For previous years of Narrascope, videos of the various presentations have eventually made their way online. As far as I can tell, that hasn’t happened for Narrascope 2024.
Is there a plan to put those up somewhere?
The stream/recording audio was pretty lousy – I vaguely gather that that was a combination of the conference committee trying to reduce costs and then the A/V company… not doing a great job with the equipment they had – Matt Griffin was trying to manipulate the recordings enough to be understandable but it was slow going. I think the last we heard from Matt was mid-December? And of course he’s co-chairing his year’s conference so I imagine that’s getting in the way too…
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Yes, Josh is exactly write with what he is saying there. This is still on me, and I’m still facing the issues he described. And I’m still the lead Conference Chair for the conference, so in a certain sense every hour I spend on videos takes away from hours making progress to move towards the new event.
I have been pretty disappointed with the quality I can extract from the sources, so haven’t shared them because I didn’t feel they served the excellent presenters well and might distract from the plans towards NarraScope 2025. Each version has felt amateurish, which is really not a good indication of the quality of NarraScope as an in-person experience. The great news is that for 2025, there is already a team of 3-4 volunteers forming to help us rethink AV and work towards not only better (even decent!) capture. Hell, I’ll bring my own 20k worth of AV gear and be the AV department to avoid this bs. Our new goal going forward will be the conference aim to start launching videos within 3weeks of the conference or earlier by doing capture and hand-off right.
But I have done a decent job rebuilding the audio which makes them useful despite the evidence of how “worked” they are, so I think I just have to grit my teeth and launch them, and archive the sources such that someone else with more time can try more cleanup work. I have kept promising to do this, and have kept having my heart broken by a few hours of experimental cleaning and layering techniques to try to take evidence of cleanup away.
But clearly people want to enjoy last years talks again, as do I, so I’m going to make this a focus this month if anything to take this off my plate and to feel less guilty being a bottleneck for this.
These will go up on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/@IFTechFoundation
If anyone wants to collaborate in Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition with me to get this 24hrs of content cleaned and launched, I’m welcoming any help I can get at this point. So far, I have spent about 20hrs fruitlessly reworking the keynote, and went back to an early pass that just had improved audio for a new pass this week.
You can even use your own tools if you can show me evidence you can process to clean audio that way. Fill out a volunteer form here and make it clear what you want to do and your background doing this work. I mean, I can also train you how to do this, if you match my current tools so that I can literally share projects with you. I can’t train you to use other tools because I don’t have the time, but there are some great resources for new ways to leverage AI cleaning tools within all of the tools, including the open source and low cost ones, so you can maybe find your own efficient way to help out. It’s a great service if you can help us get the work of these great speakers up and shared!
But even if no one helps, I’ll get this going and do my best to serve our past speakers well.
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Just checking in on this topic since I saw that registration is now open for this year’s event…
Would it make sense to release the videos as-is, on the grounds that something is better than nothing, even if only on an interim basis until the cleanup can be completed? I get that the improved versions would be improved, but it’s the presenter content that’s of highest interest (at least for me).
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I’d just like to watch the videos, having had a paying online membership for last year, but unable to watch live due to illness plus the time difference. I’ve asked about these 2024 videos so many times since at least December 
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Looks like I missed the earlier posts or I might have volunteered.
I have a lot of tools and experience, just not much time. i.e. If manual checkerboard editing of multiple voices in one audio file is required, I’m not up for it.
What I thought I might offer is see if I can apply some broad spectrum approaches to a whole recording to just make it more legible. EQ, compression, limit, multiband, stereo tweaks, reverb removal. I wouldn’t do any gating or noise reduction as I think those often make things worse. But @mifga if you’d like me to test such an approach (it of couse may not work) PM me.
-Wade
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I think the excellent presenters are served worse by publishing nothing at all, and I’m not convinced that withholding the videos looks better for the IFTF and NarraScope than releasing them in their current state.
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Thanks to @vivdunstan for pointing me at this thread. I concur, @FLACRabbit, that the time is nigh for the videos to be released in some form, irrespective of the audio quality. If/when cleanup finishes we can re-upload the improved versions, but the lack of access at all isn’t helping anybody.
I’m going to try and get at least one batch, and hopefully most/all of them up on the IFTF YouTube this weekend, in whatever state they may take.
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Apologies to the community here, and thanks @vivdunstan from bring this to my attention over in the Discord where I’ve been mostly living in the frenzied NarraScope 2025 producing mode.
I’m cross-posting here what I put on Discord here: Discord
I have lined up the videos I have to output one after the other, and will post them so you all can enjoy them. And hopefully a few of you can help collaborate into getting them into a better archival state. Justin committed us to end of the weekend, so we’ll do that.
If there are any here who suspect they might like to try their hand at cleanup and processing, what don’t you let me know here or over on the IFTF NarraScope channels on Discord. I can help make sure you get access to sources you can use to get going – and perhaps as a community we’ll find a great way to save these great talks from their bizarrely neglected recording strategy. I look forward to the results!
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I hope you’re also able to post them as separate videos!
hahahah, that really would be torture: “here’s 24hrs worth of truly fantastic talks that were recorded terribly, and by the way it is a single file that is about 340GB.”
No, I’m a once union-card-wielding editor and assistant editor with a decade worth of working in post-producing and documentary film in my background – I’m going to launch videos that can be used immediately for a kind of basic “one-light” improvement pass from my work in March and April, and then archive the raw sources (but sound and picture and trims done for easy use) for those who would like to try their hand at improving things. I have the first 10 loaded up in Adobe Premiere right now and will experimentally out put some while I keep working all night. I’m very sad about these files, but they are totally discernable now – which makes them useful enough to be used.
The good news at the bottom of all of this is that the AV team this year are brilliant, have great ideas, and are planning to route things to YouTube faster than we ever have before. So, you’ll never see me laboring over this kind of video again.
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I’m continuing my cross-posting tradition between Discord and Intfict until all the videos are delivered and all of the community is satisfied that they exist, and can be useful…
Good morning to those waiting on the NarraScope 2024 videos. I stayed up last night processing and exporting the Theater room talks.
Here you go!
I opted for going ahead to make the right container for publishing each of these instead of making special “these videos are imperfect” posts. For the very small group of you looking to help me improve them, I’ll keep myself available on DMs to send you Dropbox links to sources so that you have a nice clean slate to work with. And improvements can be swapped right into these YouTube video containers, and remain seated right there in the playlist for 2024.
In terms of which version I shared for each speaker – I picked the file with the least intervention that is intelligible – and in a few cases this is just with some minimum level adjustment and a round of noise knock-down to suppress the “are we in a machine room?” background sound. It might help you to just imagine that all of these conference talks are taking place on a spaceship.
And the talks in Room B and Room C are happening in parallel realities with a tear that is bleeding them into each other. (You’ll hear what I mean tomorrow.)
I have a “nuclear” processing option for each that even fully kills the room reverb and “invents” some to re-introduce – but the gut response from most is that this is useful only for serious problems. But in the case of any video that simply cannot be understood, I can just swap in that version where understanding the speech itself has been prioritized, but the performance is pretty deadened.
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The first five have already been uploaded. They are currently making their way through the belly of the YouTube machine, and should be published to this playlist soon. The rest of the Theater talks are exported and getting tossed in that queue.
The opening remarks was the shortest video, so that hit the playlist first – and is a bit of a tease promising to usher in Natalie but then breaking off there – but the others will populate there swiftly this morning, with all of the theater talks done before end of day.
Late night tonight, the Room B talks get going. And midnight hours on Saturday night, the Room C goes up. And then they are all up, and I’ll be able to help guide the enterprising through a fun game we called “Audio Engineer: The Experience.” I have also put in a bid with an engineer to use gear I don’t have to improve some of the baselines of these. So don’t be surprised if in a week some of them suddenly sound a little better – that is your friends in the community, or my friends helping me salvage what has been a pretty fraught chapter in my producing life.
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Just poking in to say I’ve been following this thread, and nice job. I know these things always take more time than you think they will, and one small detail that seems straightforward opens up other issues. (This from my own game dev experience, not dealing with multimedia.)
I also know that I’m the sort of person who says “Oh wow it’s great there’s any audio/video” and I don’t care if it’s fuzzy (maybe those of us around for the dawn of the Internet are grateful for anything) but then when someone takes time to clean up the audio/video (for instance, if I compare the first videos on a YouTube channel I like with later ones once it had grown and the speaker could hire better multimedia assistants/use a better sound system etc.) I recognize it and think wow, that must’ve taken a lot of work.
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Thank you very very much! 
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Thanks for the kind words, and I hope that these are useful. None of them are perfect, but I believe all of these will at least be USEFUL. and I can go back to enjoying these talks instead of being haunted by them!
YouTube is taking its sweet time, but the queue is growing there. It looks like about 3 of them will post at the same time. And very likely all of them will settle until shape before I start processing the next round of output late late tonight.
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I want to acknowledge the massive amount of effort Matt put into processing these videos AND the wildly fast turnaround on getting a batch of them uploaded within a few hours of me saying “it will get done by this weekend” when it’s only Friday. Excellent work here!
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Thank you very much @mifga for your work. I watch everything you post on Youtube as it’s uploaded. The content is surprising and interesting.
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I’m trying to automate Room C and Room D to deliver more easy to understand versions (these have sound bleed through thin walls) and need a little more testing, but they will arrive as soon as I confirm the right one and run them. They won’t be as improved as the Theater ones, but I’m optimistic they can at least be more useful. (and then perhaps we can as a community improve one at a time for a better longterm archival version) Thank you for your patience — this is short patience and actively at work.
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I skipped through some bits of @Zed’s What the Glulx? talk and it does seem significantly better than I remember the live audio being.
This is great, thanks. When the live sound was so bad in those two rooms, I kinda switched up which talks I was attending, thinking I’d go back to the ones I really wanted to see once the videos came out and I could pause and re-listen to the harder-to-understand bits, and then… well.
I’ll see if I can get some time to transcribe a few of these, though embarrassingly I don’t actually know what software or format works for getting captions into YouTube… still, I could post the text somewhere easily enough.
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