The following is a list of suggestions that you may find useful when recording your talk.
- You are free to use any recording medium you feel comfortable with. There are two very easy methods, either will record your talk and save it in a form suitable for YouTube.
- Use PowerPoint to make your slides, you can then very simply record your entire presentation within PowerPoint using the instructions here.
- Open a Zoom meeting, share your screen with your slides and click record.
- If you choose a different method, please make sure the format is supported by YouTube, e.g. MP4, MOV, MPEG4, AVI, WMV, and FLV.
- We accept slides in the PDF format. If you do not use slides to present your research, we kindly ask you to provide a summary/conclusion slide.
- When using slides in your talk, make sure that the slide number is clearly visible for easier reference during the asynchronous discussions.
- It is easy to waste time over-optimizing a prerecorded talk. See the public talks of the Cosmology from Home conference series to get an impression of what others have done in this medium.
- You are free to choose the structure of your talk. You can use the default of a recorded “webinar” if you wish. Otherwise, feel free to experiment. Some possibilities are:
- Recording a presentation of slides with voiceover using other software, with additional features, e.g. StreamYard or Open Broadcaster Software.
- Recording yourself being interviewed by a colleague (in person or on Zoom).
- Recording yourself in front of a blackboard.
- Keep the time limit of the talks in mind as talks are strictly limited to 20 minutes.
- It is much easier to remain focused and not make a mistake for three to four minutes than 20. Therefore, unless you plan to edit your talk, we suggest you do the recording in separate parts, rather than one big take. This way you do not need to re-record the entire talk from the start if you make a mistake. Subsequently, concatenating your separate recordings into one video is straightforward using the “ffmpeg” (or similar) tool, which can be easily installed on linux/mac:
printf "file '%s'\n" video1.mp4 video2.mp4 video3.mp4 > input.txt
ffmpeg -f concat -i input.txt -c copy output.mp4
- If you like, you can briefly introduce yourself before you talk about your research, for example by mentioning your name, affiliation and research interests.
- Make sure that the room you are recording in is well lit and free of distractions, and that you can be seen and heard clearly in your recording.
- Whichever method you use, remember that you as a speaker will probably appear somewhere on the screen during your talk. Keep that in mind when writing your presentation slides so that you don’t obscure important parts of any slides.