Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

If you're interested in watching the presentations and Q&A sessions from Worldcons and bids from SMOFCon 40 in Providence, they are now posted to the Worldcon Events YouTube channel.

Because SMOFCon 40 was a fully hybrid convention and was recording their program items, there was no need for me to bring the video gear with me, particularly as they very kindly promised me that I could have the Worldcon Q&A session videos and post them to the YouTube Worldcon Events channel. That way, the videos did not depend upon an individual SMOFCon keeping them online. This is more important than you might think. Most individual conventions eventually dissolve; their web sites evaporate, the links rot, or they might even delete their YouTube channel, as one Worldcon did not that long ago. The Worldcon Events channel is managed by the Hugo Awards Marketing Committee, and therefore should be considered to have a longer lifespan than just a single convention.

I received the full video of the entire Q&A, including all of the setup and the changeover time between presenters, and the inevitable issues with tech of various sorts, a few days ago. This was pretty much what you would have seen if you had been there in person or attending online. (As it happens, because I did not need to record anything, I was over in a different room setting up the Probability & Statistics Seminar.)

Today, I loaded the video into Premiere Pro and learned new things about how to use the "mark in" and "mark out" functions, which allowed me to more easily select just a single convention/bid's Q&A and then send only that part of the file to a separate recording. I did that with all six of the groups that presented that evening (only Worldcons and bids; there were also SMOFCon bids, but that's outside of scope for what I was doing). I also learned how to queue up these recordings in Adobe Media Encoder, so that once I'd set them all up, I could compile all of the videos as a batch without me having to supervise it. I did end up botching one of the six files and had to re-do it, but that was part of the learning experience.

While setting this up is more time-consuming than just dumping the entire recording into YouTube, it has the advantage that you can look at only the convention or bid presentations that you want to see, and you don't have to deal with tech delays and can instead concentrate on the presentations themselves.

As I pointed out in the news item, these are the presentations from groups who were at SMOFCon 40 either in person or remotely. Some groups have bids that are out there but that did not make a showing at SMOFCon 40. I do not know the status of those bids, which includes the Tel Aviv in 2027 and the Brisbane in 2028 Worldcon bids.