Videos from BiomedCentral: IainH and Gulliver Turtle (Panton #4 and #5) and thanks to Musopen

I have spent the last days on and off editing the material that Laura Newman (OKFN) and I collected from BiomedCentral – interviewing Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and also Gulliver Turtle. Iain has got the (slightly edited) video/audio and hoped to let me have comments shortly, when I can release a final edited version.

Before I talk about the details I want to say how much I appreciate what BiomedCentral has done for the processing of publishing science Openly. They have been going a bit over 10 years and when they started their business model was unproven. I have paid tribute to this in /pmr/2010/06/11/reclaiming-our-scholarship-tribute-to-vitek-tracz-and-bmc/ last year. I have also commended their initiatives in going beyond the mainstream. While most publisher “open access” (such as it is) has to be dragged year-by-year from apparently resistant publishers BMC has gone out in front and want to show what we should be doing. So there is a lot of this in Iain’s interview.

Editing videos is hard work and I would be grateful for advice from people who’ve done it. It depends critically on the material and Iain was a superb interviewee. He knew what the questions would be and had prepared thoroughly, so when we interviewed him the replies were fluent, without hesitation, deviation or repetition. There are about 20 questions and answers – here is a typical one –

and the whole interview lasts about 28 minutes. So I am planning to create:

• A complete edited movie of 29 minutes
• 20 snippets (Q + A), each in its own movie (1-2 mins each)

Each Q+A has the interviewer (mainly Laura) in the semi-background, but quite audible and then Iain’s response. The audio seems very clear – it was an empty room with a lapel mike for Iain and a camera mike for the interviewer.

Q: should I create 20 snippets or try to bundle them into larger themes?

Q: where should I post them (currently I will use VIMEO with a CC-BY licence)?

I also wish to get a transcript of the session (this is very important for indexing by search engines). Last time we asked for OKF volunteers and it took ages. I am considering Mechanical Turk which will costs about 1 USD/min of video, so ca 30 USD. There’s a good tutorial on this (http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/ ) so it seems to be very cost-effective and I am expect of high quality (given the simplicity of the task and the clarity of the material).

Meanwhile I have also created the final version of Gulliver Turtle’s interview (http://vimeo.com/34259668).

I wanted to add music to the slideshow so that it added to the atmosphere, and @davemurrayrust offered his CC-BY material (http://mo-seph.com/). However it was too good in that the reader/listener spent more attention on the music than the text. So I started looking for CC-BY or CC-PD music and was pointed to a wonderful site (http://musopen.org). This has many hundred public domain recordings (sic, CC-PD) mainly from “the classics”. So it was question of selecting something that added to the video.

I couldn’t find Carnival of the Animals so first tried Schumann’s kinderszenen – but we all agreed it was too sentimental. So the animals now have Bach’s Anna Magdalena in the background (far better than I can play it!). It’s fairly easy to add music – you have to trim it to the right length. It’s repeated three times to fit and has a fade at the end. I’d value comments, but I am thinking of using it as the basic AnimalGarden background for any generally “happy” photocomic.

So then I resurrected the slideshow that I had given at the Serpentine Gallery /pmr/2011/10/16/garden-marathon-at-serpentine/ and added music to it. This was harder, as the themes were Innocence, Greed and Treachery, and Hope. Still choosing from Musopen (and again many thanks) I chose Anna Magdalena, Winter (4 Seasons) and Brandenburg 6-1. Certianly I am really happy to have found a PD site that gives me so much choice.

(There will be no music for IainH’s interview)