Tuesday, November 16, 2004
Traveling
I'm in Phoenix this week at the Software Defined Radio Technical conference, so posting will be sporadic. For the moment, I'll relate a bemusing little story from the conference.
Two years ago, my advisor, a colleague and I gave a tutorial on software radio at the conference. (pretty cool, ehh? Giving a tutorial on software radio at a software radio conference.) In conjunction with this tutorial, we filmed 8 hours of our tutorial for release on a set of DVDs. At the 2002 conference, the SDR Forum (who paid the production costs) was selling our DVDs for about $500. At the 2003 conference, the Forum was selling our DVDs for about $250. This year, every conference registrant got a copy of the DVDs for free.
Always fun when the market tells you exactly how much your work is worth.
However, I'm actually not that bothered by the DVDs being given away. We had contracted Virginia Tech's Video Broadcasting Services group to do the filiming and post-production. And the production of the video is so bad, it's actually comical. There's innumerable audio and video hiccups. There's a lovely three minutes where my advisor is just staring at the screen not saying anything. Twice during my portion, you hear instructions from the VT production crew for me to stop and go back and redo a bit; once they interrupt my segment with a question about who would be doing the next segment. Really, the production value is so low, that a) I believe we could've gotten better value from a pair of teenagers pulled off the street and b) it's so bad it just has to be seen to be believed.
So with the SDR Forum giving away the DVDs, the price finally matches the production value.
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Two years ago, my advisor, a colleague and I gave a tutorial on software radio at the conference. (pretty cool, ehh? Giving a tutorial on software radio at a software radio conference.) In conjunction with this tutorial, we filmed 8 hours of our tutorial for release on a set of DVDs. At the 2002 conference, the SDR Forum (who paid the production costs) was selling our DVDs for about $500. At the 2003 conference, the Forum was selling our DVDs for about $250. This year, every conference registrant got a copy of the DVDs for free.
Always fun when the market tells you exactly how much your work is worth.
However, I'm actually not that bothered by the DVDs being given away. We had contracted Virginia Tech's Video Broadcasting Services group to do the filiming and post-production. And the production of the video is so bad, it's actually comical. There's innumerable audio and video hiccups. There's a lovely three minutes where my advisor is just staring at the screen not saying anything. Twice during my portion, you hear instructions from the VT production crew for me to stop and go back and redo a bit; once they interrupt my segment with a question about who would be doing the next segment. Really, the production value is so low, that a) I believe we could've gotten better value from a pair of teenagers pulled off the street and b) it's so bad it just has to be seen to be believed.
So with the SDR Forum giving away the DVDs, the price finally matches the production value.
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