Accompanying Abstracts with Video Clips
Tags: techtalks, speaking
Published: 2020-02-02 04:24:04

I've been going to a local conference since its inception, only missing 3 years since 2006. That makes the conference special to me and gives it a bit of a "home" feeling. 

This year was the first year that I've _submitted_ an abstract. Since my emotional investment was high, I wanted to increase my odds of acceptance - or at least the odds that the reviewers would understand what I had to offer and what my talks were about.

For the event we used Sessionize which has a field for a video link if you want to include one. If your event does NOT have a field for this, you can still include one in the non-public notes area (if one is present) with a comment that a video pitch can be found at this address.

## First Video Submission

I started simply by resubmitting a talk I successfully gave at the regional CodeMash conference.

{% link https://dev.to/integerman/preparing-and-nailing-my-first-conference-talk-25jd %}

Creating video for this one was fairly simple, since I had all of my slides already as well as the results of the feedback for the session:

{% youtube jGaKfb873SE %}

## Software Used

For this, I used Vegas Movie Studio Platinum, Steam Edition to arrange audio and video clips. Video is a poor word to use, since I simply used still screenshots of my slides as video segments and transitioned the video between screenshots.

Audio was recorded using Sound Forge, though I have since switched to the free Audacity application.

For the first video I recorded a number of small audio clips and tried to stitch them into a cohesive whole, but the result chopped off bits of the audio clips due to my still-developing skills. As a result, I did the other two videos as a single recorded audio clip.

## Second Video Submission

Next, I made a video advertising a talk I've not given, but really want to on the Scientist family of libraries. This is probably my worst of the three due to the ums, but give it a watch because Scientist is worth learning about.

{% youtube VQDuwdLYk-U %}

## Third Video Submission

I ended things off by dusting off old slides from last summer on a talk on .NET testing. This time around I stuck to a script and did multiple takes to make sure I had the wording right.

{% youtube OnGYiVqAFCQ %}

I also made a few audio environment tweaks to reduce the background noise, but it's still noticeable.

## Thoughts and Takeaways

Overall, I don't think my energy level carried through - particularly in the introduction. While I'm not a bubbly or energetic person exactly, it would be good to sound a bit more excited.

On the background noise front I did purchase a new microphone afterwards for the next time I do this. I'll also try to learn a bit more about audio design to remove background noise.

I'll find out if any of these 3 talks got accepted by the end of February. 

Shameless Plug: If you run an online or Ohio-based event and would like to invite me to speak on any of these topics or anything else I've written about, please feel free to message me.

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Overall, I really enjoyed the process of stitching together audio and video, though am obviously still a novice.