Campus Focus
How Dartmouth Produces Video Podcasts
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 08/22/07
With an $8,000 investment,
Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy
has set up the capability to provide video podcasts for courses that enable students to watch lectures they may have missed or that warrant review. Now, said Lab Manager John Largent, the New Hampshire school is exploring how it can make lecture capture available campus-wide.
Up until the summer of 2004, only a single professor in the department was in the practice of making one of his courses available for viewing after class. The media format was videotape, which had to be checked out from the library.
Video Capture Technology
With seed money in hand and based on the recommendation of other AV groups on campus, Largent invested in a
Canon GL2 camcorder
. But its MiniDV tape limited him to a single hour of recording time, not enough capacity for the lectures he needed to capture. He switched to 80-minute tapes, and then added the
Focus Enhancements FireStore FS-4
portable DTE recorder to the mix. The FS-4 can capture three hours--about 40 gigabytes--worth of video. The tape simply acts as a backup to the FS-4 and vice versa. If the tape in the camcorder runs out during filming, the FS-4 continues recording.
Now Largent can move from one lecture to another without having to download the video store first. Even better, the time taken up by post-production work has shrunk considerably.
He hooks up the FS-4 to his iMac and does a file transfer, which takes about five minutes. The FS-4 saves the lecture in 10-minute clips, so Largent uses
Apple's Final Cut Express HD
to put the clips together and to edit out "problem sessions," where the professor has spent five or 10 minutes in class having the students work on a problem. That takes another five or 10 minutes.