I have just had the most amazing experience with High Speed Conferencing, UStream and CamTwist – all from the comfort of my own home.

It’s Friday of the second to last week I have left of my summer holidays. These holidays, through my PLN (Personal Learning Network), I’ve learnt how to use flickr in new ways, I’ve taken part in an un-conference in Bangkok, Thailand, made some new twitter contacts, been invited to join photophlow and have a go and now I’ve CamTwist, SoundFlower and LineIn in action via UStream!

Earlier this week Alec Couros had been kind enough to email me an invitation to play around with photophlow. (That’s a post for another time) So, at 3.00pm NZ time, when Alec sent out this twitter ……..

……… I thought I’d take a look since I was just playing around with my travel blog (that’s a post for another time too!).

I couldn’t have asked for a better demonstration of CamTwist, UStream and Highspeed Conferencing. The stream was smooth, the audio had a bit of an echo for us all for a while, but a little bit of brainstorming saw those in the Skype conferencing call, turn down the volume of UStream. Bingo! -away went the echo for us – but unfortunately for Alec a little delay echo remained for him. Now all you intern webcasters out there can totally relate to how off putting that can be when you’re broadcasting until you get used to it. Doug Symington of EdtechTalk was in the call too and he was able to capture the audio of our conference conversation and broadcast it through EdTechTalk. How cool is that?

CamTwist
(Sorry it’s a MAC only app but there is a PC equivalent called WebCamMax but it costs $30US after 10 days)

CamTwist is tool that lets you add nice special effects to your video chats. It’s also possible to stream your desktop and still images. With CamTwist, you can also use multiple video chat programs at the same time.
CamTwist comes with an installer package and manual install instructions. Install the CamTwist driver along with the application program. You’ll need to configure your chat software to use the CamTwist camera. Once that is done, launch the CamTwist application and have fun.
CamTwist comes with a few different pieces. At the lowest level, there is a QuickTime component that pretends to be a camera driver. What it does in reality is display the video frames that it collects from the CamTwist application.
The CamTwist application is responsible for collecting the video frames, adding the special effects, and then feeding the images to the QuickTime component.
Please note: CamTwist does NOT work with iChat.

Alec took us all through the steps of using CamTwist a couple of times (especially showing a video through it) and I could not get over how easy it was to do. This is definitely worth checking out if you are a MAC school or MAC user.

Soundflower
(Again, a MAC app but its PC equivalent is VAC I think)

Soundflower is a MacOS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed.

HighSpeed Conferencing

Now this does cost! At the moment you can get 10 days FREE trial. High Speed Conferencing is still in BETA form but it offers a video conferencing calling service with high-definition audio. The prices appear reasonable, but I have I would have to thoroughly look at my options to decide if the amount of time I was going to use it would justify the cost.

Of course, the alternative is SkypeConferencing, or a Skypecast.
But some of us have experienced the varied reliability of Skype in the conference situation.

If you’re interested in the technical side of UStreaming, Arthus has very kindly provided us, via his blog, a great post entitled “Stream What You Hear”. It’s very indepth, very useful with links and extremely easy to understand. Kristin Hokanson blogged about “The Greatest Things I’ve ever Learned” in which she also has put together an indepth yet simple explanation of how to go about skyping UStream.
Thanks Arthus and Kristin! I’ll be referring to both posts myself, when I have a go at ustreaming our Open Discussion Forum at Learning@Schools08 later on in February.

And I just could not stop laughing at this demonstration of screen effects using CamTwist ……..

Better still was the vortex image but I was laughing so hard I forgot to take a screenshot!

But the best thing about it all, is now I feel a little bit more comfortable with UStream, using some applications and I feel more confident to handle this type of setup during an up and coming presentation I hope will be a huge success! Thanks Alec! Thanks to everyone else in the conference call too.

So have a guess what I’m off to download and play with now!