Welcome to Our Webcasts

As we went to press, we were multitasking. We put on our first two live webcasts: Contributing Writer Jan Ozer on best practices for encoding, and Bennett Liles, Sound & Video Contractor contributing editor, AV, on the growing complexities of wireless mic technology for presentation.

The response far exceeded our expectations — nearly 1,500 people between the two topics. The wealth of questions and positive feedback generated during the webcasts suggested great potential for this format as a way to cover what you most want to know.

Looking at the list of participants, I saw a wide diversity of people in education, government, corporations, and entertainment outlets. I was reminded again of how committed people are to making video technology work, how much there is to learn and master, and how difficult it is to accumulate a common ground of knowledge — especially when people's starting points and applications are so different.

One of the best things about the webcast format is the potential for interactivity. Because we can see the questions accumulating in realtime, we can learn about the participants and what they most need to know. With a little practice, we'll be able to steer the presentations as necessary and design future presentations to suit.

This leads me to make a request: We have a long list of topics we want to cover in the coming webcasts, many of them related to further discussion of encoding, mobile production, producing with new and upcoming small format HD codecs, etc. However, I would appreciate hearing from you about subjects you need information on but may be too busy to pursue. It's likely that the things that are on your mind will also resonate for others. Feel free to suggest quite specific and narrow topics — the participants in the debut webcasts seemed keen to know details and specific techniques. Just email your requests to feedback@digitalcontentproducer.com.

For those of you who attended our debut webcasts, thank you. We really appreciated your questions and comments, and we hope they were a good beginning.

For those who were not able to join, or who want to share the webcast content with colleagues — either the recording or a PDF of the presentation slides — an archive is available at digitalcontentproducer.com/webcasts and svconline.com/webcasts. You'll also be able to see answers there to many of the questions that listeners came up with.

Thanks again for your dedication to your work. We are looking forward to being of service to you through these webcasts.