Powerpoint online broadcast

[SteveBentley]

We have an external speaker coming in for a public lecture next week and there may be more people turn up than can be accommodated in our biggest lecture theatre.

 

Management in my dept have got wind of the fact that a higher profile lecture was recently relayed into another room, but on hearing that an AV company organised that at cost of over a grand, thoughts have turned to whether something can be lashed up (with a budget of approximately nothing) to relay slides, webcam and audio to a single projector in another room.

 

I've been experimenting with the Online Broadcast add-in for Powerpoint, but it seems to only deal in whole slides, so anything where parts of the slide appear on a click don't appear in the second location. As it's an external speaker it's harder to ask them not to use animations.

 

Anyone have any thoughts for how this could be done?

 

cheers

 

Steve

[Jackd]

VNC for powerpoint and something like netmeeting for the webcam and audio?

[Jona]

To this properly you need to get a seperate composite/s-video feed of the slides (laptop output) and the camera on the speaker then use some form of editing/processing equipment to do picture in picture. I can't find anything cheap to do this the bit of kit your after is a video mixer with picture-in-picture support.

[SteveBentley]

I thought about that Jona - but I've never really found the SVHS output to be of a particularly good quality. Maybe I've only tried it on rubbish graphics cards.

[srochford]

We've been developing this sort of thing for a while - our main theatre is nowhere near big enough to hold all the staff so we use a video camera with Windows Media Encoder to relay video of the speaker to remote locations.

 

the powerpoint is more difficult and we've tried a few things (including a second video camera pointed at the screen!)

 

The last one we did by adding some code to the slideshow the presenter used; each time she moved forwards/backwards it wrote the current slide number to a file on a server. the remote locations were running the same slideshow but with code that checked that location every second to see which slide they should be showing. That worked fine and because the speaker was internal we were able to keep the slideshow simple.

 

What would work better (but I've not yet written...) would be add to code which checked for right and left mouse clicks and wrote them to a file (or database?) Not really sure of this but my idea is that you'd end up with something like:

 

1 Left

2 Left

3 Left

4 Right

5 Left

 

etc. At intervals, the remote PC would check the table and then carry out the sequence of mouse clicks it finds, keeping track each time of where it was up to.

[SteveBentley]

I've realised that the solution to this is not to use the network and rely on unreliable digitising cards etc... I'm borrowing a vision mixer from our media dept and feeding TV-out on the laptop and a camcorder into it, that's going to provide a split screen effect and feeding that into a Cat5 AV extender (Lindy AV Extender via CAT5e/6, Upto 600mtrs - Misco.co.uk) into a network point which will be patched directly to a point in the second room where the other end of the extender will bring it out as video which will go straight into the projector/amp.

 

Thanks for your thoughts guys

[generalen]

Dimdim + win media encoder?

 

Dimdim can probably capture the ppt and video at the same time. Then you coul use win media encoder to capture the screen or record the ppt.

 

I guess you could use camtasia studio (not free) to stream both video and ppt on the fly.

 

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