Lessons learned from today’s two-hour, UStreamed (is it okay if I make that a verb?) forum with visual journalists Robert Semeniuk and John Lehmann, in no particular order of importance:
1. If you are using a Mac and you click to allow Adobe to capture your DV cam, and the DV cam is turned on, it will crash the browser. Click first, then turn the camera on.
2. When you are doing a conversation with two people, it is much easier to pan between them if they are at the same height.
3. No matter how much you test the day before, things will go wrong.
4. A good tripod, with a smoothly-turning but somewhat stiff head would make camera control much easier.
5. I know there is a control somewhere in the DV camera’s menu for controlling the speed of zooms: I need to find it.
6. An unshielded audio cable that works fine one day, will start picking up all the sources of interference in the universe and deliver only staticky crackling the next. (That’s why the first 5 minutes or so of the presentation are missing; I needed to quickly find a different mic.)
7. Even though the sources for video and audio in the UStream window are both set to DV when you first turn the camera on, they are not really sensing DV. You need to choose something else and then rechoose DV for the camera to go live.
8. For the couple of minutes it takes to set up between speakers, you really should pause the camera unless you are deathly afraid that when you try to rebroadcast there will be catastrophic failure.
9. A chat box that is there one day may not be available the next, which mean the interactivity of the real, live session is kaput. A smart backup plan would have been to use Twitter.
10. I needed way more practice with setting sound levels in UStream, particularly to compensate between the difference between what I’m getting in the headphones and what’s going out over the ‘net. (And especially after preaching to my students the virtues of good audio.)
11. Actually, this is the most important thing I learned in one case and was reminded of in the other: Robert and John are excellent at bringing passion about telling important stories visually to students. If you’re teaching journalism in the Vancouver area, go get ‘em. Your students will thank you. (Mine did.)
I’m sure I’ve learned more, most it based on the many mistakes that I made but, hey, that’s how we learn. Or at least, how I learn.
