Laura Kalbag @laura@mastodon.laurakalbag.com

@iamalsoandy thanks!

@tobykurien I have issues with being over-exposed/washed-out by too much monitor light, so yesterday I put a red wallpaper on my big monitor’s desktop, and only used half the screen for the browser, so the (low budget!) effect was a warmer light. @aral

@tobykurien I was struggling a lot yesterday because the stream was at sunset! Mostly just the room light (it’s quite bright), and a couple of table lamps. Sometimes the table lamp on my right side is a bit too strong, so I even it out with a little Manfrotto camera light (with a warm filter) that Aral bought for tv interviews years ago attached to a random tripod! @aral

My not being able to sleep means there’s now a transcript and captions up on our latest #SmallIsBeautiful video.

We go through our streaming setups, how we do it on a budget, including equipment and creating transcripts and captions.

https://small-tech.org/videos/small-is-beautiful-04/

@martinjd if you follow the url that was on the screen, you can join the studio. There’s a private chat there, but you can also join with a camera and mic. Though perhaps in the future I should keep social media open so I can catch questions on here! cc @aral

@jeanjean yes! There’ll be a video online right after, and a transcript and captions hopefully sometime tomorrow.

I’m going to talk about making captions and transcripts, and go through a couple of services I’ve used for automating speech-to-text. If you want to join in/ask questions live, we’ll be doing that too! This evening 5pm Irish time.

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/105588712652835366

@lps I’d never say no to help, but I think it’s a big ask for someone to do every week!

@pixouls I’ve not tried it, though I’ve heard a couple of people say Otter is sometimes not accurate enough for them. (Though apparently Otter is cheaper.)

@kino may well be, underneath it all. But as it’s publicly-available video, I’m ok with using it. Wouldn’t be the same if it was a private interview or similar. YouTube captioning is nowhere near as good (I used to use it, then delete the videos back before there were more services.) And editing tools are a real necessity to speed up the workflow too.

And now we have the captions and transcript up on our site for the Small is Beautiful #3 livestream.

This was a really great discussion, so much fascinating detail on the strategies for introducing more ethical (and easy-to-use!) computers into schools.

https://small-tech.org/videos/small-is-beautiful-03/

I really really believe that captions and transcripts should be included with videos by default. But blimey, doing hour-long video streams every week has really been testing my commitment to that. Especially when we don’t have money to spend. But I’m determined!

Been testing Simon Says for transcripts/captions today and I think I might be in love with a web app that’s going to save me hours and hours.

https://www.simonsays.ai

Automated transcript has great accuracy as a starting point (including for non-native English speakers!) and combined with the well-designed editing tools, I’m able to edit so much faster. Prices are also affordable for our tiny not-for-profit organisation.

@adamprocter because it’s designed to be a “studio”, it has a maximum number of participants. (As admins we can see everyone’s camera even if they’re not added to the stream.) If there were more than that, I suspect the browser might fall over, not to mention it being difficult to pick people out to add to the stream!

@adamprocter sorry for the lack of good information, I’ll make sure I explain it better next time! And thank you for being so understanding :)

The live stream is this evening (5pm Irish time) on our site at https://small-tech.org/events/small-is-beautiful/