[Fed-Talk] Webcasting-back in the day
[Fed-Talk] Webcasting-back in the day
- Subject: [Fed-Talk] Webcasting-back in the day
- From: Stephen Bates <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:58:17 -0500
Was digging through my archives for some old things and came across
this webcasting post back in the day...
vrsb
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Hale, David CPT" <email@hidden>
Date: October 16, 1997 10:59:51 AM EDT
Date: October 16, 1997 12:18:12 PM EDT
To: "'53listserv'" <email@hidden>
Subject: [53L]: How to do a webcast
Reply-To: email@hidden
This a page from last year's webcast of the Signal Symposium. It
explains the resources needed to capture, create, and serve the
information. It does not require a lot of money, time, or
experience to
create a media rich web site that serves the people that could not
attend as well as those that did attend with the knowledge that all
the
info is available in one place - timely and reliable.
How it was done
Automation Conference and Signal Symposium 1996
Hardware
Software
People
Experience
Knowledge
Procedures
Summary
Hardware
* Apple Macintosh 8500/120 32 megs of RAM, 1 gig HD
Used to digitize audio and video from a VCR.
* Apple Macintosh 9500 /120 32 megs of RAM, 1 gig HD
World Wide Web Server
* PC Express 486 (clone)
Used to convert PowerPoint slides to HTML.
The Macintoshes were connected to the NT network with no
problems other than not enough connections to the LAN. One Mac was
connected to the LAN using a BNC adapter and the other Mac was daisy
chained to the first via the built in 10BaseT connectors. The Macs
speak
TCP/IP and since they did not need access to anything on the
network no
changes were made to the NT network.
The PC was located on a LAN at Fort Belvoir, VA.
Software
* WebSTAR 1.2.5
Mac based WWW server
* Claris Home Page 2.0 beta
WYSIWYG HTML editor
* MS PowerPoint 7 with Internet Assistant
Internet Assistant is a free plug in to PowerPoint that
converts slides to HTML.
* Fetch
Mac FTP program used to send and retrieve files from
remote FTP server.
* Apple Video Player
Standard Mac system software used to capture audio and
video from VCR and save it as a QuickTime movie.
* Movie Player
Free Mac software used to extract audio track to be
input into RealAudio.
* Internet Movie Tool
Mac software used to prepare QuickTime movies for use by
PC platforms.
* Movie Cleaner Lite
Mac software used to compress QuickTime movies and
optimize for playback on internet.
* RealAudio Server, Encoder, and Player
Converted files to RealAudio format and served them on
the same server as the WWW server.
* Adobe Acrobat Pro
PowerPoint files were printed to Postscript files, which
were converted to PDF files by Adobe Distiller, opened by Adobe
Exchange
for minor editing, and then saved.
* Server Stat
Mac software used to analyze web server logs and create
detailed HTML reports.
People
* CPT Dave Hale TDY at Fort Gordon, GA
Set up server, created web site and all pages, digitized
audio and video, converted presentations to Acrobat format.
Army Acquisition Corps 53 - only formal computer
training is the System Automation Course at Fort Gordon and two
weeks of
Microsoft NT training.
* Julia Henson at Fort Belvoir, VA
Converted PowerPoint slides to HTML and maintained FTP
files.
Civilian web master for Technical Services Office,
Information Systems Software Center, CECOM.
* Others
Valuable help and technical assistance was provided by
many others but the bulk of the work was done by two people.
Experience
I had no experience producing a webcast. I had never set
up or run a web server or a RealAudio Server.
I had used Claris Home Page to create simple HTML pages.
I had used Adobe Acrobat to create PDF files. I had some experience
digitizing audio and video.
Knowledge
I scanned the documentation included with the Apple
Internet Server Solution for the World Wide Web about two hours the
day
before I took the computers to Fort Gordon and hooked them up. I
counted
on Apple's vaunted ease of use and complete server solution to pull
the
event off. I was not disappointed.
Procedures
All but two of the conference presenters brought their
presentations on disk in PowerPoint. Those files were loaded onto one
machine for the actual presentation. At the end of the day we
transferred those files via ftp to Fort Belvoir for conversion to HTML
and hosting on the ftp server. I decided to host them on a separate
network to decrease the load on Fort Gordon's network.
I converted the presentations to Acrobat and insured a
compressed PowerPoint version was available as well as ftping the
Acrobat files to Fort Belvoir. I transferred the converted HTML
versions
back to my web server at Fort Gordon and created the web pages.
The conference was broadcast on Fort Gordon and I
recorded those daily broadcasts onto VHS tape. I only had one VCR so I
had to digitize the audio and video at the end of the broadcast day. I
connected the VCR to the Macintosh 8500 via two RCA jacks and
cables and
played the days tapes looking for short, but interesting comments. One
30 second movie took 32 Mbs of storage. That was eventually compressed
to 4 Mbs.
Once I had a QuickTime movie I extracted the audio track
and converted it to RealAudio format. Setting up the RealAudio
piece was
a bit confusing as it runs as a separate server and uses metafiles to
access the real audio files. The web server had to be configured to
understand requests for the audio but that was straight-forward. The
syntax of the metafiles and links took about an hour to figure out.
All HTML files were served off the Mac server at Fort
Gordon. All FTP files were served off the FTP server at Fort Belvoir.
Summary
The measure of success of future conferences and
symposiums will be "how many people participated but did not
attend." I
had an idea a webcast could be easily done and with very little
preparation or training proved the concept. Interest in this
product has
been world-wide and the comments from the field are positive. It is of
value to the conference attendees because it puts all the presented
material in one place. For those that could not attend it allows
them to
receive the same information at a much reduced cost.
I am sure you can do this on other platforms and this is
not an endorsement of any product - just an explanation of what I used
for this demonstration and evaluation.
Comments or questions can be sent to CPT Dave Hale,
Information Systems Software Center, Fort Belvoir, VA.
Last update: 10 December 96
----------------------------------
CPT Dave Hale
Technical Services Office, ISSC
703-806-3545
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