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Posted
almost 14 years
ago
This week is special… and not for SUSE’s employees only, but also for the openSUSE community. A lot of ideas from the openFATE will be implemented on this week.
What’s about myself? Well… as you know I don’t work for SUSE anymore. Now I work for
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company in Göttingen, which use GNU/Linux and Free Software in industry sector. Xplace provide open solutions, for example, at POS terminals in almost all European countries.
As new employee in xplace I suggested couple new ideas about xplace’s software development model. Actually it works very well, but my idea was to add Open Build Service like the most convenient and powerfull development platform. So, after some discussions I installed OBS and added some xplace’s projects there. On this week I builded new packages for all available distributions and made a small demostration/talk about OBS for xplace’s development team. I introduced how easy it works and how we can to upgrade our development model. We use Jenkins as well, so I wrote small python script, which synchronizes those systems: we get new packages via OBS after every stable build of Jenkins.
I think this initiative will attract new developers to use build.opensuse.org, learn about packaging and build packages for different distributions. And of course like developer and openSUSE member I want to use at work convenient Free Software development platform and… continue to promotion openSUSE project
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Posted
almost 14 years
ago
Up early; took E. to pre-school, this time no tears -
progress indeed. Prodded mail, re-started Windows cross-compile.
Happy
birthday LibreOffice - only a year ago LibreOffice was
born
( hitting the ground running, with working test builds
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for umpteen
plaforms, repositories to work with, and fun
to be had ). What a difference a year makes to the project's
maturity, growth, feature depth and (invisible to users) code
quality, it's fantastic to see the positive difference that SUSE's
investment has made.
Lunch, interview, re-factoring unit tests to prune duplicate
code, and make them small & sweet.
Hacked away at misc. regressions from unit test code-sharing,
until everything looked pretty, and compiled. Switched to gtk-broadway
lots of cleanups there, finally got very much better behaviour.
Freedom in Christ course at our house in the evening.
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Posted
almost 14 years
ago
(Note: I waited to post my reports on the BoFs that I particpated in from the recent openSUSE Conference to give people a chance to recuperate after the conference. Over the next couple of days or so, I’ll start reporting on them and hope you all
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can help further the discussions on these topics.)
So, one of the Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at the Conference that I organized was a Video BoF. Specifically, the BoF was meant to start coming up with storyboarding to create some cool openSUSE promotional videos (ala commercials.) There’s a number of us with some great creative ideas and varying levels of exertise in this area and we just haven’t gotten off the ground yet on how to approach some of these ideas. For me, (relying on “old school” classes I took from when I was a film major) storyboarding would have helped to define exactly the steps we needed in order to complete and execute the ideas many of us have.
However, the general discussion quickly went in another direction, and one that I think is equally as important and I’m glad that conversation took place as well…
We need Tutorials!
A number of people mentioned that we should be creating more tutorial videos. Definitely true and frankly, an easier item to achieve than promotional videos. This is something a lot of people can do by simply running their favorite screencast application on their computer and recording how-to’s.
We discussed a bit about the types of tutorials we wanted to do and there was general consensus that we should create two types.
Full-length Tutorials — This would provide indepth how-to on any particular subject. And could be released at different levels of advancement. For example, a tutorial on OBS packaging, setting up a web server, troubleshooting your system, etc.
openSUSE in 60 Seconds Videos — This borrows in similar concept with GNOME’s release of “GNOME in 60 Seconds” videos leading up to the release of GNOME 3. Jason Clinton did a great job on those videosand there was good response and subscription rate to the GNOME channel on YouTube. I particularly liked these videos because they were short and to the point and simply focused on a particular feture rather than a full drawn out how-to that may cover many topics you might not need to know about.
Again, either of these videos are reasonably easy to create from just about any desktop. So, if you’ve got an idea for a video in either category tht we can put on our openSUSE video channel, what’s stopping you?
Collecting Raw Footage
There’s people who shoot videos and there’s people who edit them. It’d be nice if one person did it all, end-to-end. But that’s not always a reasonable expectation. Editing is a skill, actually an art, and there is a definite distinction between being a cinematographer and an editor. The problem however, is in how to actually collect the videos from the person who shoots raw footage.
If they’re really short videos, it can be simple to just email the video to an editor. But, more often than not, these videos can actually be quite long and fat as an email attachment. We currently have no realistic way, as far as we could determine, for how to collect and store raw (or unprocessed) videos.
And before someone says something here, uploading your raw video to YouTube or similar service isn’t exactly ideal. By the time it gets stored there, the videos have been watered down into a particular format, such as flash, and makes editing very unappealing at that point.
JDD offered to set up a video server for people to upload their raw files, but isn’t able to provide a timeline for when this server would be online. Equally, he acknowledged there were some download/upload issues with his current ISP. So, we still don’t have a reasonable solution for the exchange of videos for pre-production purposes. If you’ve got some ideas on how we can go about this, we’re all ears!
Skillsets
If you’re out there, we don’t know you yet and we’d love to hear from you!
We need people with various skillsets in areas such as Cinellera and Blender. Particularly, we’d love to create a nice opening/closing shot using animation from some Blender activity. But for now, we’re happy if someone just creates a nice couple of slides that we can use as a 2D opening/closing shot for our videos.
Organization
Briefly we talked about creating a Video Team as a subset of the Marketing Team. Not much was really discussed on this area, and I personally don’t think we should go about creating a subset team. My opinion is that the work of creating polished videos is a direct task of the marketing team itself. Plus, I don’t see the need for creating more bureaucracy through additional subdivision of existing teams. But we definitely should do more to utilize our existing marketing team to collaborate and develop some strong promotional videos for openSUSE.
It’s Gotta Be Accessible!
I had an inward cheer when someone brought up this topic. Specifically, they were referring to making these videos accessible to people in different languages and thus removing barriers. With my own background as a captioning advocate, (Yes MTV is now captioned because I personally knocked on every music producer’s door in the early 90’s), I have already planned that any videos I upload must be captioned/subtitled. So these videos would, in fact, become accessible to people with hearing loss as well as people from different language backgrounds.
Fortunately with services like Universal Subtitles and YouTube’s captioning service, the technology exists to make this a reality for us. And in fact, its a good thing to caption your videos because it increases the googleability of your video being indexed. But there are some challenges to subtitling, which are:
Transcription – This requires someone willing to sit down and listen to a video and record everything that was said into text format. And no, proper subtitling does not mean you can make many mistakes. Transcription has to be accurate. So, likely, this means a lot of replaying to make sure we picked up every word that was uttered in the video, plus describing any relevant ambient sounds. (Unfortunately, with my hearing loss, this isn’t possible for me to do in most cases.)
TimeCoding – A second-step process, once transcription is done, someone has to line up the text into a subtitle file with the exact time codes. Fortunately, this is something I can definitely do, and I love doing timecoding. I’m a stickler for caption perfection and thus I’m ideal to fulfill this job, along with others who can join in on timecoding.
Translation — A video wouldn’t be truly accessible if we didn’t release the captioned video in as many languages as possible. In this step, someone needs to look at the subtitle file (which is most likely in English) and translate each line to their native language. Video services allow us to upload multiple language versions of the same file and viewers have the option of selecting to have a subtitle in their native language.
I’d like to see a lot of people volunteering to do this one. Particularly, I have several videos soon to be uploaded that are keynotes from the openSUSE Conference. If someone can take the time to sit down and listen through these videos, I can then begin the timecoding process and ask volunteers to translate to native languages. Any takers?
Conclusion
We have do-able, albeit challenging, solutions for increasing awareness of what openSUSE can do for you through video messaging. The question now is, how serious are we in making this happen? We’ve all talked for years about doing more in the area of video production, but haven’t moved much forward yet. I say there’s no time like the present to put words into actions… or 1,000 pictures into a video!
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