We’ve been cleaning out the old studio in Kidder Hall as we prepare to turn over the space to New Media Communications. As materials are shipped away to Surplus, we unearth some ancient artifacts, some much older than this one artifact pictured here. But few are more relevant to my current occupation. This is an Anystream Apreso Coursecaster, a lecture capture device, and the appliance that Echo360 was using probably about a decade ago. We got this as part of an evaluation as we were testing lecture capture systems at OSU. We ultimately went with Apple Podcast Producer instead, a fateful decision. As Apple did what they often do, and discontinued the product almost immediately after we adopted it. We carried on for some time with Podcast Producer but ultimately retired it and replaced it with our current generation of lecture capture technology. We’ve become quite knowledgeable in regards to lecture capture over these many years, largely due to adversity and hardship. We’re now in a much better place, and much better informed. And I can’t say we’d be where we are now if we’d gone with this little box, instead.
P.S. The Canopus TwinPact 100, which was part of our Apple Podcast Producer deployment, is also sitting on my desk. But unlike the Anystream, which doesn’t seem to serve a purpose any more, the Canopus can still be leveraged as a type of Swiss Army knife for ingesting legacy standard definition sources into our workflow. You’ve got a VHS tape of your wedding that you’d like to convert into a digital file? I can do that… well, except now I need a VCR.
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