Bsides Cape Town 2022 Video

BSIDES Cape Town 2022 Video, late but not never

We had some hiccups with our video which delayed release.

Coming out of the pandemic we thought of experimenting with youtube livestreams for BSIDES Cape Town. We thought our online community was big enough to give it a go. The analytics showed us this theory wasn’t true, at least not yet. Both our community and ourselves love an in-person event, more than another online event.

What went wrong?

With our new venue we were offered a vendor they used for online events. We trusted the venue’s opinion as they organize frequent and large events including the likes of Africa Arena tech conference. We unfortunately made the assumption that this vendor would be up to the standard of the venue itself. This is not an indictment on the venue, which served us with respect and made BSIDES Cape Town 2022 very successful, but an indictment on our due diligence and trusting vendors without verifying.

What issues did we have:

• No individual slide capture
• Bad quality video and audio
• Audio often had feedback and noise that made editing very difficult.
• Some talks the video started minutes into the talk while audio was on.
• We received no raw recordings, so had to edit the uploaded youtube content.

Load shedding and bad Wifi signal added to this conundrum.

As BSIDES Cape Town’s 2022 committee and myself Christo Goosen I would like to apologise to the community and sponsors for this conundrum. Though our focus always is on the day and in person, we would like to afford those who cannot make the day and our sponsors the opportunity for High quality content afterwards. We also apologise to the speakers who spend a substantial amount of time preparing for these talks and form the backbone of this conference.

Though we donate our time, we would like to do our utmost to make the event hold up to the standard of an international event, driven by local hackers.

What did we do?

We attempted to receive the raw content, but failed to do so.

We will no longer work with this vendor and our move to a different venue reflects on growth not the venue’s part in this.

We used an AI tool at cost to BSIDES to enhance the audio as much as we could when editing the video.

All videos are uploaded to our youtube channel under a playlist:

How will we prevent this?

• We will engage past vendors and potential new vendors with expertise in conference style events.
• We will be spending money on recording hardware and contract in external expertise needed
• Increased vetting on vendors
• Jared Naude has joined BSIDES Cape Town from 2023 as an organiser and has extensive expertise in recording and livestreaming
• We will focus on high quality recording VS livestreaming.