Swiss-Prot 20 Talks on Google Video

One year after the amazing and memorable conference that was held at the 20th anniversary of Swiss-Prot we’ve made all the talks available on Google Video. Here’s a starting point. I heard it’s going to be a rainy weekend ;-)

Technical Note

The quality of the recordings wasn’t great. I finally managed to get something watchable without too much effort with help of the following tools:

  • TMPGEnc XPress was used to extract the videos from the DVDs on which we got them, clean up and boost the audio signal, and encode the result as DivX movies.
  • Audacity was used to clean up the audio of the keynote speech (which was so bad that TMPGEnc XPress failed).
  • VirtualDubMod was used to boost the audio level of all talks further (TMPGEnc XPress can only do 500%), merge back the audio of the keynote speech, and to trim some movies. All of this could be done very fast as VirtualDubMod does not need to re-encode the movies for such operations.

The reason for choosing Google Video over the more popular YouTube or the more specialized DnaTube site was that it didn’t have their upload limitations (max file size 100MB). The main drawback of Google Video is that it doesn’t allow you to create sets of movies that belong together — it seems you can’t even link to e.g. all movies from a specific publisher! But of course this is less of a problem than not being able to even upload your movies…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 16:59 and is filed under Life Science. The content of this entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Swiss-Prot 20 Talks on Google Video”

  1. Hari Jayaram Says:
    August 13th, 2007 at 22:00

    WOW Eric,
    I am so glad for this. I really liked google tech talks and its great to see content like this relevant to the biosciences on Google video.
    On an entirely un-related note , I feel guilty , but encouraged by your mention of dnatube to use this opportunity to plug a website that a bunch of us lifescience postdocs started.

    Its called bioscreencast.com. We really want the next generation of scientists who use video to learn to start using screencasts to share their knowledge. We have some screencasts there which deal with PFAM , Jalview , EBI and NCBi databases .

    We would be thrilled to see screencasts from members of the bioinformatics community on all aspects of bioinformatics data and data use.Once again thanks for these talks and drop me a line if you have any questions
    Thanks
    hari Jayaram
    Postdoc, Brandeis University
    For Bioscreencast.com

  2. Eric Jain Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 09:44

    Bioscreencast.com looks interesting… We’ve done some screencasts for beta.uniprot.org with Wink, will consider uploading them to that site!

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