Xylem is continuing its exploration of a broadcasting platform. Here, we are using Firetalk.

In this episode, we are using the closed caption feature of Youtube to extract the text. We are wondering if it would make it easier for viewers to find the interesting parts of our discussion if they could review the text.

The text and timecodes of the parts of this episode, where we discussed how we might use Firetalk follows, below.

Robert 57m 43s: …let’s talk a little bit about what we’re going to be doing with Firetalk. My way of coping with it is to acquire the mp4 file (which takes a long time to to come to me). I’ll download the event. And it’s only the video event (not the chat). I probably should take a screenshot, or a copy on Textedit — or something like that — of the chat. And then put that up on the website. I can run it (the video) through YouTube and as we saw from my previous experiment, I can have YouTube create closed captions.

It might be useful, for some of the discussions, to be able to save the text. This requires a fair amount of processing and I’m not sure I want to make this a full-time job. I will report to you on all of the steps …and maybe there’s a way we can parse the job of putting something cogent out on the web… because that is where I think we’re going as we look to future conversations.

What can we put up on our site that makes it easy for people to discover what we have said here? I think one of the things we can do is put the text of some of the more meaningful statements we have on the website, along with the broadcast with the time-code, so some people can hear exactly what the whole thing was all about, and how it emerged. Does any of that sound interesting?

Linda 59m 48s: if you were to bottom-line what you just said right in terms of attempting to bring — not the video — but the audio from these …because essentially we’re exploring the possibility of using FireTalk, Right?

Robert: Yes.

Linda: And right now we don’t have the video capability as far as recording it? Unless you recorded it?

Robert: Yes, we do. I can take the whole video without the chatfield. But the video itself — the four screens that you’re seeing right now — I can extract that. In fact that’s what I have to do.

Blab used to give me an mp3 audio that I could download. These people [FireTalk] give me the right to download the mp4 video file with the audio. I can then extract the audio if i want. I can do any kind of post-production once I’ve got the video. And to be able to exhibit it, i can make this recording available to people who come here [the Firetalk site] — as a replay. if you look at the link below the Firetalk screen where people talking, you can watch the replay of previous episodes. [That’s at Firetalk’s site, not at Youtube.]

I can also put it up on our website through Youtube. I can upload the Firetalk event to Youtube with any other edits I’ve made to it — which could include a musical intro and titling and that kind of thing.

All of which is post-production work. And then I could make it available on our own website. I presume that ultimately what we want to do is is make this a place of dynamic activity, maybe once a week. That’s been our practice. And then make our website a resource for people to discover what we have talked about. Does that sound right?

Linda 1 hr 1m 55s: how how long do you estimate it takes you for post production?

Robert: It depends on what I do. If I were simply to download this file, this hour-long file, and then turn around and upload it to to Youtube, downloading would probably take an hour or an hour and a half, depending on how fast the Internet was. And then uploading would take that much time again. Any other post-production that i’m going to do takes some more time. I could easily put in half a day as i’m preparing this. If we want to extract the the text, as i said, i can get it up on Youtube where I can force Youtube to do the closed captioning. And I can extract that. Then I’d like some help to be able to take that file – because computer-generated closed captioning gets pretty close to what people said… you usually have to understand what’s happening – but it makes an awful lot of mistakes. So that needs
to be hugely edited.

Sherry 1hr 3m 13s: So did you see what Raymond posted? I know you I know you know Audacity, Robert. I don’t i don’t know if you’re familiar with Camstudio. Have you heard of that?

Robert: Camstudio? For screen recording i use a Screenflow. And I’ve got another program called Screenium. But the the big full-featured one that is my editor is ScreenFlow. I paid for that. It’s very capable. No, there are lots of lots of programs out there. Thanks Raymond. And I will take a look at the Camstudio to see if it’s in any way simpler and faster.

Over at The Worthy Organization, a website of mine and Sherry’s, for the book The Worthy Organization, www.worthyorg.com, you can see where I’ve taken some Blab episodes we had over a year ago, and put a header and footer on it, with titling and music, and used the brilliant free music from Kevin Macleod – which I credit when I do that… all of that was worth doing because if it formats what we do it’s certainly worth putting in a couple of hours time to do the work.

When I did the audios [podcasts] what I found is: when we speak, and you are on-camera, sometimes when you’re thinking you don’t speak but people can see that you’re mulling it over, and the gap doesn’t feel like nothing is going on – it doesn’t feel like dead air. But on a strictly audio thing like a podcast, dead air doesn’t make any sense. People will think that maybe something wrong. So what I would do is go and tighten up all of that. For an hour event, it would take me an hour to go through that and do these small edits. I was doing nothing of substance – except once I asked for permission – it just flowed easier. i know enough about editing audio to be able to leave room for people to breathe and stuff like that – which a lot of people don’t do. You can always tell when people are editing it badly. But I’ve done that for years.

So there’s a number of options as to how we process this afterwards. If we were interested in the text – and I think the reason the text is important is because people can scan text quickly and see things that are interesting to them. The other thing is, for the search engines, if we have the text of important parts of our conversation there, that can be searchable and people can find what we said as well. So there could be something useful there. But I’d like some help if we’re going to be doing that. We might put together a post production team to to make to make it not just one person in the kitchen doing all the work but several people doing a little bit of work.

Segment to 1 hr 6m 25s