Orlando Code Camp was a lot of fun, and it was so great to catch up with people I haven't seen in years. This event has been one of my favorite things for as long as I've lived here. I've spoken at it every year, and it was pretty crushing when it was cancelled at the last minute in 2020 at the onset of the pandemic.
I always get a hotel the night before, partly because I don't want to drive an hour before dawn, and also because of the speaker party, which is a great chance to catch up with a few of the folks that I've gotten to know over the years. This year we resumed that practice, and several coworkers from previous jobs were there as well.
For many years, I thought, gosh, I should record my talk so there's more than some context-less deck floating out there as the only artifact. This year that was extra true because the deck wasn't that meaningful, as it was mostly code. If I have the gear to do a documentary, a tech talk should be easy enough, right? Well, yes, but it didn't exactly go well.
Basically I needed two sources to record. One was the desktop of my computer, and the other an external camera that vaguely showed that I was there. For the external, I decided to just plop my GoPro on its mini tripod and attach my wireless DJI Mic to it. I tested that arrangement at home, and it worked pretty well. On the computer, I just needed to record the desktop using QuickTime, choosing the internal microphone to record sound for the purpose of synchronizing it later. Then I could just join the two as a multi-camera clip in DaVinci Resolve and cut back and forth with the awesome Speed Editor controller.
My first mistake was that I didn't realize that I had to explicitly tell QuickTime to record laptop microphone audio, so it didn't. That's not the worst thing, since I could match the two when something on screen changed. But also, either because of some unintentional fat finger action or a crash, it stopped recording the screen in the middle of things as I was going. That also wasn't a big deal, because I was able to just restart it since I saw it stopped.
The GoPro, sigh, let's just say that I have never been impressed with it, and that perception has not changed. I've had solid success doing time-lapse recordings of the incoming hurricane, and for port departures on cruises, but whenever I try to use it for something else, it just disappoints me. Anything not outdoors is useless because of the weird compression artifacts and noise, and I despise the high shutter frame rates if you don't have an ND filter on it. But this time, the problem was that it died about 26 minutes in, for reasons not clear to me. I suppose it could have overheated or something, but I don't really know. So I ended up doing voiceover the screen recording for the last 10 minutes or so.
I think I got the bulk of it though. In the future I'll keep the audience in mind and try to get better audio for questions.
No comments yet.