Cue announcer.
This week we are holding a medical conference - live from the Miami Beach. We started planning this meeting 18 months ago.
Many doctors, both presenting and attending, giving lectures, doing panel discussions and showing videos.
What's all this have to do with Video Production? Let me count the ways.
5:30am
Woke up. Felt pretty tired. Too much Sake maybe? The ocean view room (iMac in every room!) helps get me motivated.
6:30am
Arrive in Fontaine Ballroom. This ballroom previously hosted Elvis, Sinatra and the rest of the Rat pack. It is a natural conclusion that a surgical meeting would follow in those foot steps! We have a video conferencing vendor, Stratosphere, managing our live surgery feeds, and the in-house AV crew running sound and projection.
8:00am
We prepared in advance a 3 minute roll-in, featuring an aerial shot of Miami Beach, courtesy of iStockVideo.com - followed by a brief intro to our three day program, and thanks to our sponsors, all narrated by Dave Calabrese, our local narrator in Oxford, CT. After the video, the moderator takes the stage, welcomes everyone and off we go.
We also prepared intro slides for each surgeon - basically static text and a headshot over a digital juice jumpback. We play that as the moderator introduces the surgeon. Then we switch to the live feed and everything works great...sometimes.
First case from Chile is ready to go live. The operating rooms send video and audio over ISDN to New York, then the feeds come over the internet to Miami. We send video of the moderator at the podium and our local mix-minus audio back to the OR. "Hello, Chile, come in? Can you hear us? Mork calling Orson, come in Orson?"
No audio. Go to the tape backup. We have an unedited mini DV tape from the same surgeon, whose colleague is here in the audience with a wireless mic to narrate. He does this for about 10 minutes while we troubleshoot. Turns out the catering department unplugged some cables last night when they were dressing the table. Obviously! Ok, we have audio and go live to Chile. This is a regular sleeve case - staple and remove the 2/3 of the stomach and get out. Took about 45 minutes. All the while we had live commentary from the local moderator, the surgeon in Chile and questions from audience members.
At the conclusion of the case, we punch up the intro video for the next surgeon, then switch to a live shot of the operating room floor! Nice.
9:00am
The next surgeon in Chicago is ready, we switch to his feed, and off we go again.
This image is much better - not sure if this is due to the shorter distance compared to Chile or just luck. IMHO the very fact that we can have two-way video and audio in real time over the internet is pretty amazing. Reminds me of the scene in 2001 where Dr Floyd talks to his daughter over video phone from the Pan Am Spaceport before he heads to the moon to check out the monolith.
10:00am
Coffee break. One of the most important parts of a conference, especially one involving lots of standing up and early mornings is the coffee break. The Fontainebleau has a standard layout for coffee, tea, cream, milk, sugar, cute little jars of honey, lemon wedges and to-go cups. Meanwhile we punched up the next feed from right here in Miami. We went live to Miami as the crowd (300+ people) trickled back into the ballroom...in Miami.
10:28am
Right now, we have a split screen between Miami and Chicago, so we can flip flop back and forth. The switch happens in NY - we have an open phone line going so we can relay the moderator's spoken cues back to control in NY.
While all this is going on, i am trying to get two WebEx meetings scheduled for tomorrow, which we plan to show live before our audience. One presenter is in Mumbai, the other in Leeds, UK. The time differences give us two options - do testing during a limited time window, or stay up late and get up early. My colleague Jake is back at the plant in CT doing these tests and keeping in phone contact with the two presenters. He and I were text messaging at midnight last night trying to coordinate times for testing today. Regular working hours are 24/7. Hey, that could be a cool tv show. Events happening in real time over the course of 1 day.
10:32am
Ok, I just learned that the tv show idea has been done already. Never mind!
10:43am
Never discount the usefulness of having an internet connection. I have Firefox, WebEx, Skype, Powerpoint all running something important.
And the most important app of all:
This is like the Land-o-Lakes Butter box. Me blogging about me blogging showing a picture of me blogging. There is about a 2 minute delay between the photo and the time it was taken. Life does not get too much more exciting than this!
sorry - computer network interruption - I guess this is correctly termed "cow-itus interruptus."
10:56am
While we are switching in NY between operating rooms, we are switching on-site between the video feed, a DV deck (my beloved VX-2000 actually), a Powerpoint Safety slide and occasionally a black screen!
But there is more switching going on at each hospital OR. Right now we are watching surgery from Miami. We sometimes see the overhead view, sometimes a camera pointed at the surgeon, sometimes the laparoscope (inside the abdomen - the patient's abdomen, not the surgeon's) and if you want to get closer we can also see inside the patient's stomach (what's left of it)).
(PIP view coming down from the hospital - inset is a scope down the gullet, the main image is inside the abdomen)
This is where the value of in-house media services people in hospitals is most important. Each OR has its own video capture and transmission system - no two are exactly alike. Thus, you usually have very few people in the hospital who know how it all works. The in-house resources, mentioned in my article, Surgical Video: The Cutting Edge, are especially important on days like today. Thanks for your good work!
11:33am
Things have been running smoothly. Time for bathroom and coffee breaks - one leads to the other.
We are just about done with the current case - not sure if this is Miami or Chicago - actually, while I was out of the room we switched to another location in Florida.
Another task I have is to collect powerpoints from about 40 people for Friday's events. We have 3 concurrent sessions with lectures and panel discussions. My 4 gig flash drive mysteriously went missing, so I am using the 1 gig micro-SD card from my cell phone. I have won the award for world's smallest flash drive. I guess that's a good thing!
1:21 pm
Had to pause the blogging. We had some down time between cases, so we showed some unedited surgery off DVD - call it a tape delayed live surgery. Things were going great until the movie Heidi randomly started playing.
Anyone get that?
Seriously, I am handed DVD discs of surgery, recorded in the OR using proprietary recording systems. As described in previous blog posts, these systems do a good job recording video, however you cannot play the DVD in a DVD player. That would be like not being able to play a video tape in a video deck. "I have a VHS tape here, but you need to play it using a microwave oven." A DVD by any other name should smell so sweet. (that enough pop culture references for you Ron?)
You need to open a folder within a folder within a folder within a folder to get to the 4 gig MPG2 file. Luckily VLC player plays this with ease. The moderator narrates live, then asks me to fast forward to the next important point. Let's call this live editing.
Having never seen the video before, I need to randomly advance the video using the slider bar, estimating, based upon experience, where the next important part of the operation may be.
Video conferencing can go over ISDN or IP. Some of our hospitals today are using one or the other. The current case uses IP. The only problem with IP is you are using the internet. Internet traffic picks up around mid-day, presumably because millions of office workers around the country are logging onto the internet simultaneously to check out the latest wacky videos or to see if they won that used Wii controller on eBay. Thus, the current IP-based feed, even though it is coming to us via ISDN, is a bit choppy.
1:45pm
Yet another task is to document the meeting, not necessarily for post, but for documenting. We capture on mini-DV - mostly pointed just at the moderator. We also have a DVCAM tape of the live feed, so we could marry the two together at a later date - TBD. Primarily we will have the video transcribed and send the transcript to someone who will summarize the meeting and determine what the consensus actually is.
3:28pm
Business as usual has continued so nothing new to report for a while, not to mention lunch buffet. Just enjoyed a nice cup of tea to get me through the home stretch.
Just finished the 3rd to last case - transvaginal surgery - look it up.
Another good reason to attend a meeting like this is networking. I can interact face to face with people who I normally, and sometimes exclusively, talk to only via e-mail or the phone. Clients, customers and colleagues.
I should mention that I brought my wife along to this meeting. We got nice ocean view rooms so she gets a quick little vacation on the tail end of an awful New England winter. For the three people who may not know this, the Victoria's Secret fashion show was held here back in November. Have not seen any lingerie models yet(aside from my lovely wife of course ;) ), but there are still two days to go. Lots of eye candy in this hotel! I am of course talking about the furniture and interior design.
3:34
Now finishing the 2nd to last case. This one from San Francisco has the best image quality yet. They have a proper broadcast camera on a jib, plus the usual laparoscopic view. Nice.
One more case from New York and we are home free, for tonight. Probably will have another hour to get setup for tomorrow, sort out and clone the Powerpoints for tomorrow and maybe have a swim.
4:25pm
This last hour went quick. Did I pass out? No, the tea was not spiked. Not yet.
I think this will do it.
As always, thanks for reading. It has been fun.
Mike Cohen
