SAC7: A (pod) cast of hundreds

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference in Springfield, Missouri.

Steve Hodges: Wonderful! Well, if you had a chance to read this we submitted our proposals for presentations for this conference way back when in the spring or something like that and as I went back and looked at my presentation and was rehearsing it and was thinking about it. It occurred to me that things had changed in the few months since I have submitted it. So last night way too late, right when I was getting ready to go to sleep actually I said, “You know, I want to tweak this presentation a bit to talk a little bit more about – well actually let me start with what I’ve submitted. Essentially with just one full-time staffer, my department produces over a 100 videos a year distributed via the web, Podcast sites such as YouTube and Facebook, Digital Signage, Campus Cable, and traditional broadcast.

This keeps audiences engaged blah, blah, blah, blah and discover IUPUI’s model for video communication including workflow, staffing, and funding and how it all fits with other communications. I think that’s a pretty good presentation but like I said things have changed a bit and I will talk about that in a condensed form but I’d like to talk about some of the things we’ve learned and some of our successes and failures because I think that type of thing is a lot more interesting to this group and especially when looking at successes and failures and where we’ve come since the spring because we’ve kind of taken a step forward and someone should unlock the door I don’t know. All right, so an introduction.   

I’m Steve Hodges as was mentioned and my title is Electronic Communications Manager in the office of Communications and Marketing at IUPUI. IUPUI stands for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Our campus was established in 1969 as a partnership between Indiana University and Purdue University. Two huge rivals in Indiana and somehow we lived together happily on one campus in Indianapolis.

Our campus is just two blocks from the State Capital. We’re sort of in a hub of it all and/or all the Fortune 500 companies and the high rises and all that. We started in the early 70’s with about 10,000 students. Actually, I was reading about this campus and it has a very similar history established about the same time about the same size of campus back in the day. This year we finally surpass 30,000 students on campus. About one-third are graduate and professional students.

And 1,300 students live on campus and the rest are all commuters. So a little bit about Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis which was also the jeopardy question to the answer what is the longest university title in the United States. We were the longest and then we dropped at Indianapolis and it’s just Indianapolis we’re no longer the longest, it’s great so a little bit of trivia there for you.

So IUPUI, as I mentioned, I’m in the office of communications and marketing and I just wanted to show you a quick org chart. This becomes relevant I don’t usually show this but so we have our executive director. We have essentially media relations on this side which is PR, our campus spokespersons, and a department of three this in addition to being our media relations or also our story tellers. If this is common across many university campuses but these are the folks who are actually interviewing faculty, writing the stories, and trying to drum up some interest.

In addition, here are traditional press releases, they also produce a number of our electronic communications such as internal newsletters. Alumni magazine which go out to a 130,000 people twice a year and a few other publications and then there’s electronic communications which I manage. And I have four full-time web developers and a video editor. Now, whenever I say four full-time web developers to a group like this, I got a couple of people in the back who start throwing things at me.

No one has done that yet because it’s early but let me explain. Four full-time web developers, we support 62 websites across our campus so we’ve really centralized a lot of web development and web management on our campus. A lot of departments help us fund those four positions because we are handling their web needs. So yes we have kind of a large team larger than most universities have and I know this because people threw things at me.

Well, really that’s not just supporting a campus website, it’s not just supporting the initiatives of communications and marketing it’s really supporting a number of departments across our campus. And then we have a full time video editor. Our video editor was a new position last summer.

Before that I’ve been with the department four years or with IUPUI four years before that I had an intern okay, a video intern. And this is someone who is studying a field related to video production whether it’s communication technology we have a new media program in our school of informatics. It could be an art student something like that and I had an intern and we had some successes there which I’ll talk about later that evolved into a full-time position. It was really the staring point for a lot of what I’m doing.

OK, where are we here? What we produce? OK, 2006 to this summer because like I said things started to change. We were producing about a 100 videos a year with a full-time editor and an intern.

So my synopses was a little mislead we do have a student working for us but one full-time staffer, okay. And what types of videos where we producing and I wont just show a list, I’ll show some things in a minute but regular meaning regular in frequency about four months student faculty profiles. So interesting students, faculty who are doing groundbreaking work etcetera. We’re occasionally doing features like featuring a department in campus, a service available to students, perhaps electric series and something like that, or a video that might play in an event like I produce the videos that play at our commencement ceremony and a few other voices.

So we would cover events of course you know send off the camera and covering, shoot an event and posting that online so people can check it out later maybe. And then a newscast called “The Spot” which we won an Admissions Advertising Award for but the spot essentially its five to six minutes each week. We have a student who hosts it and we just talk about what’s happening right in campus. What’s happened in the past week?

What’s coming up? Why are we doing this? Because we’re a commuter campus and a lot of students when they’re coming to class they drive to campus, get out their car, walked to building. After class they leave the building and walk back to their car and go home.

So there’s a perception that there isn’t anything happening in our campus. So there is a lot of life on our campus. There’s a lot of activity. There’s a lot of events. There’s a lot of major speakers etcetera so The Spot is one way that we showcase that to dispel those.

So where that video goes, here’s where I get to get off the PowerPoint. Pardon me for using Internet Explorer but Firefox didn’t have Flash results so just bare with me. This is our campus home page and we got a freaky guy up there. We’re actually featuring – this is one of our art exhibits but and that should be rotating but anyhow, we have videos embedded in our home page.

This is getting ready to change probably next month. The Ear Buds over here weren’t a successful as I hope they’d be but regardless we’re embedding video in this page. This page is viewed about 60,000 times a day and it is by far the most viewed page on our domain. The audience or let’s say the actual users or visitors of the site are mostly internal or current students. They are a faculty and staff.

How do I know this? Well, we have the Analytics but they’re clicking on email. They’re clicking on our Course Management Software. They’re using us a portal to get to what they’re looking for. They use it regularly and I appreciate this because it gives me the opportunity to put freaky people like that in front of them.

So IUPUI home page is one place the video goes and in addition to the home page, we have Flash players on dozens and dozens of other pages.

Audience 1: How about The Spot?

Steve Hodges: Yes. This is The Spot. This is a feature about a faculty member took us about and wrote a book on doughnuts I don’t get that, I’m in the wrong industry. And then a campus event called “IUPUI’s Got Talent or Doesn’t” if you watch it. So we’re going to watch it, it’s too early last night maybe. And then the other main place we’ve been distributing videos is on YouTube so this is our YouTube site and there’s somebody saying something really bad.

But IUPUI youtube.com/iupui so we actually have I think we’re up to 172 videos up on YouTube. I think that’s 173 somebody added one this morning. We have a number of playlist. We have a lot of different videos and I also favorite all kinds of stuff. Basically I look on YouTube for videos about IUPUI and if they’re favorable I favor them.

So videos go in two main places, third place is Podcast of course. This is really in the title of the presentation and you hope I talk about it. We’re also podcasting and that I would show you but I don’t really want to try to get to iTunes to work on this machine. We will talk about it more and more so back to the presentation where the video goes? OK, so when it comes down to though is what I think we do different and this is where we start getting into workflow in our approach.

OK, so what I’ve realized or come to accept is that we’re producing video on a YouTube world. If you’re audience is current in perspective students which generally my audience is, they have practically grown up with YouTube. What does that mean? They’ve been looking at really crappy video on the web for a long time.

That’s what they know. That’s the reality of it. If you look at YouTube and what’s popular there, it’s obviously user generated content and TV shows but let’s just ignore the TV show part of it for a moment. User generated content, production values are terrible but it seems very real.

Why I think we do things different? Well, I’ve talked to a lot of people around the country, a lot of people within Indiana University System and a lot of people that are producing video are doing it on an old broadcast model where they have a studio. They have a $90,000 HD camcorder. They have a staff of video editor maybe a sound engineer, producer all kinds of different roles.

The size of that kind of staff varies but it’s very much based in the broadcast world. So they’re producing things or videos at a slower phase because are typically very high production values but they’re not telling as many stories as say a 30,000 student campus really needs to be. So we live in a YouTube world and that means we need higher volume.

The production value is honestly don’t matter as much. Instead of a 100,000 HD camcorder, I started with a $700 Mini DV Camcorder and in market research and our focus groups. Our audiences told us they’ve liked our video better. Production values didn’t matter as much because they’re used to watching YouTube. So we live in a YouTube world and for those of you who haven’t really started video production in their campus maybe you probably don’t have access to a studio.

I would probably suggest not going that route. A lot of universities do have studios that have a full team but I don’t have a budget for that, I was never given a budget for that. So next, what we do different? OK, so I mentioned this broadcast model. How we very well could be setup because I could be the producer for all projects, I can meet with the clients, and bring in my video editor and videographer when it makes sense.

And we would have several people on our part who are involved in every production. What does that mean? Well, more people mean more cost. They also slow things down. Just be realistic.

So we look within our own department and we have our media relations staff. Now, these people are generally season journalists. They’ve been in journalism for 20 or 30 years. So they know how to tell a story. They know how to find a good story and they already have regular contact with people around campus.

So our media relation staff had become our video producers. We still continue to do a number of regular productions. So we feature students and faculty but something new that was their idea. One or two times a week we interview a faculty member about some current news topic that’s related to their area of expertise.

And they were so creative to call this current news and I’ve been trying to talk to them into something more interesting but we’ll get there. For now, it’s enough to know that we’re producing these, we’re placing around YouTube, we’re placing them everywhere else, and we’re showcasing our faculty in a different way. When we put this on the hands of people outside of my little world of electronic communications into the hands of the story tellers, they become the producers for their individual projects. What’s that mean?

Well, they’re doing the logistics so they’re finding an interview location. They’re preparing the interview questions. They’re setting up the interview. All my guy has to do on the office I have someone sat down. I’ll talk about that in a minute or two, is only to show up with the camera.

Shoot the video and go back and edit it. So we’re getting in the workflow here a bit. And that’s something we’re doing a little bit different. We’re using our videographers for videography.

We didn’t bring in extra layers of management to manage this process we use our existing resources. Now, we produce video for other people on campus as well from time to time we’ll cover campus events etcetera. Well, the person who is essentially running that event or planning that event becomes the producer. We work with that person directly. The videographer works with that person directly and that person becomes the producer.

So we’ve taken out a layer. OK, what else do we do different?  Our videos don’t live on an island back to workflow and a little bit of social application here. What I’ve learned is that a lot of people are using the stand along Flash Players nowadays right to play video on their sites so stand along Flash Players that means you can drop it on any site. You can drop a YouTube video in any page but most of the time this really do stand alone.

For an instance, our university president and not to pick on him, but he produces fabulous I mean they produce for the president this fabulous presidential updates, okay. And personally I think this would be better handled through text just text on the web but regardless he’s producing these videos and placing on the president’s website. They don’t go anywhere else they’re on the president’s website. So unless you go to the president’s website you never see it and when the new one comes out, that old video is just pulled off the site and never to be found again.

You can’t view them, it lives on an island. I see this in a lot on my campus. I see this a lot on other websites as well where we produce a video and it ends up in one place. Folks in my campus are pretty territorial and I see that all over the place. A specific school or department produces a video they want it hosted on their site because they want to drive traffic to their site and they won’t share it.

So content lives on an island. Well, we’re not doing that. You probably can’t read that but this is essentially how we distribute 90% of our video. It’s a basic web form it’s probably in tables don’t crucify me but this is internal and essentially video editor enters Meta data into this form, uploads the video to the server, click submit and it goes from that system to an XML file which is then pushed out to our campus home page automatically as well as 50 or 60 other embedded players on our site and then there’s my iPod and then out to iTunes, iTunes You, Podcast.iu.edu which is Indiana University’s Podcast portal and other places. So we enter it once, it’s pushed out to dozens and dozens of places just filling out one web form.

So our video doesn’t exist on an island. We then add video to a few other places let’s see if I listed it here now. It was late last night really. We upload the video to YouTube if it’s somewhat interesting we’ll add it to our Facebook as well. We have a digital signage around campus like you’ve seen in this building.

Some of our videos do run there. The Spot actually plays there every week. It is open caption so you can read along because we don’t have sound on any of our digital signage plays on campus cable. So it plays to the 1,300 students in-housing and also education access on Comcast and Bright House in Indianapolis. So those are all manual ads but we can push it out to two of our three main distribution platforms by filling out one web form.

So our video does not exist on an island. So that’s what I think we do different building on our successes. Well, here’s where the presentation started to change a bit. What worked and which institutional priorities can we support? Well, experimentation I have mentioned this. When I first started four years ago, I was hired by the department I beg for a $700 camera and essentially was experimenting.

When I got the funding for my first intern, we began experimenting. Will students produce the type of videos, the quality of videos we’re hoping to get those sorts of things? So here’s a list of different things we’ve experimented with. Production values so okay this concept that we live in a YouTube world. In fact from Butler, right? Butler has Butler University Butler.edu I’ll plug your site has a great series of videos.

What is it like a year? What do you call it? Oh, you have a few of them. Say a year in the life of freshmen from packing for school or college and up through their discovery of their freshman year of college whatever.

The production values, these were intentionally produced to not look professionally produced in my opinion. They look student produced. So I’ve seen this at other universities I think universities in Indianapolis and I think this has been a success. We’re not aiming for Emmy Award winning broadcast quality but instead setting the bar a little bit lower by cranking at a lot more video.

Production by interns big win? I only have one intern that didn’t work out so well but an intern a year ago, he’s serving overnight wreck right now but he just takes by. He did a great job. He would grab onto a story and tell it from he’s perspective bringing a really fresh production style. It’s really energetic and in fact having an intern on staff, he became sort of viral.

He was influencing his friends to produce videos about IUPUI. They actually started seeing videos about our campus on YouTube because this student was pretty well connected in certain communities and inspired his friends to tell stories. So anyhow, production by intern is a success. Sending cameras with regular like non-video students to capture their experiences big success as well. Whether it’s what I started with, our $700 camcorder, I send that out and I also send out flip cameras.

Flip cameras are I don’t know about the size of my iPod, a little bit thicker, and you can shoot video with them, okay. So very inexpensive but we’ve been sending these with students on say service trips or study abroad to sent on with their basketball team to a conference tournament that sort of thing. I haven’t went to that tape I’m a little afraid but that was a big success as well. And while this video certainly not in the very high production values kind of shaky but they still capture they actually took it upon themselves to shoot some interviews. Shot a lot of supplemental footages, a lot of the B-roll and what I’ve brought back was very useful and especially if you flag this as, “This was shot by so and so student in the department of whatever.” So that was a big success.

Soliciting student produced content and here’s what I mean by that. Essentially, I asked students to submit videos they’ve produced for class projects, or given them a topic about the university or the campus and say, “Hey, go produce a video about this and have a competition and give away a couple of iPods or something like that. This through, how do I promote the competition? Promoted it through all the of the usual communication channels that I have on campus.

Campus website we have a semiweekly emails that go to students which is actually very successful. Contacted student organizations directly, worked through faculty. Basically I think I gave my best effort at promoting the competition but you know what? This is a complete flop. I don’t know if it’s because students don’t really care to giving university a free content in their free time, or what but we have not gotten had a lot of success with this.

But all of our administrators on campus and a lot of other people I talked to this is their very first time. “Oh, we have 30,000 students and they love YouTube so let’s ask them for their videos.” Not so much, maybe we’ll have success with it but we haven’t. Recycling content from local media, if your local media is willing and they’re doing stories about your university whether it’s somebody building on your campus, football program etcetera, or maybe they’re interviewing one of your faculty members regarding their expert opinion on a current news topic, your university potentially has a lot of video content to play with here.

If your local media is willing and some of them are in our market, many of them are not but some of them are. So we ask them for those clips. They gave us those clips and we reuse them and repurposing content from other departments of IUPUI. This was a no brainer.            

There are plenty of other departments producing video on our campus. Some of them spending a ton of money, wish I have that money, but regardless a ton of money to produce videos about their program, about their faculty, about recruiting videos all sorts of different things. This believe or not, was a complete failure and I don’t what the culture on your campus is like but I don’t know if I just need to go around and hit people with a bigger stick or what. But there’s a lot of content out there on our campus that I’m hoping to tap into and I know at some point I’ll have some success but there are many ways that university communications and marketing or whatever, there are a lot of things that you can try to tap and you’ll have various bearing levels of success, every campus is a little bit different.

Audience 2: What is the reason for saying the internal sources of failure? What happens if there is a failure?

Steve Hodges: Well, I mentioned earlier that people tend to operate in silos in our campus, okay. And some of them, some of the video producers are being paid to re-output their video and send it over to communications and marketing I mean you get that attitude.

Audience 2: So you just wouldn't cooperate with them?

Steve Hodges: Right, or some of them where very intentional they said, “You know, we have our own YouTube page and we want to put it there, or we want it on our department website, we don’t want people to go to your website.” So there’s a lot of this territorial and some spent a lot of money on these videos I can understand some of those concerns especially trying to build their own YouTube presence. So there’s a variety of reasons and a lot of it depends on your campus culture. We don’t have a mandate from the top for instance and I think that may be coming but there’s just been that sort of friction.

So building on successes more interns this is 2 am humor people, building our successes more interns. Well, here is where things really started to change. Last spring about a month after I submitted this presentation, I got a little bit of a bump in my budget and decided to go from one intern to three. And then I had a conversation with a couple of other departments who are interested in increasing the volume of footage or videos produced about their department and I went from three interns to six, my six interns for this fall. 

They started in August. They’ve been around about five or six weeks now. And I had about 25 applicants for this six positions which is a lot concerning I promoted it in the summer and a lot of students where they have internships lined up for the fall. And you say, “Wow, six interns. You talk about a staff of one in here.” 

Well, my department is paying for three of them. Of those three, two are work study. So if those two work 20 hours a week and I pay him through work study $3 an hour, I’m not really paying much out of my budget for that staff. The other three are being funded by other departments so we’ve got a little creative here. So when I was interviewing these students, I have a couple of questions for them.

One what is about IUPUI that you think other people need to know? What is here that other people don’t know about or what stories would you tell about this campus? And then I asked the questions, “What are you involved in on campus? What do you know about institutional priorities?” I didn’t phrase it that way those sorts of things, I’m trying to get a feel for how passionate these students were about our campus whether they thought or even stories worth telling about our campus.

What kinds of things they’re interested in? One of the first interviews I did someone said, “Well, I think there’s a lot of really interesting students doing cool stuff around here. There’s also really interesting faculty like there’s listed a couple of projects in specific department that he thought were pretty cool.”

And I said, “I think this kid just wants a job because he has looked at the videos reproduced and sees that that’s what we feature and that’s what he’s going to take.” So about 10 or 12 interviews later, I heard the same thing and almost every interview. I heard a variety of things, different things students we’re passionate about there was a threat that there’s a lot of interesting things happening on the campus. So we had an orientation in early August, I was traveling most of August so we had it kind of well before they started.

But in the orientation I sort of asked those questions again. And then I told them, “You will be assigning yourself most of your video projects for the semester. Along with the expectation I expected video a week out of each of you.” So the students are producing things that are of interest to them.

When we have a campus event to shoot I asked actually five of these video interns, one is journalism. I asked the five video interns who’s interested in covering this and more than likely someone is actually interested in that event, it’s not just an assignment. So if they’re producing a faculty profile you saw on our home page, we have a video about a faculty member that did a book on doughnuts. One of students went out and found that story himself and said, “Hey, there’s this really cool faculty member that’s doing this so I’d like to profile him.” And he did.

So there’s a sense of ownership amongst our interns. I mentioned that we don’t have a lot of student produced content that we’re able to tap on our campus. Well, yeah we’re paying these students but this is student produced content. There are all credited. They’re shooting their own style. They’re all taking a great deal of pride in their work and we’re getting student produced content.

An interesting side effect of this is in the six weeks or so since we started the semester, these student’s friends have started producing more about our campus. We’ve seen more content out on YouTube and a couple of these students that had ideas that I wouldn’t want to move forward with. They produce some anyway in their free time and post them online. So maybe we’re sort of seeding future social applications on the web or social content on the web.

So is anybody out there I’m not talking about you, this is a segue and not a very good one. So that’s been our major change. We’ve really increased the size of our staffing but my video editors gone more to a manager. He’s managing these students. The Spot our Podcast which I would encourage you to check out is entirely produced by the students now so this is become student media.

Our journalism intern writes it. He does a lot of the interviews. Our students are producing stories that are of interest to them because of interest to these six students, I guarantee you they’re of interest to a lot more students on our campus. So a lot of things are becoming more relevant and I think more effective communications because we brought in students. The students are not only producing but they’re producing their ideas. So something that’s always nice to cover in these types of things is some Analytics who’s watching what, where yeah question.

Audience 3: What were the problems you faced with the explosion? The basic problems like in space. But are your student videos have a sort of working at web capture? Those kinds of systems always have input.

Steve Hodges: Sure. Well, the question how we dealt with this explosion. First one of the departments that is paying for one the interns also pay for training workstations for interns, okay. But they’re sitting in pretty cramps quarters right now. To be honest, we have a new campus center which opened on our campus last January.

There happened to be a little bit of space in there and we took advantage of that. But I think the biggest shift is been taking the person who is doing the majority of our video production, my full-time video editor, and I’ve turned him to a supervisor. So he’s really not producing anything at this point and not much. He is supervising, he’s managing the interns.         

So that’s been the bigger challenge. They are sharing equipment. They’re not working at home. Some of them use their own equipment and if our equipment is unavailable being film students or the communication students some of them do own cameras. So that’s sort of how we’ve dealt with that growth is by shifting some personnel really and then begging for equipment.

So let me get through this real quick and then we’ll jump through questions quickly. Is anybody out there? OK, I mentioned a lot of different places where we’re distributing video and yes this won’t be up long enough but that’s okay. So here’s how it breaks down.

We have about 18,000 views of our videos per month online I can’t track the offline ones because Nielsen doesn’t care about education access. And out of those 18,000, this is podcasting so people actually downloading MP4 files off of our server. Podcasting and YouTube both have about 8,200 views a month, okay. And then our campus website, our home page and all of the other players is about 2,300 views a month.

This was last month, this was September 08 so is anyone out there? Yeah, 18,000 views and I think that’s pretty good. So that’s sort of that breakdown. I’d like to take questions, we’re running out of time but I know some of you have some good questions. Yeah.

Audience 4: Can you just quickly review your infrastructure on how your videos are produced or hosted and also did you developed the Flash player app in-house? 

Steve Hodges: Yes. I did produce the Flash Video Player in-house. We have a Flash Video Server that’s actually maintained by one of our departments or school of informatics has a Flash Video Server so we’ve taken advantage of that. I don’t think necessary I think popping those files on an institutional web host would have sufficed. But I did develop the player in-house because I wanted to pull from our XML files.

I wanted to present it in a very specific way in our home page developed that in-house. I also wanted to be able to link to transcripts for all our videos so our journalism intern actually transcribes all of our videos under 10 minutes. So a lot of Flash players didn’t offer that mix of functionality I wanted this to work as a system. So yeah, I have developed that in-house.

The next phase of that actually I’m working on our new Flash player and that will actually include sync to captioning which is big accessibility. I’m actually working with some best students in our campus to make sure this is done right. But I’ve already written a tool that will allow my journalism intern after she’s written the transcript to go ahead and sync it with the video that I wrote with PHP and Java Script. So we’ve developed these tools in-house because I think they’re pretty narrow they have some pretty specific features.

Any other questions, what else we get here? Yeah.  

Audience 5: Can you describe more about the workflow about how your videos come in?

Steve Hodges: OK. Here’s the quick version. So the producer, that’s someone in media relations contacts our video editor and says, “Hey, we want to shoot an interview with this person.” And they go ahead and setup that interview time. Like I said a lot of that pre-production is left to the producer, it’s left to the person in media relations.

My video team isn’t really handling them, okay. So we show up with the shoot, shoot the video, take it back and we capture it. Sometimes we’ll shoot on an external hard drives too so we can copy it over to the computer faster but regardless. The intern will create a rough edit send it off to the client producer say, “What do you think?” Get edits back or changes back and make those changes and send it back for final approval.

Once that’s done, we output it to seven different formats. We have a broadband and 56K versions of our video on our website for instance. So there’s two formats MP4 format for iTunes and YouTube, DVD archive copy one for Digital Signage and the list goes on and on. And then that is an input into the system I showed you and is pushed out into the wild and they clean up their hard drives. Send the footage off to University Archives and that’s the process. 

Audience 6: Steve, this is a quick question. Your area involve at all with providing new kinds of motion and media content, Podcast and online classes, or interactive CD’s or any academic materials.

Steve Hodges: Right. I’m being told to wrap it up but I’ll…

Male: No, repeat the question.

Steve Hodges: Oh repeat the question that’s with that usually that means get the heck out of here Steve. OK, I got you, okay repeating the question, so are we producing any content for academic materials? No. Nice thing about being one of the 20 largest universities in the world IU Indiana University is that our Course Management Software actually handles podcasting for faculty which is kind of cool and we do not do any production for academic materials.

That’s handled by other departments in-house at IU and sometimes they outsource it. More often than not though the faculty are producing that type of thing themselves so we’re not, we have other departments for that. Questions, questions, questions yeah.

Audience 7: But that’s including your buggy operative form..

Steve Hodges: Yeah.

Audience 7: That handles your home grown system or that you use a particular software app?  

Steve Hodges: We use an app that was believe it or not freeware and I don’t remember the name of it. Let me think about that but yes we do do all that encoding through a piece of software so we output from Premiere our archive quality copy of the video. We drop in into a piece of software and it cranks out all those different formats so yeah we sure do.

Audience 8: Is that add up to XML Meta data that you form? Do you ever set the file?

Steve Hodges: It doesn’t. It should. Yes, the question does the application have the Meta data to those files. It doesn’t, I need to look for a better application that can handle that. Good call.

Audience 9: So you’re not using Podcast?

Steve Hodges: We’re in Adobe Shop. Premiere CS3 almost cause me to throw out on my workstation and by max because I had some serious problems with HDV footage when we’re shooting an HDV. So I don’t know I’m not tied to a specific software package or platform. Yeah.

Audience 10: You've been discussing the editing here?

Steve Hodges: I’m sorry. Yes, the question was he was asking what platform we use? And we are on Adobe Shop but that’s subject to change. Adobe keeps screwing up online switch.

Audience 11: What is the next challenge for this?

Steve Hodges: I don’t have any fundamental issues with the software but we’ve been having a lot of problems with how it handles HD footage. We’re having a lot of problems getting Premiere CS3 to output Quicktime files and it’s caused some major hiccups on our workflow. If we can’t produce on it because it’s causing a lot of problems I’m going to switch.

So other than that I love Premiere. Can I get more questions out of them, this group or no? Do you want to kick me up? One more question all right. Come on somebody. Yeah.

Audience 12: Do you guys reuse footage from prior shoots? And if still, how do you handle I guess catalog all the footage?

Steve Hodges: Good question. The question is, do we reuse any footage from prior shoots and how do we catalog that footage? Yes, we reuse a lot of footage. We were using an external hard drives until we realized external hard drives have this tendency to fail.

So in lieu of me getting a new workstation when we bought a RAID and restoring all of our lot of B-roll, a lot of our stock footages in campus on our RAID. How do we manage that content? I don’t have a really good solution for that. In fact I have a terrible solution for that but we make it work.

At this point generally file based we do have a spreadsheet where we tend to log it tape numbers, type of content and that sort of thing and we find ourselves referring to that spreadsheet in a while. I don’t know if I want to invest in a damn a digital asset management system and there are so expensive but that’s where we should be. So good question but yeah reuse, reuse, reuse. We repurpose footage all the time.

I guess that’s all the time we have. I’ll be here if you have questions.

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Announcer: For more presentations from the 2008 HighEdWeb Conference visit HighEdWeb.org/2008 or sign up for our podcast and feed at HighEdWeb.org/podcast.xml

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