Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 14:44:42 -0700 To: Jeff.Hodges@stanford.edu From: Paul Collins Subject: Re: how can you be in two places at once.. Thanks Jeff for writing this up - you've just about covered it... (you might pass this on to the other folks - I don't have their addresses) This setup really did what we needed - Jeff came through loud and clear with respect to audio, and the 2-3 frames per second video was enough. Sort of like watching live video from the space shuttle. I alternated the "slides" (thanks to Acrobat) between full screen and about 7/8ths (leaving room for the video window). We held our audience well - as the talk went on, perhaps people got a tiny bit restless, because of the one-way nature of the first part, where the camera was on the screen instead of the audience. Next time, I might try Timbuktu so he could see and control the remote presentation software and see/advance his own slides (Timbuktu is completely cross-platform, by the way). Or, direct control of the remote presentation program should be possible via AppleEvents and a program that allows remote sending of events via TCP/IP. But that's harder to set up. The internet connection at the show was unspecified but at least a T-1, with a 10-base-T drop to the conference session room. We were using a very small part of that, of course. The Mac at our end was a Beige 266MHz G3. Aside from the sleeping powerbook effect, we lost only about 3-5 words from momentary (0.4 second?) sound drop-outs throughout the 20 minutes. The drop-outs were short enough so we could get the meaning from context. We'd get better video performance with a USB-connected camera (or video digitizer) rather than the serial-port cameras we used. USB cameras are also cheap, but there doesn't seem to be any software to support them on WinNT--you have to use Win98 or Mac OS, unless you get a digitizer and analog camera. Half-duplex sound: ALthough I used press-to-talk at my end to avoid feedback, we could have gone full duplex if Jeff had used headphones instead of a speaker to hear me. A key setup point: the very experienced AV team set up a "mix-minus" so that Jeff's voice went-out over our PA, but was stripped out when we fed room audio back to the Mac so he could hear us. We were also lucky. The show's Internet connection went down about 2 hours after the session and stayed down for nearly an hour. Another production note: Adobe Acrobat 3.0 (the full version) allowed me to not only "print-to-PDF" from the original PowerPoint presentation, but edit the number and order of slides, as well as control slide size. It was a PowerPoint-free event. :-) Best regards, Paul Collins Owner/Developer One Click Systems paul@oneclick.com