September 2020

2020–09–04, Friday

Lecturing from the comfort of my home today – what a time to be alive!

My lecture started 08:15 in the morning, and it was a nice experience to sit comfortably and stream my lecture to the students – who perhaps also were sitting comfortably.

No early morning bike ride in the rain. No stressing with the HDMI connection and projector resolutions. Just sitting down in my home office, with everything set up the night before, pressing Start streaming and wait for the students to join.

Actually, I spent quite some time during spring preparing for this possibility. So, my home office can now double as a streaming studio. Here is what I did:

• Learned to use OBS (Open Broadcaster Software).
• Aquired a good sound card, the Komplete Audio 6 – which I also use to interconnect my Mother 32 (hardware synth) with Alsa Modular Synth (on my computer).
• Got the Røde M2, microphone – which has a really nice sound to it.
• Bought a Sony α A5100 camera.
• Connected the camera to my computer using an elgato Cam Link 4k.

Learning OBS is definitely the most bang for buck thing I did. OBS is free (in every sense) and is just such a great tool for composing video directly. It can even be used as a virtual webcam, feeding into video conference programs – even Zoom.

The A5100 is a great camera for streaming, since it has a clean HDMI output: No focus boxes or HUD elements plastered onto it. With the elgato I get 1080p and 50fps in through a USB 3.0 port.

The caveats with streaming using the A5100 are:

• The camera becomes upset when you do this. After running for more than 30mins, if you turn it of, it will not turn back on without taking the battery in and out. But as long as you keep it running, it can stream for hours and hours.
• There is no way to reliably turn off the skin smoothing effect. This is stupid, since it is clearly something Sony could have fixed with a firmware update. Here are some facts, about this problem:
  • When not in movie mode, you can turn it off normally.
  • When in movie mode, if you turn off face detection and record to SD-card, the skin smothing goes off.
  • If you are not recording internally, just streaming from the HDMI output, any digital zooming will turn off skin smoothing.
• The elgato is picky about what USB port you put it into. On my computer it will not work with an external USB 3.0 hub, and on the front ports it occationally gets hang-ups. However, on the backside ports it is smooth as butter!

But earnestly, I do not think streaming should be the default way of lecturing any time soon. And the reason I think so has little to do with me the lecturerer. Nor does it have anything to do with the tech – which worked great! But my opinion is that the students need to meet physically.

When you go to a lecture you see that you are not alone about learning this stuff. And you get to know the other students, and talk with them during breaks. You let your eyes wonder across the room and look at all the faces. And perhaps you find a face you really like, and which you migth work up the courage to talk to one of these days.

For humans, there is so much motivation in this! If everything is online, you don’t get that motivation to see the lecture. And you do not learn something accedentally because you overheard those on the row in front of you discuss their solution to an exercise, tête-à-tête.