Le Collège de la Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie

The College of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (la Villette, Paris) organizes conferences and debates for a large audience on science and society (the climate, matter, the brain, technology of the future, etc.). Each season, more than 200 researchers are invited to share their knowledge during over one hundred events. In order to make this knowledge available to all, the Cité transmits its conferences online. To enrich the conferences with a range of additional resources (bibliographies, files, documents presented during the conference), the Cité chose production tools from the manreo range.

The project

• Quickly film and prepare accurate, consistent archives on the College's conferences.

• Offer a new service enabling the public to remotely see or review conferences.

• Combine with the video archives the various documents presented by speakers (photographs, PowerPoint presentations, bibliographies, etc.).

• Publish conferences in rich media format over the Internet for more leisurely, interactive, and effective viewing.

The Manreo solution

• 

  Video capture (control of VCRs, integration with editing tools).

• Video encoding.

• Segmentation into chapters and subchapters.

• Description and annotation of sequences.

• Synchronization of multimedia components corresponding to each chapter or subchapter.

• Automatic publication and real-time updates of intranet Web pages.

• Advanced, multiple criteria search across the entire catalog.

• Creation of new publication templates.

Advantages

• Use of video processing by non-specialists (Webmasters).

• Fast viewing and locating in over 1.5 hours of video of the various conference phases.

• Segmentation into chapters and subchapters according to the sequences of the conference and the distributed components

• Automatic transformation of PowerPoint documents into images for publication.

• Ability to integrate digitized photographs or slides between PowerPoint slides.

• Customizable publication templates according to the Web site's graphic guidelines and the user's configuration.

• Publication of multiple media in multiple formats from a single source file.

Benefits

Productivity, speed, and efficiency

• Over sixty conferences are already available as automatically-generated Web pages (110 hours).

• Production capacity of one half-day per event, up to 3 events per week.

• Keep up with schedule of events by making conferences available online before the next conference in each cycle.

Scalability

• Initial video description template can be enriched at any time with new components (such as tutorials, "chats", etc.) without starting from scratch.

• Time saved processing the document is spent improving the components for enrichment.

• Fully customizable browsing interface and very stable publication of Web content.

Visibility

• Number of visits to the College's Web site has increased tenfold since conferences were made available online.

Jean-Christophe MONFERRAN, Webmaster of the College of the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie"The tools provided by Manreo attracted us by their ability to quickly and efficiently work on long (1.5 hour) video documents to be completed and enriched. Indexing is very simple and the tool' fast learning curve has made us more efficient by segmenting and indexing a conference in just a half day. This lets us spend more time making the conference easier to understand, incorporating graphics, and adding more text. The solution was particularly valuable because it lets us freely create Rich Media pages for online publication without worrying about graphic guidelines constraints due to the Dreamweaver extension".

The next step

Manreo tools will be used for other purposes after the conferences at the College.