[Lex Computer & Tech Group/LCTG] Reactiona from home to today's meeting
Harry Forsdick
harry at forsdick.com
Thu Dec 12 06:01:37 PST 2024
Bob,
Good point about what you see in the meeting room regarding what sounds you
hear from local speakers and what you see on the screen of their videos.
That is a fundamental problem that cannot be solved. But the solution is
for the people intge meeting room to look atctge actual person speaking.
People in remote locations will not experience this problem.
I'd like to encourage members of the group to attend as many meetings as
possible in the meeting room because there are a lot of good conversations
that happen before and after the meetings. One of the tragedies of COVID
has been the destruction of social groups, and I believe that has happened
to our group. Being present in the room when possible helps re-establish
these bonds.
I also think the lunches also help.
I wonder if we should start up a new activity of visiting interesting STEM
places. We live in a special place (Boston) and I think we should take
advantage of it.
More later.
— Harry
On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 7:52 AM Robert Primak <bobprimak at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From the live room at the LCC I did notice that when we saw on the screen
> our speaker, her voice and video were very much out of sync. That is a Zoom
> artifact.
>
> I have started attending in person when there is a live speaker, but will
> probably not attend live for all-video meetings.
>
> We need to boost our in person audience numbers. This influences which
> speakers we can get, and makes for a much better presentation and question
> and answer dynamic.
>
> But if you are sick, by all means STAY HOME.
>
> -- Bob Primak
>
>
> On Wednesday, December 11, 2024 at 06:16:28 PM EST, Harry Forsdick via
> LCTG <lctg at lists.toku.us> wrote:
>
>
> Steve,
>
> I have some thoughts about the ability of non-technical people to start up
> Hybrid Meetings. Another way of saying that is we can make starting a
> Hybrid Meeting just like turning on the lights. (Of course, note that it
> is not so easy to turn on the lights in LexCC Room 237 because of the fancy
> dimming panel at the front of the room :-)
>
> Now that the equipment is permanently installed in the meeting room, the
> set of things that must be done to get a meeting started has been reduced
> significantly.
>
> I think we can work towards a system which does not need to have a trained *Meeting
> Room Director *(e.g., Peter or me) or a *Zoom Conference Director *(such
> as you and Barry have served LCTG so admirably over the past many years).
> We are getting very close so that *anybody* (i.e., not just Peter or me)
> in the meeting room can start the conference by reading a 2 or 3 set cheat
> sheet posted on the wall next to the touch panels at the front of the room.
>
> Similarly I think we need to move so that we do not need a Zoom Conference
> director, the function you and Barry have been performing knowing a lot of
> very technical knowledge about Zoom. This will require a second cheat
> sheet with both instructions for the Presenter on how to:
>
> 1. Turn off any audio input or output on their laptop
> 2. Connect to the LexCC wifi
> 3. Login to our meeting on Zoom
> 4. Use the share screen Zoom command to show their presentation
>
> I realize because we are all humans with different talents, this may seem
> like a difficult task. But, I think with a suitable set of defaults based
> on our experience, we can come up with a Hybrid Meeting Room schema for the
> Zoom Conferencing software. We don't have to do this. It's just that if
> we want to release you and Barry from being in the position of always
> having to be available for our meetings to run successfully, we may need to
> limit ourselves to a set of default configurations for the Zoom
> Conferencing software.
>
> Tim Goncalves and Vince LeRow, the two guys from the Town's IT
> Department who have done all of the work so far, have initially focused
> on getting the standard schema for configuring the installed hardware in
> LexCC Room 237 to work for three different meeting types for which there
> are buttons on the top touch panel. Pushing one of those buttons installs
> scheme of software and hardware settings for each of three type of room
> usage:
>
> 1. Hybrid Meeting
> 2. The second type that I don't remember
> 3. The third type that I don't remember
>
>
> Your and my comments about tweeks to the Hybrid Meeting configuration are
> quite consistent on:
>
> - Locating the Presenter is currently distracting and every other time
> is incorrect. Currently it seems to get in a mode where it properly
> locates the speaker and then shortly thereafter locates the speaker again,
> this time below the speaker's head. Rinse and Repeat.
>
> - It would be better if we had two streams coming out of LexCC Room
> 237:
> 1. Fixed zoom to the area in the front of the room where the
> speaker may move
> 2. Zooming from the front of the room (either left or right side
> camera) to anyone in the audience who asks a question (i.e., speaks).
>
> - In addition the Presenter would use their laptop to join the
> conference as a normal participant -- but with their sound input and output
> turned off. The only purpose of the Presenter's laptop is to show the
> presentation. Note that I am also saying that the video of the Presenter
> must be picked up by the equipment permanently installed in the room. The
> consequence of using the video of the Presenter's laptop is that the voice
> and video will not be in sync -- which will drive people crazy.
>
>
> That's enough for now -- it's dinner time...
>
> Regards,
>
> -- Harry
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 5:11 PM Steve Isenberg <smisenberg at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Some of my thoughts.
>
> Given that we were using the microphone in the room, that means that the
> room camera composite will be chosen by zoom. This is usually not what we
> want because we’d much rather have the speaker appear. So today we asked
> our speaker to turn on her laptop camera, and I spotlighted it. As a
> result, we were seeing her face as she was giving the presentation.
> So anyone who is in the role of host and controlling what is recorded,
> needs to know that they need to spotlight the person or persons who are
> speaking and of course, remove someone from the spotlight after they are
> done talking or asking their questions.
> This is similar to the way a technical Director handles recording a TV
> show, as he or she is busy selecting the active camera or cameras during a
> commercial video production.
>
> The composite camera coming from the room. It shows a composite of:
> audience left, audience right, and speaker. This has limited use and is not
> producing a result that is of the quality that at least I would like.
> This is in part because the images are very small, as there are three
> images that make up the video.
> It is also because the image that is supposedly of the person speaking,
> shifts, moves, zooms in and out, at apparently random times. It sometimes
> shows the speaker, sometimes shows the speaker and half the audience, and
> other times shows the feet of the speaker and the audience without showing
> the speaker’s face. This seems to change at random times during the
> presentation. It is frustrating if all you want to do is watch the face of
> the speaker presenting.
>
> I’m currently producing the video from today’s presentation and the
> speaker is not always spotlighted so you can see several times during the
> video what the cameras look like coming from the room and I suspect you’ll
> see what I mean.
>
> WIBNIF. It would be nice if the camera aimed at the speaker stayed aimed
> at the speaker, all the speaker, and only the speaker, during the course of
> her presentation.
> WIBNIF It would be nice if there were two feeds coming from the LCC room.
> One being the speaker and only the speaker; and the other being a composite
> of the two cameras facing the audience in the room.
>
> Maybe; the feed coming from the LCC room be only a composite of the two
> cameras facing the audience. And have the speaker use her camera on her
> laptop.
> Then, during the program the host could Spotlight the speaker; and when
> others speak, including those in the audience, the host could add a
> spotlight (on the other person speaking) or (the feed of the audience when
> someone from the audience was asking a question or making a comment) in
> addition to the spotlight on the speaker’s computer’s camera video. The two
> would show up side by side in the recording, and life would be good.
>
> Please pardon my rambling and I hope that this will end up helping.
> -steve
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 11, 2024 at 11:55 AM Harry Forsdick via LCTG <
> lctg at lists.toku.us> wrote:
>
> 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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