Information for Preparing for Your Talk

Please read the following instructions carefully for guidelines on preparing your Presentation, Representative Image, and Video Preview (if required) for VIS 2024, or a VIS 2024 associated event.

IEEE Visualization 2024 is a Hybrid Conference

IEEE VIS 2024 will be a mix of hybrid experiences, based upon the event type.

  • VIS Full/Short Papers: Full and short papers will be split into in-person presenter-only and virtual presenter-only sessions. Both in-person and virtual session will be streamed and recorded via Zoom. Authors should have made this selection during their camera ready submission.
  • TVCG/CG&A Presentations: TVCG/CG&A Presentations will be in-person presenter-only, but they will be streamed and recorded via Zoom.
  • All Other Events: Please contact the organizers of your event.

All full/short paper and TVCG/CG&A presenters are required to register as a speaker, irrespective of their mode of presentation. Presenters at other events may register as attendees. Additionally, diversity and inclusivity scholarships will be available to support the participation of speakers with financial needs.

Required Materials Deadlines

Work must be submitted via the provided link on the dates listed below.

Presentation videos are not required, as all presentations will be given live.

Video Previews:

  • VIS Full/Short Papers: Aug. 22
  • TVCG/CG&A Presentations: Aug. 22 Sep. 12
  • All Other Events: Sep. 12

Representative Image and Caption:

  • Full/Short VIS Papers: Aug. 22
  • TVCG/CG&A Presentations: Aug. 22 Sep. 12
  • All Other Events: Sep. 12

Presentation Recommendations and Powerpoint Template

We recommend using the provided 16x9 wide format Powerpoint template for your presentation.

In addition, make sure that your presentation is accessible by speaking clearly, using large fonts, and ensuring high contrast. Avoid saying “as you can see on this slide” and always describe all relevant visuals. You can find some recommendations for giving accessible talks from SIGACCESS and if you have additional questions contact the accessibility chairs.

The VIS 2022 conference organizers put together some tips on making a compelling and informative talk, which still apply. We hope that this guidance is helpful for your presentation:

Presentation Length

As a guide, the length requirements for are as follows:

  • VIS Full Papers and TVCG/CG&A Presentations: the maximum length of your slot is 12 minutes, including questions. We recommend a 9 minute talk with 2 to 3 minutes for questions. At least 1 minute must be left for questions.
  • VIS Short Papers Presentations: the maximum length of your slot is 9 minutes, including questions. We recommend a 7 minute talk with 2 minutes for questions. At least 1 minute must be left for questions
  • Associated Events: please consult your associated event organizers for information on presentation timing.

Required Material

Your submission consists of two pieces resulting in four files:

  1. Video Preview - The short video previews are a great opportunity to publicize your work or event to a wide audience. Video previews are accessible from the conference website on the VIS YouTube channel prior to, during, and after the conference.
    • A 25-second video that clearly communicates the research and contribution, inviting readers to read your paper.
    • Please do NOT include the paper title or authors’ information. The FF chairs will add these as a 5-second title slide in front of your 25-second video in a consistent way.
    • Must be self-contained.
    • We discourage humor and trailer-like ‘ads’ because the video will exist for a long time and can be shared widely by the authors on social media and other channels.
    • Should contain audio narration. However, we discourage background music and request that the video focuses viewers’ attention on the content.
    • Subtitles are mandatory to increase accessibility. See below for tips on how to create and include subtitles.
  2. Representative Image and Caption
    • Authors are asked to submit a representative preview image that will be used as an icon next to the listing of the paper on our web pages.
    • You will also be asked to provide a plaintext file with an image caption (100 words or less).

Technical Specifications

All uploaded material must follow the following technical specifications.

Video Submissions

All video submissions must meet the following requirements:

  • MPEG-4 using H.264 encoding for video and AAC for audio (file extension must be .mp4)
  • 1920x1080 resolution
  • 16:9 aspect ratio: please make use of the full resolution, i.e., no black borders should be visible
  • Frame rate of 30FPS
  • Maximum Size:
    • 30MB for Video Previews
  • Audio: Make sure that the quality of your voice recording is good and clearly understandable, without background noise and/or oversteering (stay below -5db). We discourage salient music to focus viewers’ attention on the content and to avoid copyright issues.
  • Make sure that any audio and video content is free from copyright or that you are licensed to use it. This is very important as YouTube automatically checks for copyright infringements.

We recommend using OBS Studio to record your presentation, which is free and cross-platform. If you are familiar with other recording software please feel free to use it instead. Please see our guide from 2022 for information on recording a compelling and high-quality talk (some information might be outdated, though). You can also watch our tutorial on Youtube from VIS 2020 for a guide on how to use OBS Studio to record your talk, should you choose to use it. We do not recommend using Powerpoint’s built in recording since the recording is done per-slide, so if you speak during a slide transition the audio will not be recorded. These issues can be tough to catch and fix.

After recording your talk, please rewatch it to ensure the video and audio are recorded correctly.

To encode/re-encode your video in the right format, you can use the free software Handbrake. To check that your video is in the right format, you can use the free software MediaInfo.

Mandatory: Subtitles

There are a number of tools that are available to generate captions for you, which you can download and include with your video. YouTube, Veed.io, and Facebook, for example, have free tools that automatically create closed captions and make it possible to download these.

Please note two important things for this:

  1. In general, it takes some time to generate the files and they need corrections (particularly with uncommon words or terminology), so you should take this into account so that the video is finished before the deadline;
  2. If you use a social media platform to generate subtitles, please do not publish the video completely (not even private or unlisted) as it will interfere with the conference and will increase the work on the student volunteers and might lead to delays.

There are also a number of paid services that enable the transcription of videos, such as Amberscript. Lastly, it is also possible to manually create the subtitles using, for example, the YouTube captioning tool, Adobe Premiere Pro, or Amara. Regardless of the tool you are using, please make sure that the subtitles are accurate and correctly timed for the benefit of all attendees. Videos containing subtitles have a considerably higher engagement and retention rate than one’s without.

If you use YouTube for creating captions (automatically or by hand), you can download them by going to the subtitles page when editing your video information in YouTube Studio. You can then click the three dots next to the subtitles you want to download and select download from the menu to download the .sbv or .srt file containing your subtitles. Make sure that you manually correct the generated subtitles for errors by directly editing the .srt file in a text editor.

You can test your subtitles by playing your video in VLC with the .sbv file in the same directory so that VLC will find it. Then right-click the VLC window and select the subtitle menu item to pick your subtitles to play during your video.

If you create the captions using a different software package, subtitles in the .srt format are also acceptable.

Representative Image and Caption

Authors are asked to submit a representative preview image that will be used as an icon next to the listing of the paper on our web pages:

  • File Format: png
  • Image Size Limit: 1920 x 1080 Maximum
  • Maximum file size is 5MB

You will also be asked to provide a plaintext file with an image caption (100 words or less).

File Uploads

All files (videos, subtitles, images) are uploaded through our custom Presentation Material Upload system. Shortly after the final acceptance notifications, the Tech Chairs will email submission-specific upload links to the corresponding author (please also check your spam folder). You can reuse the link if you want to or need to upload additional files later. Unlike previous years, you do not need to name your files appropriately, the only thing that matters is a valid file extension.

Whenever you upload something, we perform various initial checks automatically to make sure that your submitted files adhere to the specifications outlined in this document (including preliminary audio quality checks). If any errors are reported in our upload system, you must fix them before the respective deadline. We also encourage you to strongly consider any warnings that might be displayed. For material that ends up on YouTube, an additional manual check will be performed after the respective deadline. We recommend uploading the videos as early as possible so that you have enough time to fix raised issues before the deadline. The reason for our strict technical requirements is that we need all videos and materials in a consistent format for our downstream processing pipeline.

Contact

Tech Chairs

  • Aditeya Pandey, Regeneron
  • John Thompson, Autodesk Research
  • Harry Li, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
  • Kelvin Li, Databricks

Email: tech@ieeevis.org

Accessibility Chairs

  • Dominik Moritz, Carnegie Mellon University

Email: accessibility@ieeevis.org