PE Department videos

[mrbios]

I've been talking to my head of PE and it seems we need a solution to something, wondering how everyone else is managing this and wether anyone has a nice solution...

 

Our PE department have to take videos of their students as evidence, they take 3 different videos for each sport a student does, which are solo, team and real match situation (for example with football they'd do skills videos, some team play and a full 90 minute match) however they record multiples of these 3 types....they're by far our biggest consumer of data right now, with nearly 1TB of videos for the last year alone......excessive as you can imagine.

 

Obviously the cameras they take these videos on aren't all the same, sometimes it's a proper camera, sometimes it's a phone, sometimes it's an ipad or something.... once the year ends, they pick the best videos for each student and submit them for examiners, and they need to keep all the video incase they need to resubmit or something.

 

How are you all managing something like this? Any suggestions on streamlining the whole process from recording, uploading, editing, submitting etc? Obviously GDPR means having random recordings of kids on unencrypted devices is going to be a sticky issue now too, and we can't encrypt an SD card in a camera (as far as I'm aware)

[3s-gtech]

I built a completely separate and vast storage drive for this, which was tacked onto an existing server to share. The evidence doesn't need to be retained after the remark deadline, so you don't need hugely long retention. You can script compression tools to run automatically on it too. You could also use cloud storage for retention, but your usage may get a bit excessive pretty quickly.

[rad]

Last year... no idea.

 

this year the Media Dept are supplying us with a Camera, tripod and Hard Drive that contains the recordings.

 

As soon as we get the kit, I can let you know how good it is etc and what we have. The same kit will be used for Drama productions too

[denzal2k4]

We use FormatFactory to bulk re-encode the videos to avi first off to save space, unless they need editing in which case edit them first then re-encode, haven't been asked to do anything like this by PE though, but plenty of Drama videos.

[dhicks]

Any suggestions on streamlining the whole process from recording, uploading, editing, submitting etc? Obviously GDPR means having random recordings of kids on unencrypted devices is going to be a sticky issue now too, and we can't encrypt an SD card in a camera (as far as I'm aware)

 

If bandwidth (either for your in-school network / WiFi and / or Internet connection, or for mobile data if PE are away somewhere from the main school) isn't too much of an issue, then we've been uploading media files to Google Drive with no particular problems - we have around 4TB of assorted images and videos at the moment, with no storage costs. Easy to share resources, but sharing / access can be audited, so you can check who has permission and who has been doing what.

 

Another similar thread today:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/hardware/199656-encrypted-cameras-no-longer-working.html

 

If there isn't already a neat all-in-one solution for pointing an Android device at some sports activity and having it go straight to Google Drive, not being stored on either the device or any intermediate server, then I can see about writing one.

[hardtailstar]

Obviously the cameras they take these videos on aren't all the same, sometimes it's a proper camera, sometimes it's a phone, sometimes it's an ipad or something.... once the year ends, they pick the best videos for each student and submit them for examiners, and they need to keep all the video incase they need to resubmit or something.

 

Firstly I'd get them to buy department cameras with SD cards rather than using phones and ipads.

 

Secondly buy an external HDD for them to use or add another HDD to your network for their use only etc.

[mavhc]

I wrote this to halve the size of camera video, just drag your folder containing all the files on, it'll skip the ones it's already compressed

 

https://github.com/mavhc/shrink-video-recursive-python

 

Write a document of how to remove files from camera once transferred to NAS, how to label each file with the people who are in it, etc, using their official school name so you can find them again

[rogerdnixon]

Drive app on the phone - upload the video to Drive. We use Mobile Device management on all devices with a school account and unlimited storage on Drive with G Suite. If you also use the Classroom app - the student can directly add the video to an assignment. Dead simple for users and free.

[3s-gtech]

Taking any evidence videos of students on personal phones or camera should be thoroughly off-limits by now, and mandated in your policies, whether they're quickly transferred or not. Automatic iCloud backups could well mean that student personal information is being retained on offsite storage which isn't under the control of the school It's just a world of NOPE.

[mrbios]

Taking any evidence videos of students on personal phones or camera should be thoroughly off-limits by now, and mandated in your policies, whether they're quickly transferred or not. Automatic iCloud backups could well mean that student personal information is being retained on offsite storage which isn't under the control of the school It's just a world of NOPE.

 

It's not the staff doing it, they used to (i honestly don't know if they still do) get the kids to record themselves and get the kid to upload it. That might have changed by now of course given the whole GDPR scenario. They do have a pick'n'mix of good to terrible cameras they often use, their department (school owned) iPads used to be used for it due to some apps, but they got a bit long in the tooth (iPad 2's)

[rogerdnixon]

We force device management onto all devices as soon as a user added a school account. So while they "own" the phone - we "own" the data and have total power over the device and where the data goes.

[christhetech]

Taking any evidence videos of students on personal phones or camera should be thoroughly off-limits by now, and mandated in your policies, whether they're quickly transferred or not. Automatic iCloud backups could well mean that student personal information is being retained on offsite storage which isn't under the control of the school It's just a world of NOPE.

 

Absolutely 100% this!

Apart from the obvious GDPR implications, there is also the issue of what the person recording the footage could potentially do with it. I'm not insinuating for one second that they would, just that it is a risk. Any footage captured on the school premises or whilst a child is in the school's care, should really be on a school device, which can be managed appropriately.

I've supported schools where the teaching staff were not even permitted to have a mobile phone in the classroom and would have to lock their personal mobiles away in the staff room before starting work and would have to leave the premises completely if they wished to use their phone. That's probably a little OTT to be fair, but some schools do have this sort of policy in place. I found that some of the PRUs that I have been to in particular, where some of the students would be considered vulnerable, the staff were quite happy to go along with this sort of arrangement given the nature of the students that they were teaching.

If you don't already have suitable equipment at the school, I would definitely be asking for funding to cover the cost of getting some.

[Meldrew]

I built a completely separate and vast storage drive for this, which was tacked onto an existing server to share. The evidence doesn't need to be retained after the remark deadline, so you don't need hugely long retention. You can script compression tools to run automatically on it too. You could also use cloud storage for retention, but your usage may get a bit excessive pretty quickly.

 

I've been told that we need to keep this material for 2-3 years. When is the remark deadline?

[3s-gtech]

It's something like the 20th of September after their June exams (GCSE at least). In GDPR terms, you'll need to be able to justify keeping them for longer than that, and I'm not sure of reasons other than for moderation of future work ("this is a 1, this is a 9"). https://www.jcq.org.uk/Download/exams-office/post-results-services/post-results-services-june-2018-and-november-2018

[Brimstone]

We use FormatFactory to bulk re-encode the videos to avi first off to save space, unless they need editing in which case edit them first then re-encode, haven't been asked to do anything like this by PE though, but plenty of Drama videos.

AVI is not a compression format, it's just a container format.

 

What's important to compress the file is the codec that is being used, avi can use lot's of different codecs.

[Sylv3r]

Our PE department have Go Pro's. They record the footage, they bring it to us and the recording is compressed. We have a NAS box that has a drive mapped that only PE staff have access too which the files are copied over too.

[mavhc]

Make sure they're set to only record at 720p or something, not 4k 60fps etc

[denzal2k4]

Well don't I like like a silly goose

 

We load it into formatfactory as a raw video file and it comes out as a massively smaller avi.

AVI is not a compression format, it's just a container format.

 

What's important to compress the file is the codec that is being used, avi can use lot's of different codecs.

[Chuckster]

I wrote this to halve the size of camera video, just drag your folder containing all the files on, it'll skip the ones it's already compressed

https://github.com/mavhc/shrink-video-recursive-python

Write a document of how to remove files from camera once transferred to NAS, how to label each file with the people who are in it, etc, using their official school name so you can find them again

@mavhc, I used your script and it worked fine - and I say this loosely because when I dragged a folder with a mixture of vids and pics over onto the script, the script converted only the first vid in alphabetical order. I tried a folder just full of vids and it did the same again.

 

Is there something I am doing wrong?

[jthompson]

We've set up a share on a NAS here, with privileges limited to PE staff. We've not yet established any sort of transcoding regime (currently just a combination of Windows search and FormatFactory batch processing) but it's at least all in one place and not spread about in the general shared areas.