Friday, March 13, 2009

Mac Mini Podcast Producer setup

Part of my job at the university is to do digital media for an engineering grant dealing with water.  At conferences I have been capturing the Power Point presentation with the audio of the presenter.  For two weeks after the conference I take the captured video, edit it on Final Cut Pro and export it to be encoded in Compressor in either podcast or streaming video.

Now we are wanting to have the podcasts at the end of each day of the conference.  To accomplish this we have created a setup with three Mac Minis, one running server, the other two are an agent and client.  The client will capture the video and send it to the server for processing.  Instead of using Podcast Capture we are using Quicktime Pro and an Automator script.  The script starts the capture, creates a metadata plist using the current day and time for the name of the podcast, pauses waiting for a click to end the capture and send it to the server.

Quicktime Pro is being used because it automatically saves the file.  If there is some failure on upload to the server, at least there will be a copy of the presentation that can be processed at a later date.

This setup has not been used at a conference yet.  It will be used at a conference in the middle of April in San Francisco.  In real time testing the setup works well.  

The equipment being used are three Mac Minis, one Airport Extreme, 1G miniStack hard drive Epiphan VGA2USB LR, video splitter and a portable rack of audio equipment.  The minis, airport and hard drive are also going to be incorporated in a 6U rack case that has wheels and a pull out handle.  This should make it easy to take the equipment on as carry on luggage when flying instead of shipping to the site.  I am hoping this works when in the field because we will be traveling to conferences all over the world where there are problems with clean water.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Quicktime Pro and Podcast Producer

Podcast Capture is the primary way to record and post audio and/or video to Podcast Producer.  If you were wanting to use Windows to create the podcast you could use Quicktime Pro 7.3 or later.  Make a recording in Quicktime then "share" the file.  In the menu bar select Podcast Producer, enter the producer's URL, username and password. Upload the file.

Using Windows version of Quicktime Pro to capture for Podcast Producer is not possible, sorry for any confusion.

Creating new workflows from a script

George Cook has provided a script that will take a workflow(included in the script package) and create a new one based on the new group name.  It is available here.  Call the script in the terminal with this command ./pcastgroup.sh  "new group name" .

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

podcast CLI man pages

I was reminded that there is also a podcast man page.  This is the command that is used by the web interface for Podcast Producer.  In the terminal type "man podcast".

Monday, December 17, 2007

Podcast Producer Tech Summit

During MacWorld, Jan 14-18, Apple is having a Podcast Producer Tech Summit in Cupertino at the corporate offices.  Various organizations that have expressed an interest in piloting and implementing Podcast Producer have been invited.  Day One will be discussions and presentations by the invitees.  Day Two the participants will actually create and modify workflows using their own banners, logos, and movies.  Also Apple Engineers will be there to answer your questions. 

pcastaction Help

There is a website called pcastaction Help - ANU TV that list all of the Podcast Producer "switches" to the CLI command, pcastaction.  You also can access this same info by typing "man pcastaction" in a terminal window. 

Friday, December 14, 2007

Tip: Web Interface for Podcast Producer

Robert Bennett says that there is a web interface for Podcast Producer at MacLearning.org.  It installs on the server and is accessed via port 8143.  Using a browser you can control camera agents or submit video files.  This should also work from a PC.