Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Sure, except that the person taking the video never captures the screen, so it’s effectively useless.

This happens all the time, including at Linux Conference Australia, and it’s dumber than a hat full of dumb things.

We appreciate the effort, but if you’re filming a presentation that’s not a circus act, we don’t always need to see the person giving the speech. We can hear them thanks to the magic of microphones. What we would like to see, is what the hell they are talking about.

Ideally you’d have two cameras, one constantly on the screen and the other on the speaker, then you can clip them together and switch between the two. That’s a lot of work however and no-one at a conference has time for it. Fair enough.

So use your brain. Film the presenter talking, then when they show something, pan across and show us the screen. Then, pan back to the speaker. Use a view finder so that you can see when the best time to switch is.

The magical thing about video is that we can pause it. So you only need to capture the screen momentarily at the least. And while you’re at it, make sure you zoom right into a decent depth so that when it’s encoded at a low resolution we can actually read it.

Do this and when Linus says:

Here’s the most awesome Git command in the universe..

..we actually get to see what the flipping thing is!