[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] Reactiona from home to today's meeting

[Harry Forsdick]

I am writing down my impressions about today's meeting from the perspective
of a remote user being involved in a meeting.

I encourage others who were remote today to respond to these suggestions
with your own impressions: feel free to add to or negate what I am saying
below.

-- Harry

Here are some reactions to the meeting today.  I am writing these in order
of observation. Some of the early comments are corrected or improved by the
later comments.

   1. Initial setup in room 237 is good: there are only a couple of schemes
   of use (x?, y? and Hybrid -- which is what we want to use), and that is
   good.  The improvements recommended here are intended to be to the small
   number of setups -- and in fact only got the Hybrid scheme because that is
   the only one I have any experience with

   2. Sound from Presenter and Audience is muffled.  More for the
   Audience.  Possible improvement for Presenter is a microphone at front to
   be closer -- or a lavalier mic to be fed through a mixer to make it part of
   the one audio stream coming out of the room and thus able to take advantage
   of the Zoom echo cancellation.

   3. Zooming on the Presenter is ineffective because it zooms too much,
   missing the head of the presenter.  Her own webcam is much better.
   Following the presenter around the room is not needed.

   4. There might be better use of the cameras to not have them zoom, but
   rather focus on particular parts of the room:
      1. Aimed at the front where the presenter will be (performed by the
      camera at the rear of the room)
      2. Aimed at the front  half of the audience (performed by, say, the
      front left camera)
      3. Aimed at the back  half of the audience (performed by, say, the
      front right camera)

      5. There is no need for the meeting room Zoom display to have one
   participant shown in the upper right corner because that has nothing to do
   with who is speaking. It looks like the first participant in the conference
   is chosen arbitrarily to be in this spot.  It doesn't serve any purpose in
   the meeting room.

   6. Cross talking in the meeting room is really annoying because the
   audio of coming out of the room is already very difficult to listen to.

   7. 12 people in the meeting room audience, 10 in the remote audience.

   8. This new system, which cost a LOT of money, is better in some ways
   than our ($800) homebrew system (ease of setup so that anybody can run this
   system and it is permanently installed.  This is huge.  It means that
   anybody in the group can control the meeting, not just a couple of people.

   9. When the meeting room audience asked a question, the zoomable camera
   tried to find the person, but the camera only localized the back of the
   head of the speaker.  This is pretty disappointing.  That is why I suggest
   a reallocation of the roles of the cameras.

   10. Even with all of my complaints about audio and zooming video, the
   combination of all the features, warts and all, is better than we've had
   before -- largely because it could be so easy to start the hybrid meeting,

   11. Remote attendees' voices are still excellent -- illustrating how bad
   the sound is from the meeting room.

   12. I think it would be better to make the rear camera fixed non zooming
   so that there is one camera that can see all of the audience, even if it
   isn't their face.  Let the presenter's image come from their laptop. Devote
   one of the left and right cameras to the noise source, and leave out the
   third camera because it takes up too much space in the Hollywood squares
   grid.  *It would be really good to have two or three streams coming out
   of the meeting room so that each of the room cameras could occupy the full
   area of a video stream.*


Harry Forsdick <http://www.forsdick.com/resume/>
Town Meeting Member Precinct 7 <http://lexingtontmma.org/>
harry at forsdick.com
<https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=harry@forsdick.com>
www.forsdick.com
  46 Burlington St.
Lexington, MA 02420 <https://goo.gl/xZXT2F>
(781) 799-6002 (mobile) <callto:17817996002>
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