My name is Aliza Hutchison. I'm with QuickTime Product Marketing. It's my great pleasure today to have two speakers for you. We have Gudrun Enger, the Director of Communications for ACM SIGGRAPH, and we also have Dave Bergivin, Director of Technical Operations for SOMA Media. So I would like to ask if we could hold all of our questions until the end and we'll do a short question and answer. And with that, I invite Gudrun up on to the stage.

Thanks for joining us this morning. Again, my name is Gudrun Enger. I'm the ACM SIGGRAPH Director for Communications. That is my volunteer position at ACM SIGGRAPH. For my day job, I work at Stanford University. And I'm here today to tell you just a little bit about my role.

I just want to tell you a little bit about our organization. I want to tell you why we chose Soma Media to do our product and what our plans are for 2004. And then I'm going to turn it over to Dave and he's going to give you the technical background of the product because that's of course why you're here.

ACMC Graph, for those of you who don't know, is a professional computer society. It stands for the Association of Computer Machinery Special Interest Group Computer Graphics Interactive Techniques. We are a volunteer run organization with about 6,500 members. The majority of our members are extremely technical. They are researchers. They come from industry and education.

One of our events every year is our annual conference which is typically held the end of July, beginning of August. We have anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 attendees at this conference. The other events and activities that we do as part of our association include: chapters, educators program, symposia and other co-located events.

The annual conference is our biggest program but it is not our only program but it is where we have the most visibility. This year's conference will be in Los Angeles the second week of August. We have technical programs which include papers, panels, courses, sketches which are short innovative new research.

We have special sessions. We also have a keynote and awards ceremony. In addition to the technical part of the conference we also have an art show, an educators program, the electronic theater and computer animation festival which the clip we just showed you from that. And of course a large exhibit hall.

So one of our main goals, we try to do a membership survey every couple of years and one of the things that was continually coming out in the membership survey was that our members wanted to see more content from the conference and have it accessible online. And so we, over the past three years, 2001, 2002, 2003, we've been doing pilot experiments to see the best way to capture that content, the best way to deliver it, how to put it online, how to keep it safe, all these kind of things. Last year we teamed up with Soma Media to capture a small portion of our conference, basically all the technical content that was in two of the largest rooms at the conference.

That included most of the papers, a couple courses, some sketches, and a couple special sessions. This product proved to be very successful with our membership. We had originally anticipated that we would just offer it online and we decided, Soma was pushing really hard to get us to do a DVD product of it and the executive committee of ACMC Graph was not so sure, but in the end we decided to do the DVD in addition to the online version. online streaming application and the DVD sold really well at the conference, it sold really well after the conference.

We've probably had more interest generated about the DVD than the online streaming version. So we're really pleased with how that's worked. In the future though we do hope to, you know, we plan to continually offer both because ACM has a component called the digital library, and all of our content from the conference goes into the digital library, so the OSA from SOMA will go in there as well. It's just another member benefit that we're pleased to offer. The reason we chose SOMA is the solution that they offer is really cross platform.

It's not browser dependent, which a lot of the other solutions out there are. It works well on Macs and PCs. We have a large Mac population, highly technical users. A lot of the creative folks use it as well as a lot of the researchers and technicians. So, we're really excited to be able to offer this to our customers.

It's a flexible system by offering the DVD and the OSA. We were able to allow people to take it on the road with them as well as sit and use it in their office. And overall we're just really pleased with how it turned out. Our plans for 2004 are to expand the content capture. We plan to capture all of the technical content at the conference. So that's all the papers, courses, panels, sketches, special sessions.

And it's in ten rooms. It's approximately 300 contributors with a lot of technical content. So, we're really excited to be able to offer that to our customers. And we're really excited to be able to offer that to our customers. So, we're really excited to be able to offer that to our customers.

And we're really excited to be able to offer that to our customers. And we're really excited to be able to offer with 250-300 hours of video and PowerPoint presentations. The other thing that we're doing this year is we're only going to capture video in the two largest rooms. For the other smaller rooms we're going to do just a head shot with the slides and the audio. So I now want to turn it over to Dave Bergevin who will explain exactly how it was accomplished. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Gudrun, Aliza. For the past several years, Apple Computer has recorded the proceedings of its worldwide developers conference on DVD-ROM and the web. When did it be great if every single conference we attended would also be recorded? If that were the case, we would not miss a keynote speaker. We would not miss a single session.

We'll be able to see the session we wish and see it any number of times we want. We would be able to instantaneously jump to the presentation we want to see, to that particular slide we want to study, and we'd be able to review the material sufficiently to absorb the knowledge being disseminated.

We would move our exposure to the material from the level of awareness to the level of comprehension. This ability would allow us to jumpstart our research in our respective areas of interest. This newfound ability would also allow our colleagues who may not be able to attend the conference the opportunity to share in the knowledge being disseminated at the conference.

SOMA Media specializes in creating knowledge dissemination solutions to help organizations distribute their content beyond the walls of the conference center. In 2003, ACM SIGGRAPH hired SOMA Media to record a portion of their conference on TVD-ROM and the web. This year we're recording the whole SIGGRAPH 2004 conference and also putting it on DVD-ROM and the web. Today I'm excited to be here to present the process of creating the 2003 DVD-ROM and our online streaming application, or as we refer to it as the OSA.

Okay, so here's the agenda for this morning. I'll briefly talk about Soma Media, our company, the benefits to conference recording, what you'll learn in this session, and then we'll go in-depth on the case study for the ACM SIGGRAPH DVD-ROM and OSA. Then I'll talk about the technology framework, the technologies we used, and the workflow, the improvements that we're going to introduce in 2004, and then I'll conclude and we'll have time for some questions.

So SOMA Media specializes in knowledge dissemination solutions. We work with the organization to come up with a custom solution for them. We provide complete end-to-end solutions starting with the logistics from pre-production all the way to delivery. We handle the speaker permission forms. We capture the content. We compress it for DVD, DVD-ROM or the web. We author the content. We create the interface, do all the design and the packaging. And we do the sales and marketing, including all the print materials and having a sales booth at the conference, including a sales team.

So here are some of the benefits. Obviously, recording the conference is a great way to create an organized archive of that conference. Currently, right now, there are, I think, eight other presentations going on. So because this conference is being recorded, you know you'll have access to the other presentations.

As well, when it's available online or on DVD-ROM, people that couldn't attend a conference can still participate and actually see the content that was presented at the conference. A huge benefit also is being able to watch it on your own time. This is great. I mean, you pop it into your computer or you go online on the Internet and you choose to watch the presentations when you want to watch them. And finally, recording a conference can be a revenue-generating source for conference organizers. It can help to offset the expenses related to actually recording the conference.

So what you'll learn in this session is our knowledge dissemination solution that we came up with for SIGGRAPH working with them. I'll talk about capturing content efficiently. How to avoid the bottlenecks and developing a workflow with your software and the technology that you're going to use to develop the project. So here we're going to go in depth right now onto the case study for the ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 conference presentations.

So at SIGGRAPH 2003, there were some physical constraints. We weren't recording the whole conference. We were recording only two presentation rooms, the main two presentation rooms which included most of all the paper sessions, some of the courses. It was five days of recording and this resulted in about 800 gigabytes of video that was digitized on the fly at the conference. We also captured over 40 gigabytes of PowerPoint presentations and extra videos, including 101 total PowerPoint presentations and 140 extra videos.

So what we delivered was over 62 hours of video on two DVDs, 115 presentations. This included over 4,000 synchronized slides and 140 of those videos were synchronized with their PowerPoint presentations. So we had a two-disc DVD-ROM set. The first disc was the paper's disc. It was on a 9-gig DVD-ROM. The second disc included the keynote, the courses, the special sessions, and the sketches, and that was actually on a 4.7-gig DVD-ROM. And then finally we created the online streaming application.

So we captured 78 out of the 81 paper presentations. I believe the three presentations we didn't capture were due to copyright problems that we weren't allowed to record them. We captured the keynote, the four courses that were presented in the two rooms we recorded, four of the special sessions, and one sketch.

So these were the technical requirements for producing this product. We had to come up with a cost-effective solution with a low sale price. The price of the DVD was $79 for non-members and $59 for members, so we had to keep the cost low. It had to be cross-platform, so it had to work seamlessly on a Mac and a Windows platform. It had to work also on the Internet and DVD-ROM.

Another important criteria is the slides had to be legible, so the presentation screen, which I'll show you in a few minutes, had to be big enough so that you can read all of the text displayed in the PowerPoints. We also included chapter lists. I'll go through what the chapter list is. It basically divides the presentation, allows you to navigate the presentation by the slide titles, so each presentation is divided into their slide titles, and you can jump to any part of the presentation seamlessly.

We had to include as many extra videos and demos. SIGGRAPH shows a lot of demos, similar to here at this conference where they show a lot of different types of demos of new technologies. And everything had to be synchronized. The final requirement, we actually, there was already AV crews in the two rooms and we had to work with their technology and find a way to link that to ours, our setup.

Now we also handled the sales and marketing. So we included all the marketing materials. This included flyers that were in all of the conference bags, posters. We had two booths at that conference and a sales team. We worked with ACM SIGGRAPH to come up with an online ordering system and we have a website with an online working demo of the product.

Now we also had to deal with the speaker related issues, which meant collecting all the speaker permission forms. Since it had not been recorded, speakers had to be contacted and we had to collect all of their speaker permission forms, collect also their slides, all their extra videos and demos. So we set up an FTP site for them to upload their information.

We also had to include, we had to remove the copyrighted images and sounds. A lot of presentations at SIGGRAPH refer to films, movies and a lot of times you don't have permission to actually, you can show it at the conference, but you can't actually show it or record it for the DVD. Okay, so let's move to the demo.

Actually, can we have the other demo, the one on the G5? Okay, so this is the paper's desk and I'll go through the interface a little bit. We had to develop--every year SIGGRAPH, I guess, they come up with a design for the conference with graphics and logos and certain fonts and styles. So we created an interface that worked with their design requirements.

We also wanted to create an interface that was easy on your eyes, because if you're going to watch a presentation that's 25, 30 minutes long, you don't really want something. You want something that's very easy to look at. We developed the interface like a player, so you can easily move through.

You can easily select any presentation by their event. Here it's the paper's disc. And each paper topic, we divided it by day, so you have Monday, July 28th, and if you scroll down, you go all the way to Thursday. And these are each of the session titles. So if you click on a session title, There are four presentations that were presented during that session. You'll see the speaker pick and their title of their talk. We'll click on Vivek.

So your video plays here and your PowerPoint presentations are here. So it's fairly large screen size. And just to begin, you simply press play. Here are a few examples of what we are able to achieve using our technique. Here is an image of two water lilies that we found on the web. So you see it's all completely synchronized. It'll keep switching the slides throughout the presentation.

This presentation also includes some of the demos and animations. This one is showing an animation, so we integrated it and synchronized it inside the presentation. Now as I mentioned before, this is the chapter list. So you click on it and you'll notice, if you notice in the scrubber, you're actually moving through the presentation all by their slide titles. So here's a thing on the patch placement.

And here's another video that was included in the presentation. This is the original draft sequence from the video text newspaper. Note is the intermittent. Okay, we'll select another topic. Now, as I mentioned before, we had copyright issues that we had to deal with. This individual, Alice Sheffer, she actually had a picture of Madonna that was taken from a magazine. So what we did was, it's right over here, we blocked it out. We had to do that on a number of presentations where there was images that had copyright issues.

I'll show you another. So I've selected shadows, the paper topic, and the title of this talk was A Geometry-based Soft Shadows. You'll see the slides are also-- this one's all-- everything's in sync. This one also included an animation. So wherever speakers provided us animations and demos, we included them.

This one actually the individual included a QuickTime VR. He sent it to us. He probably didn't think we would actually include it in the presentation, but we actually did. Here's his full QuickTime VR, and you can actually move around the space that he had given us.

I'll show you a final... So any video that we were able to include, we were able, we put it in, we compressed it, and we synced it with their PowerPoint presentations. Can we switch to the other demo machine? So I'll show you the keynote because I'm going to talk a little bit about it later.

At this moment it's my very great pleasure to welcome Anthony Lazenby, our SIGGRAPH 2003 So he also included animations. And he had many animations throughout his presentation. You'll see the size of the video is 320 by 240. The size of the PowerPoint is 548 by 411, so it's a fairly large size. When I show you the OSA a little later, the video will be smaller, but the PowerPoints will still be quite large. Starship in the 3D hyperbolic space. Now, this new technique we call conformal geometry.

Now this presentation, the courses, just to show you that, Some of them included a lot of code. Well, we wanted to make sure that people could read the code, so the video had to be, the video presentation screen had to be large enough so that people could clearly see what the speaker was talking about.

This was a special session that included a demonstration of a robot that Sony was developing.

and the song that he used was copyrighted and so Masahiro contacted us and said well we could show the video but we can't show the song so we actually went through the video and muted out the dance sequence. So all through this, the audio is muted out but you get to still see what was shown at the conference.

Robobot was actually interpreting a song, so it was coming up with the dance moves as--it wasn't a pre-programmed thing, it was actually coming up with the dance moves according to the song's beat.

This was done as a promo for the NHL and the LA Kings. So before we get to the slides. Okay, let's go back to the slides and let's see how we put this all together.

Okay, so these were the challenges. The first one is how to digitize live analog feeds to hard drives and tapes. Then how to compress 800 gigabytes to less than 17 gigabytes, because we figured at the time that we were going to put it on two 9-gig DVDs, we actually got it down to 11, so that's why we had one 9-gig and one 4.7-gig DVD. Next really large challenge was synchronizing 4,000 slides with their videos and then synchronizing the 140 videos with their slides.

Now, the conference was at the end of July. We did about a month, six weeks of work pre-production before the conference, getting speaker permissions and doing basically most of the authoring and collecting the slides. We had a deadline in October. We actually finished work on the product October 8th. We had sent it to the DVD manufacturer. Unfortunately, the DVD manufacturer took a lot longer and we ended up delivering it in November, not in October.

So here's the technology framework. Everything begins and ends basically with authoring. We started building the whole iShell, the whole project in developing the skeleton structure within the authoring environment. We collected the slides. So we collected as many slides as we could beforehand, the animations and videos. We started doing the compression, but we basically waited because we know that speakers are going to change their slides, which often happens right before the conference.

So we did most of the--we did all the compression afterwards and then we created a chapter list for the presentation--for the slides. At the conference, we captured the video, then we compressed the video, and then we also created, we created chapter lists so that we could synchronize them. So everything was done in the authoring environment to synchronize the chapter lists.

and then we delivered it to both DVD-ROM and on the web with our online streaming application. So let's begin with authoring. Well, the authoring environment had to be cross-platform. It also had to be robust. It couldn't, you know, we didn't want it to crash. We wanted to work on a large number of machines. We wanted to be able also to create a really intuitive interface that was really easy to use. As I showed you, three clicks basically gets you anywhere in the player and you can watch any presentation very quickly.

We also wanted an authoring tool that we could build before the conference and have it all ready so that all we had to do was compress the videos, synchronize them and put them into the authoring environment. And then very importantly, having a file naming system, something that you do in the pre-production so it makes your life really, really easy. So the authoring platform we chose is TribeWorks iShell. Their head office is not far from here.

and mainly we chose it because it's cross-platform, work Mac, Windows seamlessly. We can deliver on DVD-ROM on the web with very minimal changes. The only changes we had were the videos themselves. One is going to a QuickTime streaming server with the web version and the other one is reading them off the DVD.

As well, TribeWorks iShell is really an easy-to-use object-oriented environment, so that translated to really fast development times. The whole interface was developed in about two weeks. The author environment also allowed us to do the synchronization because it includes advanced controls of QuickTime with the chapter tracks. So we did all the synchronizations between the presentations using chapter tracks.

So how did we capture all of these chapter lists? Well, we did a lot of it at the conference itself. We captured the slide timings right at the conference, put it in an Excel spreadsheet that had a macro that outputted formatted text file ready for embedding into QuickTime.

We also had to then, with a chapter list, check the timing, verify that it all was working properly, that the spelling of the slide titles was correct, and that we could add these chapter lists at the end to QuickTime. Because we had to do all of that before we could start synchronizing them, because we had chapter lists in both of them, in both the PowerPoint and the video.

So this is how we captured the content actually at the conference. We got the AV source footage from the AV crew at the conference. We used the Canopus ADVC 500. This is an analog-to-digital video converter. It actually goes both ways, digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital. It has two outputs, one firewire, two firewire outputs that we could use.

One went to a DV cam deck. That was actually our backup, which we never had to use. And the other went to a fire store, which converted the video information and stored it on our, let's see, 500 gig hard drive. So this is where we actually had two hard drives at the conferences in the two rooms. And we were easily able to capture all the presentations in those two rooms. As well as the video. So we had a terabyte of storage and we only, we didn't fill it all up.

So after you have the content, you ought to prepare it for compression. We had all these, many of them were four presentations per session. Well, we recorded the whole session, so we had to think of, well, what video editing software we wanted to use. We wanted something really easy to use that all we wanted to do was the editing, the in and the out points.

We also wanted to be able to remove the copyrighted materials quite easily. And we wanted to use the functionality of QuickTime reference movies. So what we used was QuickTime Pro. Mainly, well, it's cross-platform. It supported the different media types, video, audio, text for the chapter lists. QuickTime VR, which was great. Flash, which we didn't have to use, but there's so many things that you could do with QuickTime.

And having the editing capabilities right in the program is fantastic. So all we had to do was set the in and out points and create a reference movie. Scriptability is really a key. We didn't take advantage of it as much as we will be taking advantage of doing scripts in QuickTime.

Of course, adding the chapter tracks. We were able to remove all the audio and copyrighted images and sounds all within the QuickTime Pro. And we use QuickTime mainly because we've used Sorensen Video 3 in the past and we're getting into using MPEG-4 and they work flawlessly for us. So, QuickTime was our solution.

Well now we have to move on to compressing. We've got them all prepared, the content all prepared, but we have to compress the content. So we have to determine what kind of compression software. We've used different ones in the past. But we wanted one that was fairly simple to use again, that worked, that we could come up with a workflow. So once we edit all the videos, we can get it into and start compressing them. So we wanted to be able to control the settings for compression and do small adjustments to the audio and the video. So the compression software we used, was Sorenson Squeeze 3.1.

Why it was really simple to use, basic image adjustments. All we wanted to really do was crop, de-enderlace, and adjust the gamma so that it would look equally good on a PC and a Mac. As we were editing the videos and saving them as quick time reference movies, we were dumping them into our watch folder. So once we had our compression settings, it was just turning out, our computers were compressing.

So we wanted to really use, was Sorenson Video 3 for the DVD-ROM and MPEG-4 for the online streaming application. And one final note, we didn't actually have, it didn't crash. The only time we had a problem was when the power went out on the East Coast. We were out for four days, and that was right in the middle of our encoding, but that was the only problem that we actually had with Sorenson Squeeze. So it was really robust. for our purposes.

So a little bit about Sorenson Video 3 Pro. We'd used it before in a previous project. We knew it fairly well. Worked great on the DVD-ROM, gave us really high-quality video, as you can tell at the conference. Very small file sizes, and we can optimize the compression settings.

Now, the fast compression times, we were able to achieve really good compression times. The example here is the keynote, which was 48 minutes in length. We compressed it in 90 minutes on a dual 1 GHz G4 with 1 Giga RAM, and that was at a resolution of 320 by 240.

Now with MPEG-4, for the online streaming application, we used it because it works great with the QuickTime streaming server. Really high quality and low bandwidth. I will show you that later. Really excellent audio codec. Also, really fast compression times, our keynote, which was 48 minutes, compressed in 60 minutes on a dual 1 GHz G4. Now, the frame size is a little bit smaller. I'm not trying to compare the two codecs here. I'm just trying to give you a point of reference in terms of how long it took us to compress all of the video.

And basically at the end, the DVD-ROM, all of the videos that we compressed on the DVD-ROM took less than a week. So it wasn't really the bottleneck of the project. Now back to the technology framework, we went through the authoring, went through the slides, capturing them, how we collected the chapter lists.

And the key is that we synchronized everything on the chapter list between the slides and the video. So now we're on to the delivery. So we put it on to the DVD-ROM and then on to the web. So here are the differences. The DVD-ROM has 140 demos and animations. It's on two disks. It includes a booklet.

So you can actually use it as a reference to go through the, to look for the presentation. It's higher quality. The video quality is better. The video quality is larger and it's smoother. And it's available for members and non-members. On the other hand, the online streaming application, it's just one interface, which I'll show you, and it's free to all ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH members. Okay, so we'll go back to the demo on the G5 and I'll load up the... So this is the online streaming version. It checks the internet first to see if it's there. It's actually just pinging a server and then it'll load up.

This version actually doesn't have the login. The one on the net has a login, so you have to be a member, and it won't let you in unless you're a member. So the nice feature about the online streaming application is the papers, special sessions, they're all in one environment. So you don't have to change discs.

Okay, here we go. So this is all running online right now here from the conference. So you have the keynote, the papers, the courses, the special sessions. It actually tells you at the bottom, select an event. So if you click on the keynote, now it's downloading the next section. It tells you at the bottom, select a topic and you can click on the keynote address. and Anthony Lazenby. And it tells you to select a presentation. You'll notice the blue highlights as you go through the process, so we try to make this as easy as possible.

So let's press play to begin. So this is connecting to the QuickTime streaming server at ACM SIGGRAPH. You notice the video is smaller. It's 240 by 180. But the PowerPoint, it's a bit more compressed, but it's the same size, so you still get to see everything clearly. And one great feature is the chapter track still works. So you can jump through the presentation just like on the disc.

Now the only difference is you don't get the animations. We weren't going to put that much bandwidth issues onto their server. So all that's streaming right now is his presentation. So you do lose out on the animations, but you get the full PowerPoint presentation. The feature I didn't show earlier, you can actually move through the presentations and pause the video.

You can move forward and backwards, so if you want to scrutinize a certain presentation or certain slide, you can go and just pause it and look at the different slides that way. So with this interface we can also see the papers which is really, really handy. And you'll see that it'll load up over here. Obviously it's not going to be as, it's as fast as your internet connection is going to be. Gives you a little watch.

Some presentations obviously take a little longer to load as it is downloading it from the Internet. Now it's connecting it to the stream. The audio quality is really good. That's really key. You want to make sure the audio quality is very good because that's what you're listening to. And see the synchronization, everything is all functioning very well. You can adjust the volume here.

And you can again go through the presentation quite quickly. So if you've seen the presentation and you're interested in a particular section, you can go to that area and it'll jump right to that area. It's a really handy feature. It's very competitive and very expensive, but we can speed. Okay, let's go back to the slides.

So what were the bottlenecks? A lot of people would have thought it was the compression, 800 gigs down to 11 gigs. How long that would take? Well, it didn't take that long. Once we had edited all the videos, it didn't take that long on the two machines that we had dedicated for encoding.

What really took a long time was developing the chapter list and creating and then synchronizing those slides with their videos and making sure that the synchronization was correct. Also, synchronizing the extra animations with the slides. There's all sorts of issues related to that. Now, the speaker permissions forms, that was also a bottleneck because you're contacting the speakers after they've already been accepted to speak at the conference. They're busy and they have to sign a form, fax it in.

They have to upload their slides. You're asking them to do a lot to do and sometimes it's hard to contact them and when you're contacting 120 people, it took a long time to get through. We still collected speaker permissions long after the conference was through mainly because we wanted to include as many presentations as possible on the DVD-ROM and the online streaming application.

Removing the copyrighted materials. That took a while because we had to go through each presentation. We knew on the speaker permission form that they had copyrighted issues, but we had to develop a way to kind of remove those images and sounds that we couldn't record or couldn't keep in the presentation.

And of course testing and troubleshooting, that took a fair bit of time to go through to make sure it ran on a number of platforms, a number of different computers and make sure everything was working correctly. And then of course the manufacturing of the DVD-ROMs, that took way too long. We were really disappointed in that.

So how are we going to remove the bottlenecks for 2004? Well, last year's conference, the compression wasn't a bottleneck. This year, it's going to be when you're dealing with 290 presentations as opposed to 115 and 250 to 300 hours. So what we've come up with, we're putting together a dual G5 network. So that should significantly reduce the compression times.

For the speaker permissions forms, we've actually come up with an online speaker data management system. So now speakers don't have to fax anything in. It's all, they're given, they're sent an email with a password and username and authorization and basically a digital signature and they can do everything online. They can give us keywords, they can give us their speaker profile or their picture and their permission. So it's a great system that we've developed.

Well, we're in the process of coming up with a way of automating the chapter list so we can significantly reduce the amount of time it took to create all the chapter lists. And then finally, we picked a new DVD manufacturer that will turn it around in 10 days as opposed to almost 6 weeks.

So a little bit about quality control. The video quality and the compression that we achieved here was due because we had the best quality audio feeds and video feeds. If you think you're going to be able to fix it in post-production, you're wrong. It's just going to take too long. 62 hours is too much video to go through, so you really want the best quality audio and video.

You also don't want to do a lot of editing. You only want to do in and out points, basically when the presentation starts and when it finishes. If you're going to do other editing, that's going to be a huge bottleneck. And then experiment with your compression settings. I can give you the compression settings for this product, but every time we've done a conference or a project, we always use different settings because whatever is optimized for one conference doesn't necessarily work for another. And the reason being is SIGGRAPH, everybody was at a podium. Nobody was allowed to walk around.

And the background, there was no shadows, there was no issues like that. It was really well lit, so we could use a different setting. We just did another project with ATI and we didn't have the same kind of controls. So we had to use completely different compression settings to still get a good quality video.

So, to summarize, ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 was a big success. We worked within ACM SIGGRAPH's framework. We created workflows that did actually produce the project by October. It was really well received by the computer graphics community and it did really well in sales. So, for 2004, this year, it's going to be a five-disk DVD-ROM as opposed to a two-disk. There will be an online streaming application. We're moving from two rooms to ten rooms and it's going to go up to about 250 to 300 hours of video.

So these are the improvements for 2004 where we're recording the whole conference. We're including all the live demos, so we're doing the demos a completely different way this year. We've got the online speaker data management system. Already it's working right now because the conference is in August. We're adding a search engine to our product and we're developing a new method for creating chapter lists and this will inevitably improve the synchronization of the slides and the video.

So to conclude, I've gone through our knowledge dissemination solution for SIGGRAPH. I've talked to you about optimizing high-quality audio and video, creating the intuitive interface. I've talked about the large presentation window that we used instead of a smaller one, the chapter list that we used for SIGGRAPH, and now that we're working with 2004, we're adding the search engine. So our approach, I'll emphasize this, is designed to serve an audience who is interested in detailed and in-depth information retrieval. This means academics, researchers, and developers.

So there's some contact information for you there on the screen if you're interested to talk to these guys after the conference. But I'd also like to take the opportunity to let you ask some questions if you have them. Please come up to, there's mics in the middle here and on the side if you have some questions for these guys. And I'll ask Gudrun to come back up on the stage.