improve speaker visibility in dark rooms

[markvdb]

It's almost impossible in some rooms to see the speaker.
Two things are at play:

• Weak beamer means switching off the room lighting so the audience can see the screen
• The speaker sometimes walks in front of the screen. Dark speaker on light background == almost invisible.

We could do two things mainly:

• Give the speaker a virtual cage so he stays outside of the screen area. Basicly tape off his cage on the stage floor. This obviously needs to be communicated about very very clearly.
• Active lighting. Our rental supplier has some options. We do need to build some knowledge around this and/or get advice...

[RichiH]

Active lighting seems like a lot of hassle unless the rooms are staffed and if they are, there might be better options to use the manpower. I am always in favour of taping off areas both for speakers and attendees. Also quite some work, but at least that's before the main event and once per room. Richard Sent by mobile; excuse my brevity and the wall of text Gmail appends by default.

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On Oct 22, 2017 22:18, "Mark Van den Borre" ***@***.***> wrote: It's almost impossible in some rooms to see the speaker. Two things are at play: - Weak beamer means switching off the room lighting so the audience can see the screen - The speaker sometimes walks in front of the screen. Dark speaker on light background == almost invisible. We could do two things mainly: - Give the speaker a virtual cage so he stays outside of the screen area. Basicly tape off his cage on the stage floor. This obviously needs to be communicated about very very clearly. - Active lighting. Our rental supplier has some options. We do need to build some knowledge around this and/or get advice... — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#113>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAuEIx6-Aba0zSFyHmalk0SS5gGuPM-gks5su6MYgaJpZM4QCFro> .

[yoe]

Taping off areas for speakers is not going to work. Sometimes speakers want to move in front of their screen to point something out. Some speakers just don't want to stand in a single place because they think their talk is more engaging if they walk around a bit (and I couldn't agree more).

I see two practical solutions to this problem:

• Ensure we have better projectors so that the lighting in the room can be switched on without causing too much grief for the audience
• Ensure that the cameras we rent have good low-light capabilities. That way, the recording won't look as bad when the speaker is in the dark.

[krokodilerian]

@yoe, both aren't really options, as:

• the projectors come from ULB;
• the cameras have pretty nice low-light capabilities, but half of the time the screen is somewhat in the frame and there isn't a lot the camera can do. And even the best cameras in this regard can't deal well with bad lighting.

Some kind of light that illuminates the speaker can go a long way (especially for H).

[yoe]

Well, in that case theoretically you could set them to spot metering, but I agree that that's probably not a viable way of doing things for untrained camera people.

It's true that we use the projectors from ULB because that's easiest, but there's nothing that says we have to. If we can improve the video quality by just renting better equipment, I'd say that's definitely worth it; at the very least it's worth investigating.

If people can still see the slides when the lighting is switched on, that will hugely improve the video quality with no need to train our video staff, which I think is preferable over anything that does require such training.

[markvdb]

We have a potential solution to this that we will test in H where things were most problematic. Nudge nudge, wink wink.

[markvdb]

The only thing we can possibly do it tape off speaker cages to prevent them from having the bright screen on camera and messing up the auto exposure.