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Great Basin Visual Science Symposium

The Challenge

A scientific symposium typically consists of half-hour to one-hour lecture-presentations centered around either PowerPoint or 35mm slide media. Additionally, most auditoriums are darkened. Several challenges were posed to the production team in order to gather, record, and translate the symposium into a web experience:

• Videotaping a speaker in a darkened auditorium is less than optimal.
• Videotaping PowerPoint or 35mm slides from a projection screen yields marginal results.
• Recording the speaker voices poses no difficulty.
• Converting all presentation materials into a website requires the designers to protect the intellectual property rights of the original speakers. Downloading of slides needs to be discouraged, while viewing them is encouraged.

The Solution

The structure of the day long symposium became the structure of the website. Navigation was based on a simple selection of which speaker or presentation title was of interest. Actual presentation of materials exploited the streaming video capabilites of QuickTime.

• PowerPoint presentations and 35mm slides were converted into 500x375 high quality TIF images
• Speaker audio was digitized into AIFF audio format
• The TIF images and audio files were edited together in a Non Linear Editing program (Adobe Premiere) using the symposium videotape as a reference to the original presentations.
• The individual movies were converted into streaming QuickTime files, loaded onto a streaming video server, and linked into the website's navigation and tables of content.
• Speaker Bios and Adobe PDF versions of their papers were also linked into the site.

Other Benefits

Streaming the speaker's images and audio with the QuickTime movies protected the intellectual property rights of the presenters. It is impossible to download and save an RTSP streaming media file. If the PowerPoint slides and 35mm transparencies were posted as JPEG's to the website, with accompanying audio files, the author rights would not have been protected. The website divided a speaker's presentation into three separate experiences:

1. ENTIRE PRESENTATION: A presentation could be viewed in its entirety with all slides and comments.
2. BROWSE SLIDES ONLY: One could browse through each presenter's slides without audio.
3. PICK & PLAY: Each slide was also available for viewing on an individual basis with speaker comments. The slides were carefully identified by number and title.

Project Details

Client: Moran Eye Center; Randall J. Olson, MD (director), Eric M. Lasater, PhD (Director of Research)
URL: http://www.moraneyecenter.org/gbs/gbs4/index.html
Lead Designer: Paul E. Burrows