The Conference Video Engine

Since 2021, the Solana Foundation has hosted regular conferences, like the annual “Breakpoint” conference, for the larger Solana community. But when you have a worldwide, decentralized base, how do you make sure that everyone can take part, even if they can’t be in one physical location due to cost or visa issues?

Ahead of Breakpoint 2024, I solved this by creating the video engine. Our goal was to ensure that every person that appeared on stage (100+ over 80+ total talks) had a clip and photo to share on social before the end of the conference day — a massive feat when photos and full videos from conference are usually shared weeks or months later, if at all.

To do this, I led a team to:

• hire 15 video producers who were familiar with the solana community (to know what clips would hit the best on social)

• pair them with 15 local video editors

• coordinate with the livestream/youtube team and event photographers to get media to our “mission control” work room

• assign clips to each pair as they came in with the lead editor

• review and give feedback on clips selected (down to copyediting captions)

• pass approved clips to a community relations producer, who then uploaded photos and video to a folder and shared with speakrs

• track everything in a massive logistics document

After the success (and lessons) from our first run at Breakpoint 2024, we repeated the feat at Accelerate, a mid-year conference in New York City.