2020 Virtual DDA Meeting: Presentation Guidelines

To adapt to the virtual meeting format, we are requiring that all abstract authors upload their talks or posters one week before the start of the 2020 DDA meeting. This will allow all participants time to view talks and posters on their own schedule and submit questions ahead of time (questions can also be submitted in real time during the live Q&A sessions). Talks and posters will be grouped by sessions, and during the week of the meeting, we will schedule 2-3 hours of live webinars per day for authors to answer questions and discuss their work. 

Note on pre-recorded talks: Below we have some suggestions for how to most easily record your talks (and provide details on file formats and maximum file sizes). The talk lengths listed below are upper limits. We will not accept talks that are over-length! Note that the contributed talk length is shorter than the typical 15 minute time slot because at our usual meetings that includes the Q&A time whereas here we are scheduling a separate, live Q&A panel discussion for each session.

Contributed Oral Presentations: Pre-recorded talks should be 10-12 minutes in length

Invited Talks: Pre-recorded talks should be 20-25 minutes in length.

Posters: You will need to upload your poster as a PDF (no more than 50MB in size). We will share links to them on the password protected meeting page. Here's an example pdf poster. Poster authors will be scheduled for live Q&A sessions just like oral presentation authors, so if you are hesitant about pre-recording a talk, this might be a good option to consider!

Asynchronous Posters (late and second abstracts): These posters should be formatted as above, but there will be no live webinar for Q&A. Instead, discussion of these posters will take place via Slack.

Details and Instructions for recorded talks:

The talks are going to be uploaded and shared with meeting registrants via the AAS Vimeo account. They will be uploaded as "unlisted" videos, meaning you need to have access to a link in order to watch the video (i.e., they will not publicly show up on the account channel). These links will be provided to meeting registrants on a password protected meeting website. These links are not shareable (Vimeo offers security such that copy-pasting the links outside of our protected meeting website will not work!), which allows us to limit who can view your talk. Your talk is, of course, your own, so if you'd like to make it publicly available, you are free to do so and post it anywhere you'd like (we will still require your talk to be uploaded for the official Vimeo meeting channel)! After the conclusion of the DDA meeting, we will be happy to list your talk publicly via Vimeo or on the DDA YouTube channel if you request that. 

File formats/sizes: Vimeo supports a variety of file formats. Some common ones are .MOV, .MPEG4, .MP4, .M4V, .AVI, and .MMV, and you can check Vimeo guidelines here. Please keep the total video file size under ~200 MB (most contributed talks should very easily be recorded in under 100 MB!). Include your name (and preferably also your session number) in the video file name!

Where to send your videos: Authors of accpeted abstracts will recieve a link to a Dropbox folder where you will upload your file. The SOC will upload the video files to the official conference Vimeo channel.

Suggested ways to record talks: You can record and edit your talk however you would like, but here are a few suggestions.

General note (which also applies to the Q&A webinars): Whether you want to include video/photos of yourself in your talk is completely up to you! Audio-only is completely acceptable for the recorded talks and for your webinar session.

Narrated PowerPoint Presentation: If you have access to Microsoft PowerPoint, this is a really nice way to record your talk. It requires some familiarity with PowerPoint, but it gives you the ability to edit your narration on a slide-by-slide basis (so if you're unhappy with just one section of your talk, you can easily fix it without re-recording the whole thing!). We used PowerPoint to put together and record a quick (~6 minute) presentation outlining the basics of this approach. The video is here, and you can download the example power point file that generated the video here. Microsoft has more detailed instructions here for recording PowerPoint presentations if you want to do something more advanced.

Narrated Keynote Presentation: If you prefer to use Apple's Keynote software, it provides similar options for recording your presentation (editorial note from Kat: despite being a Keynote user rather than a PowerPoint user, I found the options in PowerPoint to be easier to figure out and much more flexible than those in Keynote. Your mileage may vary, but it might be worth considering PowerPoint!). The official Instructions from Apple are here, and we made a quick tutorial video here.

Recording a using Zoom: If you want to keep it simple, or your preferred presentation software doesn't include any narration options, you can record your talk using Zoom. We've made a quick example video with basic instructions here. Detailed instructions for how to record meetings is available from Zoom.

Miscellaneous other options: The three recording methods above are the only ones we have tried and plan to demo, but we will add additional suggestions here as we come across them. If you are familiar with Panopto, they appear to offer a free in-browser way to record talks (see Panopto's website).