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  • Apple's Podcast Producer for Lecture Capture?

    By Joshua Kim October 5, 2009 8:37 pm EDT

    The EDUCAUSE annual conference offers the best opportunity each year to spend time with educational technology companies in order to understand their strategic roadmap and how their plans and releases will impact our work on campus.

    This year one of my main goals is to get a handle of where Apple sits in the presentation / lecture capture space. An Apple product for presentation capture would be extremely appealing, as it is easy to envision Apple delivering an elegant solution that ties into their existing iMovie, Quicktime, and iTunesU platforms.

    Rapid authoring and distribution tools, of which presentation / lecture capture systems are a significant component, will emerge as the next disruptive innovation on campus. When students get the power to easily create, edit, publish, consume and interact with rich media presentations we will take a significant leap towards an active learning ideal. A related leap in the effectiveness of teaching and learning will be the ubiquitous capture and distribution of classroom lectures and discussions, combined with faculty using these tools to create one-off teaching modules and provide individual student feedback.

    Rapid authoring, presentation / lecture capture, publishing and distribution platforms are merging. Simple, integrated systems that allow all the members of the campus community to create, record, publish and distribute learning materials will dominate over complex, costly, and fragmented tools. This space is wide open for innovation and the establishment of deep partnerships between educational technology companies and higher ed. institutions.

    That is why I'm particularly interested to try to understand how Apple sees this space developing and where their product mix fits in to the trends identified above.

    The Podcast Producer 2 site on the Apple page offers this description of the product:

    "What is Podcast Producer 2? Podcasts are ideal for distributing university lectures, training a sales force, delivering product demos, or simply keeping employees, students, and customers up to date. Podcast Producer 2 simplifies the process of capturing, editing, and publishing them, letting your organization produce more podcasts with less work while maintaining a high degree of standardization among them. " (emphasis mine)

    I'm unclear if Apple sees Podcast Producer as a lecture / presentation capture solution -- or one that is designed to work in conjunction with other platforms? It will be good to hear how other institutions are utilizing Podcast Producer. And I hope to leave with a better understanding of how Apple envisions its role in the move to democratized authoring and sharing of educational content, as well as the growth in lecture capture, within higher education.

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Comments on Apple's Podcast Producer for Lecture Capture?

  • Don't put all your eggs in one basket...
  • Posted by Ed Garay at University of Illinois at Chicago on October 6, 2009 at 1:30pm EDT

  • Apple Podcast Producer is useful, but I would not selected as a campus-wide solution for class/presentation recordings for a number of reasons:

    * Podcast Producer is a typical Apple-only technology
    (locking *all* school recordings on iTunes is not a good idea)

    * Apple's solution is not transparent to the faculty
    (lecture capturing technology must be 200% transparent to faculty)

    * no easy way of capturing video off computers, Tablet PCs, visual presenters and other podium electronics

    * no advanced provisions for visual navigation, including granular control for thumbnail navigation

    * no decent support for closed captioning, automatic transcription services or decent accessibility

    * no easy and intelligent tools for dealing with copyrighted and I.P. content

    * no built-in lecture capture scheduler, advanced or otherwise

    * no portable solution for on-the-go presentation/lecture capture that includes video or anything beyond computer screen capture (TechSmith Camtasia Relay, Ying, Echo360, Tegrity, MediaSite do that)

    * offers minimal backend integration and system administration options

    * Podcast Producer does not run on Windows, does not support Flash Video and many desirable Internet standards

    I would recommend using Apple Podcast Producer at a small scale if everyone is comfortable in using iTunes and Apple-only technology for everything, but what about the growing number of Linux desktop users? What about Blackberry and the emerging number of Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Many of them don't run QuickTime or iTunes.

  • responding to Ed
  • Posted by Joshua Kim on October 6, 2009 at 4:45pm EDT

  • Wow Ed....great post. I would love to hear Apple respond to everything you wrote. Hello..is there anyone out there in Apple land that could respond to Ed?

  • Re: Don't put all your eggs in one basket...
  • Posted by Steve Welsh , Technical Specialist at Columbia University on October 12, 2009 at 8:00pm EDT

  • Thanks for bringing up these important points Ed. We've been working with a combination of different home-grown and enterprise solutions on our campus, and I just wanted to clarify a few points about PcP.

    * Podcast Producer is a typical Apple-only technology(locking *all* school recordings on iTunes is not a good idea)

    PcP does not predefine your distribution channel. You can configure both what formats to encode your audio and video assets as well as where to distribute them. iTunes U is just one option, but you can publish to whatever local media server you choose.

    * Apple's solution is not transparent to the faculty
    (lecture capturing technology must be 200% transparent to faculty)

    I'm not sure what kind of transparency you mean. We've found that generally, faculty don't prefer to be 'hands-on' with lecture capture. If your institution has a department with the resources to handle the backend of scheduling and distributing lecture captures, the faculty is usually happier when they don't see behind the curtain. However, if you wanted to train faculty to use Podcast Capture on the podium machines to capture their lectures and send them to a defined workflow, they can do that 'ad-hoc' from the podium machines, either via Podcast Capture (in OS X) or via the browser (OSX and Windows).

    * no easy way of capturing video off computers, Tablet PCs, visual presenters and other podium electronics

    If your device can open a browser and can connect over a LAN to your PcP server, then you can submit captures from any podium machine (OS X or Windows). That includes tablet PC's. In terms of 'other podium electronics' that don't run either of those OS's (i.e. a linux box), then yeah, you'd have an obstacle there.

    * no advanced provisions for visual navigation, including granular control for thumbnail navigation

    By visual navigation, I'm wondering what you mean. We've used Echo 360, and it does have a very robust visual navigation by chapterizing video assets and allowing you to see the thumbnails of the chapters. It's a great feature, but it comes with a HEFTY pricetag.

    * no decent support for closed captioning, automatic transcription services or decent accessibility

    Well, automated captioning would be a great built-in feature in ANY capture platform, but wow, that's hoping for a lot. Although PcP doesn't produce captions itself, if you use a captioning service, you can build the captioning integration into your workflows in PcP. Also, there are a few different software-based utilities that can 'rip' your video assets and produce .srt captioning files that can then be integrated into your video assets using PcP.

    * no easy and intelligent tools for dealing with copyrighted and I.P. content

    Policing content for IP issues is ALWAYS going to be a problem, no matter what the platform. You can, however, publish to a secure server if you'd prefer to keep your assets behind closed doors.

    * no built-in lecture capture scheduler, advanced or otherwise

    We're working on this right now ourselves. It's not as streamlined as we'd like it to be, but you can use iCal and Applescript to schedule and execute captures. See this article for more info: http://developer.apple.com/mac/articles/server/schedulingical.html

    * no portable solution for on-the-go presentation/lecture capture that includes video or anything beyond computer screen capture (TechSmith Camtasia Relay, Ying, Echo360, Tegrity, MediaSite do that)

    Again, you can submit captures from the browser from any OS X or Windows machine with an internet connection. No client app needs to be installed. Also, if you don't have a LAN connection, you can also use QT to record screencapture locally, and then submit at a later time. (And don't get me started on how locked-down, unstable and restrictive MediaSite and Tegrity are! Terrible platforms that promise way more than they deliver!)

    * Podcast Producer does not run on Windows, does not support Flash Video and many desirable Internet standards

    You can integrate your FFMPEG and Episode encoder configurations with PcP workflows very easily to produce flash and a slew of other popular standards. PcP in itself doesn't come 'out-of-the-box' with the entire arsenal of tools for transcoding every different combination of assets, but you can use it as a workflow tool to integrate your different encoding utilities. Conversely, one of my biggest gripes with a platform like Echo 360 is the opaqueness of the media processing and the proprietary distribution standards. generally, the enterprise solutions don't play well with others.

    With the hefty pricetag of the enterprise solutions available to educational institutions, we're very interested in the open-source and free solutions available to us. Although PcP isn't an open-source solution, it is malleable enough to use it in a mixed environment and define your formats and your distribution channels, and integrate with other encoding engines. And although OS X server isn't 'free,' it's way cheaper than any of the enterprise capture solutions on the market. PcP1 wasn't very GUI-friendly, but PcP2 has become significantly more user-friendly with the introduction of the Posdcast Composer utility.

    Other interesting tools we're looking into for media management on campus are Kaltura (http://kaltura.org) and the Opencast initiative's Matterhorn platform (still in development: http://www.opencastproject.org/project/matterhorn)

    Also see http://podcastproducer.org - a community of Podcast producer users who are trying to share best practices. A good place to field many of your 'beyond-the-manual' real-world questions.

    Best,

    -Steve

  • Web-based
  • Posted by Frances Rowe , QU Online at Quinnipiac University on December 1, 2009 at 1:15pm EST

  • Screentoaster.com, screen recorder, works on pretty much any OS like Linux because it is a Java Web applet. The file format is mov or swf, which is good for the end user with either an iPhone or a Blackberry. If you have learningobjects.com for your LMS, the files can be deployed using the podcast feature in the case you don’t want to share beyond the confines of your course or require the end user to have iTunes.
    - Frances

  • Customizing Podcast Producer
  • Posted by Arno Bosse , Humanities Computing at University of Chicago on February 9, 2010 at 11:30am EST

  • I'd like to second Steve's comment above about being able to customize PP workflows to meet your institution's specific needs. For example in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago we see PP far less as a tool to capture scheduled lectures than as an easy way for people to produce ad hoc screencasts or re-purpose existing video and audio files for their WordPress and Drupal sites and for iTunesU. We also wanted to collect better metadata about these media files and provide these in additional, HTML5 friendly formats.

    To this end, we've adapted the default PP workflow to insert a web-form for capturing Dublin Core and iTunesU compatible metadata (which we also use to create a custom RSS feed) and custom HTML 5 as well as Drupal and WordPress compatible embed codes. We've also modified the standard PP output format to include Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis versions of incoming video and audio files. If you're interested, you can read more about it on our wiki (https://coral.uchicago.edu/display/humcomp/Podcast+Producer+Overview).

    Something I don't think was mentioned earlier and which irks me with PP is that it can't handle (yes?) second monitor presentations (for example when a speaker uses presenter's notes). I'd also prefer not to have to fall back to a third-party tool for Windows based captures. It would be great if Podcast Capture were ported to Windows (though I'm not actually expecting this to ever happen).

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