[SGVLUG] history in video

[Don Saxton]

Recently there have been some attempts to video record (I almost said 
tape) the meeting.  Someone has been good enough to drag-out all of the 
equipment and record the meeting. In viewing these recordings the most 
obvious flaw is that the speaker's slides are really difficult to read. 
So we have talked about ways to merge the slides with the video. It is 
real clear that this can't take time or money we don't have.

I got an idea from this historical (1968 is very historical) from 
Stanford. It is a demo of an early crt UI. Four years earlier vendors 
were very proud to show off hollerinth cards at the Seattle world fair.

There are a lot of cool things about this video, but relevant to our 
problem, they simply superimposed the video of the speaker over (or 
under) the action on the crt (the slides for our purpose).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097

It seems to me that if we capture the slides and timing of the slide 
switches, then we could automate the production of a very usable video. 
So the merge of the two video sources is simply their relative 
transparency (alpha). I can foresee that it will soon be dismal if we 
have the same alpha throughout the whole lecture. This might be 
automated simply by accentuating the slides whenever there is a slide 
switch. If that doesn't work at least it only take an hour to go through 
the show while adjusting the alpha.