WeVu is a media-hosting platform that can be used for virtual music festivals with asynchronous submissions of video recordings. 

WeVu’s characteristics and features make it ideal for an online, asynchronous music festival.

• Administrator, adjudicator, and entrant roles in the system
• Time-specific comments by the adjudicators
• Unlimited sites and users
• Source-quality audio – no compression or downsampling
• PDF scores can be uploaded so that they can be found by adjudicators along with the videos and downloaded for viewing in a separate window while the video is playing.

WeVu is flexible. But it is not built exactly like a file storage system with folders. Think of it more like educational software built so teachers and students can be in a closed space together to share and comment on audio, video, images, and pdfs. Each WeVu site can be set to allow or not allow students to share files with each other and comment on them. And within each site, any file can be available to everyone, or only between teacher and student (a WeVu ‘Assignment’), or placed into a Playlist for organization.

Think of the WeVu organizational hierarchy like this:

Instance >> Site >> Playlist or Assignment >> Videos

For Music Festivals with a dedicated private instance, there are decisions to be made about whether to create separate WeVu sites for different categories of entrants, different adjudicators, or different instruments or age/level groups. Each site stands alone within your WeVu instance, but festival entrants and adjudicators can be affiliated with multiple sites. So an entrant could be in both a violin and a cello/bass site, while an adjudicator could be affiliated with all the woodwinds sites for the different age or competition categories. Within each site you may want to have separate Assignment boxes for each ‘class’ to which entrants register and to which they will upload their videos. Then, if there is a public-access aspect to the festival, you may want to make certain videos public or create separate sites that house the videos that are being made public (copies of the original recording that has the adjudicator’s comments, but with those comments removed when the copy is made.)

So, for example, your organizational hierarchy might be:

The Festival’s WeVu Instance >> Junior Piano >> Grade 1 Piano >> All Grade 1 Entrants’ Videos

What follows assumes that you want entrants to only be able to ‘share’ their upload with the adjudicator, rather than it being visible to all entrants. (If you want it to be more public, we can set this up with you).

Our recommendation is that you create sites for each adjudicator but name those sites with the categories or sections that the adjudicator is responsible for – like “Junior Piano” or “Woodwinds”. Then that adjudicator knows that she is responsible for all the entry videos in that site.

Within each (adjudicator’s or section) site you can define as many WeVu Assignments as you wish to correspond to different classes.

The User Experience

Set up this way, the experience for users will be:

For Administrators:

• Create separate WeVu sites for each section or adjudicator (e.g. Brass or Sarah Gill)
• Each of these sites will have a unique invite link to send to the adjudicator and another to provide to entrants. Using those links to create an account (or login after creating an account) will attach that user to the applicable site.
• Keep a spreadsheet with a list of these site names and the two links.
• Provide the appropriate site link to entrants after they have chosen the class they’re entering.
  (Entrants entering more than one class in one section/adjudicator’s site only need the one link, once).
• Assist as necessary with entrant/parent uploads and move files from one class to another if necessary.

For Adjudicators:

• Receive your email with the owner/instructor-role link for their site.
• Create an account from that link. (From then on, log in at your instance’s URL, which will be of the form: https://app.wevu.video/[festivalname])
• When videos are uploaded by entrants, the adjudicator will receive an email. (We can turn this off if you don’t want this.)
• Watch the performances one by one and make time-specific comments and a general final summative comment.
• Keep a separate sheet with the marks to provide to the festival administrators for ranking and awards.

For Entrants and their Parents:

• Get the account creation link from the festival, either by email or after clicking through on the Festival website once a class has been seleted and registration fee paid.
• Record the video, following recommendations from WeVu and the festival to maximize audio quality but minimize file size.
• Create a WeVu account and log in, which puts the entrant into the appropriate site.
• Go to the upload screen from the left menu, choose the appropriate class (Assignment in WeVu terminology), find the file on the device, and upload.
• After the adjudication has happened, entrants can log in again to read the comments from the adjudicator and for each comment replay their video from the exact moment at which the comment was made.

We would be happy to do a call with you to discuss your needs. Please email fred.cutler@wevu.ca with your inquiries.