the end of the Summit.
If things go fantastically well, maybe we can record some short clips of attendees thanking the Friends of GNOME donors for helping finance travel. Something in the format of: Sponsored by GNOME banner, fade to thank-you from attendee, fade to Sponsored by GNOME banner. Monday is in the Media Lab building so perhaps there will be some ideal shooting conditions, there. I already emailed some people about this but haven't gotten a response—it's up-in-the-air, at the moment.