One of my projects-in-development is “The Healthy Human Nature Hypothesis.”
One goal of this project is to invite Human Nature Scientists I admire to dialogue with me about topics I propose that we agree can be categorized as relevant to “healthy human nature” in the most common domains of daily life for us humans.
I’m planning for these to be video dialogues on Zoom and wanting them to be simple and easy for the scientist and for me.
An example of the simplicity I’m aiming for (at least to begin with) is this interview/conversation Out of the Lab with Professor Betsy Levy Paluck : . . . no fancy intro or outro . . . no music . . . and minimal editing. In the example of this conversation, it looks to me that it was start to finish without any editing.
Another example are the Dialogues between Iain McGilchrist and Àlex Gómez-Marín on Dr. McGilchrist’s book The Matter with Things . . . this is an episode in their series dialoguing on Chapter 11 Science’s claims on truth It is only a little more polished . . . and still very simple conversation on Zoom and doesn’t seem likely to have had any editing (or if any it would likely have been minimal).
I would think that watching only a few minutes of each would give you the sense of the simplicity I’m wanting to be able to match. I’ve been doing weekly my Zoom video meetings on my iMac and now, and in my opinion my videos are within the range of the video quality of these two examples . Thanks to the Podcasting Workshop, I’m now using a USB mic, which others have told me is a great improvement. I just got an inexpensive Ring Light to try out to help my lighting be more consistent.
I thought to take advantage of the Workbench opportunity to post what I am planning to do to see if any in the community have any advice for me to have the tech basics within the range of these two examples.
Thank you @Mark I will check out Riverside.fm and Zencastr. I am assuming that most of the human nature scientists I’d be meeting with would be “zoom-experienced” and not experienced with other programs . . . but maybe they don’t need to be? I’ll check that out. Big thanks!
Oh really? I’m confident you’re the world’s expert on your human nature! All us other humans can have gazillions of opinions about you and your nature, but you’re the only one who can know, experientially know/be aware of your always changing live nature.
Will be curious to see what Zencaster and Riverside users say about this. I have the same question. Would like to consider shifting from Zoom to something better but haven’t yet done so. Thanks for posting the question @LGItom.
@LGItom first step would be to look through everything in a for Zencastr here on PodComm.
Anything I try to control for (“have headphones” for example, “find a quiet space”, etc) adds friction for the guest. So my trying to get the full audio quality (ie a .wav file from their side) by using one of these “double-end” (give me the full audio from both ends) recording solutions adds friction.
At worst, services like Zencastr simply don’t work—guests don’t have computers (vs Zoom on their phone), guests can’t run Chrome, etc. This is rare, but is a “hard fail.” Zoom can also “hard fail” but it is much less likely. (Score one for Zoom.)
At best, services like Zencastr get you full quality audio, and Zoom gets you lossy mp3 audio files. (Score one for Zencastr et al)
As with everything, there are trafe offs that you have to decide about.
for Zencastr