Presenters

Note: this is an archived site. Visit us at http://ladrupal.org.

We'll be using smart classrooms and lecture halls for our sessions. Most of the rooms have a smart podium, with an in-podium Windows PC; however, we recommend you present with your own laptop as there's a problem with the room audio feed to the podium PCs.

There is a laptop connection with VGA+audio hookup+ethernet. There is also a DVD player, speakers, and controls for the projector screen, room lights and room sound level (exact controls vary by room). The largest lecture halls also have a document camera, CD/cassette deck, writing tablet, gooseneck microphone, wireless microphone, and preview monitor.

The smaller classrooms don't have a podium microphone, but we'll planning to provide a microphone of some kind for each room. Details are pending. The McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium has a podium only (with no PC) so bring your laptop if you're presenting in that room.

Screencasts

We'd like to record screencasts of all the presentations, containing the images from your computer screen and audio from the room microphones. UCI has licensed Camtasia Relay software for this. You can install it on your laptop or run it directly from a USB flash drive, on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. See below for instructions. Linux folks: we're working on alternative screen capture ideas.

Rooms

Podium PC

Most rooms have a podium with a built-in PC running Microsoft Windows, with Microsoft Office. In the large lecture halls, there's a software list of what is installed on the PCs. In the smaller rooms, just the basic stuff (e.g., Microsoft Office) is installed. If you need something special, please contact us and we'll see what we can do. In the McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium there's no podium PC, so bring your own laptop.

Laptop connection

There is a VGA+audio connection for your laptop. Please set your video output resolution to 1024 × 768 @ 60Hz. Other resolutions may work, but the screencast software and the projector will have to scale your image and it and will look bad (i.e., in the recorded screencast).

If you're going to present with a MAC laptop, be sure to either bring or coordinate access for a VGA adapter. Apple has many adapter styles, be sure you find one for your laptop model.

There is Visitor WiFi available in all our rooms, but port restrictions apply. If you need more open access, or you need a wired ethernet connection, don't register for visitor WiFi, instead see John Romine or another organizer for how to get connected.

Audio capture

In PSLH 100, DBH 1100 & DBH 1600, and the MDEA, there's a female 1/8" mini audio plug that has the room audio feed. Please connect the audio feed to your laptop's audio input, so the room audio can be captured by Camtasia Relay along with the screen images.

If you were planning to use the podium PC to present, and can't use your laptop, let us know. There is a problem with the room audio feed to the podium PCs at present.

Microphones

Details pending. If you have a podcast microphone (USB, etc.), please bring it with you.

Camtasia Relay

We'll be using Camtasia Relay to record screencasts of the presentations. You can download and install the software on your Windows or Mac OS X laptop (see John Romine or another organizer for the account login/password).

Running Camtasia

If you are presenting with PowerPoint, there is a Camtasia PowerPoint plug-in that will start Camtasia automatically when you begin your presentation. If you are presenting with other software, start Camtasia Relay first before you begin your presentation. There is a good one-page handout on how to use Camtasia (with pictures!), but here is the basic process:

You will be prompted to login; use the account login/password provided to you. If you don't have the account info, ask an organizer or your room session chair.
Select the 'Public' profile so that your presentation will be available to people outside the UCI campus.
Enter a title for your presentation in the form 'DxLA session name', like 'DxLA Building the Drupal Camp Website'.
Select the appropriate microphone settings, and check the volume is correct and you are seeing audio input (there's an audio level meter graphic).
You can run a 10 second test with the blue TEST button to see if everything seems to be working.
To record your session, click the red REC button; click the stop button when your recording is complete. If you are using the PowerPoint plug-in, it will start and stop recording automatically.
You can Play your recording to see if it is OK. Optionally, you can use the Trimming function to cut off the start and/or end of your recording.
Click Submit to save your recording, and wait 2 minutes before shutting down your computer so that your recording can be uploaded to the Camtasia server. Note that there is no clear indication when this is finished, so just give it some time.

The Camtasia recording is stored on your laptop while it is recording. The file size depends on much your screen images changes, but a good estimate is 200MB for a 1-hour PowerPoint presentation.

The UCI Camtasia Relay encoding server has lots of gigs free for processing of recordings and the hosting server has a huge amount of space available. UCI is licensed for one encoding at a time so all recordings will be queued, encoded, transferred to http://replay.nacs.uci.edu, then deleted from http://encoder.nacs.uci.edu

If you can't install Camtasia on your laptop, you can run the Camtasia Portable Recorder from a USB drive. The portable recorder puts the recording in a temp directory on the computer being used. When stop is pressed, you will be asked to move the recording from the computer to the USB drive. Then at a later time, the USB drive must be plugged into a computer with Camtasia Relay installed for the recording to be transferred up to the server.

There's no direct way to delete files from the server. If you have a file that needs to be deleted, contact John Romine and he'll take care of removing the file.

According to the folks that know the most about Camtasia, nearly all of the things that can go wrong occur when the user does not Submit the recording before logging off, so don't do that.