The following are some suggested practices to ensure a successful videoconference for all participants and presenters.

Participants

• Arrive 15 minutes before the videoconference. Arriving early provides an opportunity to find a seat, conduct introductions among participants, and organize materials for the meeting.

• Ensure you can be heard, move closer to the microphone if necessary.

• Avoid shuffling papers or tapping objects near the microphones.

• Keep your microphone on mute at all times until the chairperson/host asks your site to respond. This improves the audio quality for everyone in the videoconference by removing extraneous room noise (chairs, paper shuffling etc.)

•Avoid side conversations that would exclude the far-end sites from your conversation.

• Interactivity between all locations is the key to a successful video conference.

• Ideas and comments from each remote site should be encouraged and discussed within the timeframe of the agenda.

• Once the connections have been made with the sites in the conference, all participants should introduce themselves.

• This helps to establish appropriate audio levels in all the meeting rooms. Remember, just because the other participants are not in the same room, proper business protocol should still be followed.

Procedures for Site Hosts/Facilitators/Presenters

• Familiarize yourself with the room, keypad and document camera or other special equipment. Presenters that will be using a number of devices (document camera, vcr, computer) may want to arrange a visit to the room a week or so before the videoconference, to practice operating the equipment. If the event will be large, complex or critical we highly recommend a rehearsal session.

• In most sites with two monitors the left television monitor is the preview monitor and will show what the camera sees.

• The right television monitor is the monitor that will show the other sites.

• Mounted on the top of the right monitor is the camera.

• The switching from site to site is voice activated. It takes four seconds of continuous noise from your site for the video to show your image to the rest of the conference.

The keypad that controls the equipment is usually located on the conference room table. A participant in the room will operate the keypad for the session.

• Participants should remember to pause for reaction.

In order to coordinate the audio and the video coming from a site there is a 1/4 second audio delay.

    The video picture is compressed before being transmitted and decompressed at the receiving sites. There is a choice of two data rates, 112 kilobytes per second (low speed) and 384 kbps (high speed). The higher data rate produces a higher quality visual image. If there will be a lot of movement or video tapes shown, it is best to use the 384 kbps data rate. However, if the presentation doesn't contain a lot of movement, the 112 kbps data rate is suitable.

• The compression process will make the other sites move on the monitor in a jerky motion. This distortion is called artifacting or pixelation.

• Movement should be kept to a minimum to reduce this effect. With the higher transmission rate, the jerky movement is less noticeable. Most participants grow accustomed to this effect quite quickly.

Adapted from ©Province of British Columbia 2001