Video System Update

Hiawatha Woodturning Club,
For members and guest who have missed the last couple of meetings.  It was decided that it was time that the club put together a video system that would 1) provide a better demonstration experience for the audience at live demonstration 2) provide for recording the live demonstrations 3) allow us to take advantage of remote demonstrations if and when this movement takes off with in the AAW community.

To that effect Steve Promo and Tom Cadwalader (yours truly) set off to build a frame to support the equipment and purchase the equipment to accomplish this.

At the October meeting all of this technology came together and was tried for the first time.  Steve Promo did a short demonstrations on making scoops.  In my opinion this is how it went. Those  in attendance my have a slightly different or vastly different opinion, so feel free to use the comment section.

Basically everything worked, but there is room for improvement.  Lots of room for improvement.   We went into this with a somewhat limited budget and there were a few surprises.  I learned that there was a whole lot more to learn about video and broadcasting a live stream than I ever thought I needed to know.

What I see as improvement areas and what we can do.

1)  The first obvious issue was the latency between what Steve was doing live and what was showing on the monitors.  The picture and audio being later takes some getting used to.  The audio was the bigger issue for both the audience and the demonstrator.
     The fix:  I have been working on the latency, Archie and I swapped out the hard drive on the computer with a faster drive I had.  Plus we tried recording to a solid state camera card instead of the hard dive in the computer.  This seemed to help a lot.  But for the audio we need to do what I did during the demo, and that is to mute the audio on both monitors.  Their will always be some delay and in our smaller room, thats not good.

2) Lighting.  The light we are currently using needs to be relocated.  It's too close and there needs to be a second light.  There are deep shadows on the piece being turned and its very difficult for the demonstrator to see what he/she is doing.  We need more even lighting across the entire lathe.

3) Cameras.
 The overhead camera was prone to hunting for focus.  We need to run that camera in manual focus and manual exposure.
The second camera (the one showing the demonstrator with a wider shot)  The footage looked like security camera footage.  As I tried to work through this issue it was a combination of dropped frames and something else.  It was starting to look like it was just a bad camera.  But I deleted the driver (the software that runs the camera form the computer) and used the Microsoft drive instead of the camera manufactures drivers.  This seemed to help a lot.

4)The background is distracting.  Having the office area behind is not the best situation.  I think we would be better off going back to having the lathe by the garage doors.  The lathe table and the video from are only connected by the white 110 volt cord form the power strip.  So both pieces can be moved separately if need be.

So that is basically it.  I have edited the footage form the last meeting and put it in the cloud for members to download.  I would recommend you download it and then view it as opposed to trying to watch it like a uTube video.  I put the file in a dropbox account and that doesn't typically stream video every well.As you watch the movie I think you will see what my concerns are.

The computer we have was $421.  What really need is one that is $2,000.  But with the changes we have made to both the settings and the hard drive we are pretty dam close.  The testing I have done lately has been turning out pretty good video.


The video of the scoops demo can be found here.  I welcome your feedback.
Click Here for Video