Recording the MLD Family Conference

Fortunately, MLD (Metachromatic Leukodystrophie) is a very rare genetic disease because it is always fatal and affects mostly children. Dean and Teryn Suhr lost a daughter to MLD and as a means to cope with their grief, founded the MLD Foundation as an international organisation that is primarily focused on helping the families of MLD patients to cope, but also tries to fertilize research by connecting doctors and pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and legislators around the world.

Since 1999, the Suhr’s and the MLD Foundation have organized and sponsored six MLD Family Conferences where parents and families could meet, support each other, learn about treatments and talk to researchers and doctors. All but the first conference was taped to share with those who could not attend.

Taping these conferences is essential, as only a few of the affected families can make it to a conference. For the others, the information and the sense of community comes from being connected online and being able to watch the recordings to be on par with the people able to attend in person.

In the past, Dean Suhr was taping the conferences the conventional way, ending up with a huge stack of tapes and a lot of work. "Without BoinxTV, I would spend days and days loading the tapes into the Mac, then using Final Cut to mix the videos, add the titles, mix in the slides and so on", Dean says. "And since I was doing this only once a year, I had to figure out how to do it in Final Cut from scratch every time." The videos would take months to be up on the web.

Without BoinxTV, I would spend days and days loading the tapes into the Mac, then using Final Cut to mix the videos, add the titles, mix in the slides and so on.

Dean Suhr, MLD Foundation

So Dean was very excited to learn about BoinxTV in fall of 2008, just as planning for the first MLD Family Conference outside of the US was under way. He downloaded the trial and immediately saw how he could put it to good work for the foundation. "I realised that not only would I be able to get the videos online almost instantaneously, they would also look like they were made by a professional TV crew," Dean recalls his excitement.

He contacted Boinx Software to find out how much effort it would be and what equipment he would need. At that time, BoinxTV was very fresh on the market, and it hadn't been used for taping a conference yet. Fortunately, the conference was set to be close to the Boinx Software offices in Munich, Germany, so Oliver Breidenbach, CEO of Boinx Software, could promise Dean that the Boinx Software team would be on site to help with people and equipment.

Suhr’s goal was to learn how to set-up and run BoinxTV for their future conferences. “The simplicity of the user software interface using layers (similar to Photoshop for still pictures), the standard Mac integration, and the use of no special hardware make me very optimistic about producing our next set of videos all on our own,” said Suhr.

The simplicity of the user software interface using layers (similar to Photoshop for still pictures), the standard Mac integration, and the use of no special hardware make me very optimistic about producing our next set of videos all on our own.

Dean Suhr, MLD Foundation

Leading up to the conference in March 2009, Oliver and Dean put together a setup plan that would provide video from three DV camcorders: one for a total view of the room, one to capture a close up of the speaker, one to provide atmosphere from the audience. There would be 2 hand microphones for moderation and Q&A with the audience and 2 lavalier mics for the speakers. Dean also wanted to be able to capture the slides directly from the presentations given on his MacBook Pro to preserve the highest quality instead of filming the projected image.

All the video and audio sources needed to be connected to a computer which would run BoinxTV to capture live-to-disk. This provided a couple of challenges:

How to run the video from a camera at the back of the room to the computer?

FireWire cables can run only 5 meters. One camera was to be positioned at the back of the room while the space reserved for the crew was right next to the stage, more than 20 meters away. In addition the cables had to be run around the walls of the room so that people would not trip over them. FireNEX FireWire extenders by NewNex provided the solution, being able to extend the reach to 60m using Twisted Pair cable.

How to connect 3 DV cameras to the Mac?

The way a DV camcorder behaves on the FireWire bus causes the setup to be limited to one camera per FireWire bus. Some Macs have two FireWire controllers, but most have only one. To get around this, it was necessary to use a MacPro with two additional Startech 3+1 Internal Port PCI Express FireWire Cards, providing a total of 3 independent buses.

How to get the slides into BoinxTV?

Dean used to get the slides into his movies by either editing them in afterwards or pointing a camera at the projection. The first method would mean hours of postproduction, the second would mean a greatly reduced readability of the slides. To get both great quality and to be able to do it live, the setup called for the use of a VGA framegrabber device by Epiphan called VGA2USB. This device connects to the VGA out of the projector and to the USB port of the MacPro and provides the slides as a video source in BoinxTV.

Capturing the slides directly from the computer improved the legibility dramatically but it created a behavioral challenge for the presenters. They were used to using a laser pointer to direct attention to areas on the screen as they talked.  The laser pointer movements could only be captured with a low resolution camera feed so a compromise was used.  Dean followed the laser pointer with the computer’s mouse so the high resolution screen could be captured. Mouseposé, a screen pointer application from Boinx, will be used in future recordings to further refine the presentations for their next recording.

How to sync Audio and Video?

Since the Canon HD30 camcorders need some time to encode the DV signal, the video has a slight delay when it arrives at the MacPro. Feeding the audio signal directly into the MacPro from the Alesis Audio Mixer would lead to the video and audio being out of snyc. To prevent this, the audio was connected to the aux input of one of the Canon cameras where it was encoded together with the video thus providing both video and audio in sync.

"The first recording took a bit more preparation than what I did in the past, but now post production is down to cutting out data that the speakers do not want to be on the web and a bit of overhead footage that resulted from people getting ready to speak", says Dean Suhr. Shortly before the conference, Dean spent half a day at the Boinx Software Headquarters to go over the conference schedule and to setup and customize the template to be used for the recording. He also reflected that the prep time for the next conference will be about 1/10th of that for this first BoinxTV production since the templates and flows are well understood. This prep of updating the text on the scrollers and title bars will occur at his home office using his own Mac long before arrival at the conference site.

BoinxTV flawlessly recorded almost 15 hours of conference presentations, so the 45 DV tapes used as a backup in the cameras can be discarded unviewed. The material was recorded in 4:3 PAL resolution and stored encoded with the Apple Intermediate Codec, resulting in a relatively modest 80GBs of data. Conversion to NTSC for US viewers will be seamless using QuickTime Pro. Suhr says the MLD Foundation plans to publish them both on the Web and on DVD. In addition to live production using BoinxTV, they plan to go one step further and broadcast their next conference live to the web.

Post-Processing Plans

The video will be put up on the web just as it is.  “The quality is excellent and the videos reflect the spontaneity and the logistical pauses of the conference,” says Suhr, “In the interest of timeliness we will put the videos up on the web as is, but we will also take a quick run through the files to clip out the pauses to tighten up the files and then re-post them.” Suhr expects the files to be live less than a week after the conference.

 “The biggest delay,” muses Suhr, ”was the unanticipated time it took to copy 80 GB of material to a portable external USB  drive.  I had to leave right after the conference to catch a plane so we had to ship the drive back to the US.”  The MLD Foundation will be re-targeting the videos to various formats including Podcast, low & high resolution webcasting, and DVD in both PAL and NTSC using standard easy to use Mac tools such as QuickTime Pro and Final Cut Express.