Panopto’s capabilities for recording conferences were not just tested by Digital Humanities. Egrove Park, an annex of the Saïd Business School, ran a half-day workshop that was recorded by Panopto.
The workshop was structured around flash talks lasting 3-4 minutes followed by group work developing posters, then more flash talks to see if presentation skills had improved.
There were no serious problems at Egrove Park that raised major concerns about Panopto’s suitability.
The biggest issue was that the recording was one second out sync, meaning it needed to be manually edited. This was a result of hardware and a bug in the OSX version of the software – the team have since switched from a Blackmagic Mini Recorder to a Magewell XI100DUSB-HDMI device, which has reduced the delay to an acceptable two or three frame. The second matter that arose was access to the files for the users who did not have Single Sign On. To solve this, external participants were given access to the recording by a WebLearn site, which auto-generated e-mail to each. Initially this caused further confusion, until an explanation was communicated.
Overall, the event organiser was pleased with the quality of the output and has received only positive feedback on the experience of using Panopto as a whole, even with the small issue of permission that arose.
