Hi John,
I've appended the relevant extracts from an email I sent to Alan Flavell
about my experience of a couple of recent video links from UCL to meetings
in Oxford. The comments primarily referred to a 3-way H323 conference via
the new UCL MCU (2 Zydacrons + 1 Netmeeting), but I've appended the bits
that also refer to the RealVideo broadcast.
Overall my conclusion is that the technology works, but the meeting itself
has to be "video aware" i.e. people have to be near enough to mikes, and
the overheads/powerpoint-screens have to use recommended-size fonts. If
the live part of the meeting forgets the remote people it can easily
become unsatisfactory.
Specifically on the Oxford meeting: the presentations could be heard fine,
the audience comments often not at all, and the visual material was hard
to follow.
Hope this helps.
cheers,
Bob (Cranfield)
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On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Gordon, JC (John) wrote:
> PS Oxford broadcast the recent Grid meeting by streaming video. I didn't
> hear any feedback on how this went. Would anyone like to comment?
>
> This offers the chance for everyone to watch from their desktop even if they
> cannot contribute.
>
> John
>
...............................................................................
...
The biggest drawback on the video side was that overheads were only
partially decipherable. I would give the same verdict to the presentations
relayed by Realvideo from the Globus meeting on Wednesday -- even for the
directly transmitted PowerPoint slides. Not really an acceptable
substitute for a live presentation unless people take care to choose large
fonts. It's fine of course if speakers can distribute the material
beforehand for local viewing. And whatever happened to whiteboarding and
application-sharing in all this video-conferencing?
What worked best in practice yesterday was when the DELL guy drew his own
pictures under the vertical camera.
...
However, something I've noticed generally with
remote conferences (both video and telephone) is that sound is often a
problem when there are enough people at one site that they tend to forget
they're in a distributed meeting, and it becomes just too tedious to keep
reminding them to speak up.
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