How did we run the live video stream of the conference and create this CD containing the video? For the past three years the OCA has been running some form of live internet video streaming of the AstroImage Conference. This years event was streamed to more people than ever. The attendees were viewing from their homes around the country and we had attendees watching from Canada, the UK and even Singapore This is a quote from one of the attendees received on the live chat system (see below) at the conclusion of the conference. "This has been absolutely fantastic. I would never have believed it possible to be 1000's of miles away and it was just like being there." Dr Lilian Hobbs. UK That sentiment was echoed by many of the attendees. Several of the attendees ordered conference hats/polo shirts and even managed to take advantage of the special conference discount rates on some of the products sold by our sponsors. How did we achieve this? We didn't simply send along a video stream of the conference. We backed that up with two very critical components that gave the remote audience a unique way of taking part in the conference. Conference Proceedings Website Firstly the remote group had access to a special on-line web-site containing high resolution versions of almost every presentation. This allowed our audience to see full resolution images and some of the more detailed slides which cannot be adequately viewed using the video stream. Chat Room system Secondly we utilized a live chat-room facility. This allowed the attendees to post questions to the chat room which then get relayed to the speakers for immediate answer. In this way the remote audience really get to take part in the conference. They also managed to ask questions which would then be answered by other attendees on the chat room. The Technical Facts Many people want to know how we did the video stream. I am going to get a little technical below - but I hope you can follow on anyway. Most people have only really experienced video streaming of archived multimedia content such as music videos - but very few have actually experienced live video streaming. It is actually much easier than you would think - although in the end there are lots of cables involved which always makes things seem more complicated than they actually are! The diagram below shows all the equipment used in the streaming (click for larger image) The most fundamental part of it all is a video camera, a computer with video digitzer hardware and software, and a video streaming server. The video is digitzed so that it consumes a certain amount of bandwidth. This year we streamed at a bandwidth of 100Kbs and 56Kbs. This allowed people with broadband access to get a reasonable quality video signal but also provided a backup stream of lower bandwidth just in case their internet connection became congested. This year we had 17 remote attendees viewing the stream. In the end that adds up to nearly 2MBs of total bandwidth utilized (100Kbs times 17 remote viewers, plus an additional stream back to the conference so we can see exactly what everyone else is). The PC that is doing the digitizing at the conference is just sending one video signal back to the video streaming server. This year the video streaming server was provided by a company called Eyecentric in Huntsville Alabama. This company specializes in doing this sort of video streaming at a very reasonable cost (we could not have afforded to do this without their reasonable rates). The video streaming server at their facility is the one that every remote attendee actually connects with and downloads the video from. The most important part of the system! Apart from the technical side of things described above of course none of this could happen without people. In this case the people are the ones operating the equipment, the video cameras, the chat room and more. The person running the stream was OCA President, Liam Kennedy, helped by his wife Anna Kennedy and Miguell Thibodeau the son of AstroImage 2002 Committee member Darren Thibodeau. How did we create the CD containing the video? The Video CD of the conference contains nearly 14 hours of video using up nearly 700MBs of space. We re-digitzed all of the video from the conference VHS tapes into a higher bandwidth Windows Media Video format (at 386KBs). This allowed us to edit the video content (triming segments that were unecessary). We then converted this edited video file back into the realmedia video format for the CD. In all for every hour of video we have spent nearly 5 hours in editing and format conversion. That represents a total of approximately 70 hours of additional work since the conference ended!. Join us next year! If you missed the conference this year we hope you will enjoy experiencing the conference through this video. However we would really like to welcome you in person next year!. If you really cannot make it in person - you might like to consider attending remotely next year also. To assist with our conference planning next year please do let us know you are interested by sending an email to Liam.Kennedy@OCAstronomers.org We hope to see you there! Back to Home Page