Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes

One of my goals is to be able to provide content in the following quality:

My first experience in producing a lecture was The Strangers, followed by Desert Rose and Darkness2Light. Although with time the standards for Islamic video content has been rising I don’t believe the standards are where they should be. The above video should be the standard for Islamic content in terms of production quality. No less.

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The next logical step toward setting that standard was the birth of IlmCast.com. AlMaghrib in their efforts to reach out to more people and deliver the knowledge further and wider than ever before started a project called “AlMaghrib Radio on Demand” where they would post a new lecture every month.

Personally I thought that the concept of extending the “free-line” in Islamic content was great but the approach wasn’t great. I proposed setting up a separate website that would act as a brand in and of itself. Sort of like how EmanRush is for AlMaghrib. The advantages being that it was web 2.0 friendly.

• Content can be syndicated to the people via RSS, iTunes, and Facebook
• There would be a sense of social community where people can post comments and feedback as well as blog about it on their own blogs.
• People can share with other people through services such as Digg, StumbleUpon, or simply email.

The initial approach didn’t give this level of usability.

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As we progressed into the third month of IlmCast, one of the things I wanted to do was to systemize the process. Initially I figured what we can do is simply have the video recorded. I can take it and encode and compress it to a specific size, after which it would be uploaded so that editors can get the footage to edit and finally out put it up for me to format it for final distribution.

I decided to test the process on IlmFest. After a couple weeks — one thing I’ve learned was, double handeling video is a BAD idea. In order to make the best of everyone’s time the work flow process from event to ilmcast will be as follows:

If there is going to be video recording of a lecture event, there should be a dedicated person responsible for this task. Their job is to make sure the video gets recorded, edited, and put online on the IlmCast server for later portion where the video is encoded for online distribution.

Development Stage:

• Dedicated individual should be in charge of video, just like how there is a person for food, hospitality, etc.
• proper equipment and should be secured: microphone, cables, camera, lights, as well as human resources for tasks such as doing the recording, lighting, editing — the event organizer should set aside a budget for this just like they would for food and other aspects of the event.
• Permission from the speaker and location should be sought out before recording takes place (usually done with release forms)

Production Stage:

• Standard should be a two camera shoot. (if they cannot find a second cam, then 1 camera can work). Camera 1 takes a medium close up (shoulders up) at a 45-degree angle, camera 2 takes a medium long-shot (thighs up) at an opposite 45-degree angle. — – Ideally it be great if 3 or 4 cameras can be brought in to get some b-roll footage. Cam 3 would be audience from behind the speaker and cam 4 would be extreme long shot from the back of the audience in the form of a tracking shot.
• Lighting should be adequate. The ideal setup for lighting is to take the wedding video approach. About 6 tungstun lights around the room on stands that position the lights 12 feet above the ground (see image below), giving a 3-point look on anyone in the room.

• If they don’t have that option then getting simple lights that light up the speaker from the sides can work. — – If the organizers and producer is on a shoe-string budget, then make the best of in house lighting as they can, like using lamps, mirrors, sunlight, etc.
• Audio needs to be fed directly into a Camera. There is no excuse for not having this.

Post Production Stage:

• Audio Cleanup – this requires adjusting the background noise levels, as well as EQ settings. If they don’t know how to do this, then simply ask! It literally takes 10 mins to clean up the audio if it was captured properly, just a matter of knowing what buttons to push.
• Color Correction – Whether it be the brightness, contrast, color balance, hue, saturation, etc. All of this should be adjusted. Purpose of this is to balance the video to give it it’s proper look, or to save it from its horrible look (which usually happens due to bad lighting). If shooting was done properly, then hardly any color correction should be needed.
• Titleing and Letterboxing — This is part of the IlmCast branding. Always opens and closes with the ilmcast title screen, and has the slight letterbox on it.
• Encoding — The final output should be encoded in WMV format at 640×355 deinterlaced, 1.5Mbps CBR (constant bit rate), 128kbps audio CBR.
• Delivery — After output, the WMV file is to be uploaded onto a server so the distribution and marketing guys can handle it.

Distribution and Marketing:

• Syndication — Once the video is on the server. The marketing and distribution guys should download it, encode for purposes of online distribution and syndication: FLV, MP4, MP3 — after which our brothers and sisters will rip it off the website and put it on youtube, post it on their blogs and forums. (which is great for producers of IlmCast lectures since it brings back links to Ilmcast website and more people hear about it and subscribe to the RSS and iTunes feed.)
• Facebooking — Major releases should have a “launch/release” date where events can be made.
• Emailing — Qabaail leaders can be encouraged to send out an email to their lists and get everyone to subscribe and stuff.
• Blogging and Reviews — bloggers and the people in the video can post it on their websites and other such places.

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Every step of the way there are lessons. It will be great to see IlmCast turned into a well oiled machine.