Media Back-up and Organizing for Public Presentations

Very often, and especially recently, I have run into problems with live presentations full of multimedia content from computers. The major issues I will discuss include back-up media and labeling of media.

Rewind a few years ago - I was often given CDR's and floppy discs to load presentations onto a computer. The presentations were 100% PowerPoint and the floppies were on their way out of fashion. Soon, the laptops did not included floppy drives and compatibility with USB floppy drives was less than perfect - maybe around 75% success. The CDR's, although much better at compatibility, were harder to label unless a thin marker was used (like the ubiquitous Sharpie).

Even still, many presenters (or their assistants) were too busy to label the disc, so they simply wrote on the disc sleeve or plastic case, which meant very little to me once the disc was out of the case. I would sometimes end up with six or seven discs with little or no identification on them, so I would have to open each one just to see who it belonged to. To add to my confusion, some presentations were labeled electronically with the author's name and not the presenter's while others had no author's name.

I soon developed a system which allowed me to identify the CDR's with a single number, no matter who authored it or who presented it and it has served me well for the past five years, when followed. CDR's were easy, just look up the presenter's time slot, assign them a number and write the number on the disc. Then came the barrage of USB keys, which are harder to write on (sticky notes don't work well). So, I now ID the USB drives by their manufacturer - it ain't easy, but it's something.

Problem #1
So, there I was, a few weeks ago, in front of 200 people trying to load a presentation onto a laptop (PC) only to discover the CDR was corrupted and the transfer process froze the computer. The back-up was corrupted as well. The presentation was over 100 MB and so I had to wait two minutes each time to see if it would work. Then, the presenter pointed to a USB key, which had the same presentation on it. The only problem was that the presentation was renamed on the USB key and there were many PowerPoints on the key, so locating it was next to impossible without opening every single PowerPoint on the key - never mind that some presentations may be very similiar to each other.

Problem #2
That same day, my fancy numbering system was not followed which resulted in a presentation not being loaded onto the host computer. Not only that, the presenter didn't have a back-up. I found this out as the presenters were on stage looking for their presentations in front of the same 200 people. Offices had to be called, emails had to be sent and the event had to be quickly reorganized because the missing presentation was full of pictures to illustrate the topic. Fingers were pointed and blame was assigned, but those actions don't get things done.

These problems were solved in record time, but they potentially created a massive blow to the credibility of the meeting planners. It didn't look good and some tempers flared. In my experience, it's quite easy for a person to lose their mind in such a situation, when they are facing a crowd of peers or customers and expected to deliver. Without on-site support, it could have been a whole lot worse.

So, what did I learn from this? Nothing, actually. I've been through it before, but the problems arose due to lack of communication and not following established procedures. It is not a matter of who is at fault in situations like these, but how the situation can be immediatley solved, then improved and maintained in the future.