6A20 ELECTRIC LECTURE HALL

A Sophisticated Lecture Hall: Perspective of Remote Audience

Mission: Our mission is to find the best and most efficient methods of recording and broadcasting lectures in Edgerton Hall, while maintaining a comfortable environment for the live audience and the lecturer. To this end, we also envision maintaining a sophisticated control room for efficient editing of remote lectures.

• We are not going to conduct any major structural rennovations in Edgerton Hall. Specificly, the positioning of black boards, control room, slide/video equipment and seats will remain in the current configuration.
• The control room can be rennovated if necessary to enhance the quality, economy or efficiency of 'producing' lectures (See #5 in 'Designs and Guidelines' below for details).
• Financial constraints will obviously play a major part in our recommendations. Fancy equipment like 5-way triangulation systems for monitoring all the people in the audience or wall-to-wall interactive LCD screens are not being considered in this study.
• We concede the highest priority to the local audiance, but not ALL priority. We assume we will have some level of control over local lighting and placement of cameras, providing we obey common sense, and the lighting guidelines our groups propose.
• While obeying the constraints of Number 4, we want to provide the best possible service to remote viewers as is possible. We shall also assume that, given reasonably good cameras, the images we transmit are probably about as good as what the local audience sees; hence, if we can't see an image (its too dark, bright or out of focus) neither can the local audiance.
• Time constraints are also kept in mind; given the time remaining, detailed studies of equipment and positioning are impossible. Our report is assumed not to be the final say on Edgerton Hall, and others will study our recommendations in detail.

• How many cameras are to be placed in the lecture hall? The more cameras that we use, the greater our imposition on the local audience (depending on how they are placed, see below), while at the same time, the better our final covergage comes out to be. Given our dedication to both the local audience and cost constraints, we will probably settle for no more than four cameras (the fourth is an experiment: a camera pointing from the front ceilling toward the audience).
• Where should those cameras be placed to minimize interference? Three major options present themselves: in the middle (current position), in the rear, or on the sides/roof (requiring automated controls). The disadvantage of the first location is disrupting the audience, since the cameras might be distracting to (or in the way of) the lecturer. The second option leads to either a keystone effect, or a very distant image, neither of which is particularly enjoyable to watch. The third option might provide the best compromise, if the remote controls are quiet enough not to get the audience's attention (which they should be), AND they are not too expensive. Remote controls, however, might also cut down on the number of cameramen required, saving money down the road. It should (in theory) also make camera operations a simple enough job to learn without years of special training.
• Given the simple design of Edgerton's lecture space, suggesting "quarantine zones" (where the lecturer should try to avoid standing), will be unnecesary. Other recomendations outside of camera placement, however, will be more useful. For example, something to place on overhead projectors, which will help block the light they produce from streaming out in all directions; specifically, so that a camera filming a person near a project (not the projected image itself) will not be blinded.
• The equipment needs to be chosen so that it can work at optimum light levels for the local audiance. This includes A) not flooding the stage in extraordinarily bright light levels B) being able to record in a reasonably dark room, while still filming a projected [slide, transparency, photo, etc.]. This is probably best achieved by having at least two cameras (one on the dim professor, and one on the bright projection). If necesary (for us, and thus we assume, for the local audience), we will raise the lights a bit, to allow better viewing, or dim them, to provide better projecting. The exact controls over the lights are uncertain, but would certainly involve switches for each separate bank of instruments (Audience, Lectuer, Board, Front Spotlights, Entry Lights, etc.). The controls would function within the ranges set by the Lighting Group, and would include an overide for special circumstances.
• The control room has to have the appropriate equipment to edit/control the footage. The control equipment for the cameras (in the event of remote control), will be located there. Further features (such as separate monitors for the technicians to view the audiance with) would also be in the main control room. If another nearby room becomes available, we may find it best to occupy it exculsively with editing equipment (rather than editing film in the control room as well): thus we could record/broadcast all the lectures from the control room, while at the same time edit and alter previously recorded events in another room. This might involve duplicating some of the control room's machinery elsewhere, in which case we will have to decide whether the efficiency is worth the cost. In any case, the equipment in the control and/or production room should not require a specialized degree to operate well, which would lead to its dependence on one or two people. It should also be easy enough to maintain (and eventually, upgrade) that it can be counted on to work most of the time; a fantastic video control room fifty percent of the time is not useful to us. Likewise, a fantastic video control room that, a few years from now, becomes obsolete because it can't handle something as simple as wider screened TVs will not be as useful and dependable as one which can survive new broadcasting technologies.

1. Using automated cameras which will detect the location of the lecturer and alter resolution to focus automatically. This would force the lecturer to wear one or two locator pins, which should not greatly inconvenience him/her; we must be certain these systems will work reliably, however.
2. High resolution cameras which can work under very low light levels. Keeping cost efficiency in mind, we predict there will be some tradeoff between the optimum camera (number and type), and what we can afford. Next-to Top of the Line models (under $10,000) should be ample for our needs.
3. Controls to swivel some of the lighting instruments, in order to use minimal lights but still cover the whole area (as always, trying not to distract the local audience). This also provides more control to techinicians over the lighting in the room, so they can minimize the amount of special illumination needed for the cameras.
4. We are looking into M-Peg type software to digitize films onto a computer. We would also have to decide between using Macintosh or Sun computers for this editing and image-processing. None of them, however, would be likely in the near future; current styles of video editing are likely to remain.

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