Words from the WellRandom Thoughts on Christ, the Church and Technology

I just got off the phone with someone that needs to produce one short video a month as a discussion starter for some online continuing education. Each month he wants a different personality to present the video. These persons are located all over the USA and most if not all will have no video experience. And, I know what you are thinking, but this is not a great freelance opportunity for me! While this organization has a decent budget for this project that budget would quickly disappear if they were sending me all over the country and this is not what this guy wanted. He wanted a way to do it himself so I gave him a solution that I think can work for others in a similar situation. I will list below what I told him and hope that my fellow pro’s don’t shoot me.

1. Buy 2 Kodak Zi8 camcorders, small tripods and wired lav mics
2. Buy a 27″ iMac
3. Get Final Cut Express
4. Get an Elgato Turbo.264HD encoder
5. Hire a Motion Graphics Designer to produce bumpers for your videos (He can add titles in FCE)

As I thought about the advice that I was giving him I was floored at what he would be able to do with this. It is amazing how far video has come in just a few years.

Do you have any thoughts on this? Did I miss something?

My wife and I decided that she “needed” an iPhone4 as well so this morning I decided to take a foolish run to our local AT&T store since today was the first day they were supposed to have the iPhone in stock for walk in purchases. I wasn’t really planning on finding one when I arrived at 8:45 am this morning, in fact, I was expecting to see a big line at the store. To be honest, it didn’t really matter because I already had one on order from Apple but it wasn’t going to arrive until we left for vacation in three weeks. I thought, what the heck, let me just drive by and see what the situation is.

When I arrived at 8:45 and saw very few cars in the lot I knew one of two things was going on, either they were already sold out or for some reason no one had shown up when they opened at 7am. I went in to inquire about an iPhone to be told that they had sold out but……..they were handing out tickets for the next shipment that would…get this…be there in a few hours, probably before lunch. Score! I gave them the info they needed to reserve an iPhone for Mickey and while they were doing that, I pulled out my iPhone and cancelled my Apple order!

A few hours later I got a call from Eric at the AT&T store saying that my phone was in. Nice! I went to the store and picked it up, they even let me pick it up without activating it so that I could activate it at home so that my wife wouldn’t miss any calls since I would have her new phone with me for the next few hours.

All in all it was a very positive experience. I will never say that AT&T is perfect and I am certainly not an AT&T fanboy, but they have taken a lot of hits over the past few months and it is time for some positive feedback.

Now I just have to take this thing home and get it set up!

Well I must be living right. I received my iPhone 4 a day early! I pre-ordered last Monday through the AT&T website about an hour before there was a complete meltdown that forced them to stop taking orders completely. At that point I felt very lucky to be receiving mine at all.  I never expected to get it a day early. I thought that I would take a moment and document the unboxing and set up process and jot down a few of my initial reactions.

1. The packaging is just what I expected, pretty much the same as my original 3G.

In the Box

2. It is thinner and slightly narrower than my 3G and even though it weighs the same it feels slightly heavier in the hand. It seems A LOT smaller than the 3G.

Much Thinner than the 3G

3. The fit and finish is exceptional. This thing is beautiful just like the unibody MacBook Pros. It seems very sturdy and very well built.

4. I love that just about everything that I need to know about my phone is included in the 20 page fanfold booklet. I remember the days of getting 150+ page books with other phones. This shows the usability of the iOS. The compactness and simplicity of the “Owners manual” is especially encouraging to me since my wife will be getting her first iPhone in a few weeks and this will make it a lot easier for her to learn how to use it.

Getting Started Guide

5. Once I updated iTunes the process of registering and restoring my phone was painless. Except that iTunes crashed in the middle of the initial sync after restore. That may have been because AT&T activated the phone right at the beginning of the process and caused a hiccup. (hey, when you can blame something on AT&T you take the opportunity!)

6. Speaking of activation, it took all of 2 minutes for the activation to take effect after I went to att.com/Activations and plugged in my info. I was a little concerned because the instructions that appeared after I had entered my info did not match what AT&T had sent me earlier. They indicated on one screen that I should turn my phone on and connect it to iTunes and on the other said that I should leave it off for at least 15 minutes. That was impossible since my phone was already connected to iTunes.  They promised dire consequences if I turned it on in less than 15 minutes, oops.  No problems here.

AT&T's Activation confirmation

7. OK, I understand the reasons for this but it is annoying since I wasn’t ready for it.  When you restore from backup your passwords do not restore.  This results in a pop-up everytime the phone tries to check your mail, sync to google calendars, etc. The problem is that the pop-ups almost block you from getting the passwords entered.  Once while I was entering a crazy long PW a new pop-up came up and interrupted my typing. Arghhh.

8. The Display on this thing is amazing.  Very crisp. Very Bright. I think that you really have to see it live to appreciate it. All of the photos that I have seen online do not do it justice. Text is much easier to read. All I can say is that you need to see it live. It is absolutely amazing.

Retina Display is crazy good.

9. Snappy.  That is the only way I know to describe the performance.  I use Tweetdeck and had almost given up on using it on my phone because it was terribly slow. On the new phone it is very snappy.

10. I don’t know why but typing seems a little easier on this phone.

11. The volume buttons are a big improvement.  The old rocker style was fine but the separate buttons feel more solid. I always felt like I had to press the rocker switch too hard to change it.

Alright, those are a few of my initial thoughts.  Overall, this phone is a big improvement over the 3G, I can’t say about the 3GS because I never had one, but a huge improvement over the 3G. I haven’t tried out FaceTime or multi-tasking but I will at some point. The unified inbox and message threading is very nice. One word of caution, the message threading is based off of the subject line in the email so if you have multiple emails with the same subject they will be threaded together whether they should be or not. Now I’m off to continue exploring my toy tool.

I am no professional VO artist, let me get that out in the beginning, but I do have the occasional need to record VO for video projects. I live in an apartment so I have no control over when my neighbors decide to slam a door, stomp on the floor or do anything else that makes noise! In the past I had closed myself in a closet and hoped for the best. This worked, sort of. The clothes in the closet acted as some sound dampening but it still left the audio sounding a bit hollow.

I also have need to record decent audio at my day job. We have professors record lectures using Camtasia to capture audio and their Powerpoint. We have been doing this by giving them a decent USB headset mic. To be honest, I have never liked this setup. The overall quality was never very good and you could hear background noises and every mouse click when they advanced to the next slide.

With these needs in mind I began to look for an inexpensive solution and this is what I found-The New & Improved Voice Over “Porta-Booth” ®.

Now I could have gone ahead and bought one of the premade ones, but I am cheap and like to do somethings myself. So I decided that for not much more than the premade booth, I could get a booth and a microphone! So that is exactly what I did.

I began by locating the materials that I would need. You can spend valuable time searching the web for them or you can use these links. I would prefer that you use these links since I will get a little Affiliate love from Amazon and Sam Ash if you buy the materials with these links!

The first thing you need are the cubes. These come in a set of two, you can either make two booths or use the extra cube for storage.

Then you need the Mic. I choose a Blue Snowball. It is a USB mic that has gotten a ton of good reviews. Blue is a well known mic manufacturer and it looks cool!

The most difficult thing to locate was the acoustical foam. I wanted the Auralex Studiofoam Pyrimids because that is what Harlan said works best. These are usually only sold in boxes of 12. I only needed 1. I found them at SamAsh.

If you don’t want to pay that much for the Pyrimid panels, there are alternatives. You could buy this:

If you buy the wedge panel, you will cut it into 4 12″ squares. I have not tried this but I think that it would work, probably not as tight as the pyrimids though. I will cover how to cut the pyrimid foam in a moment.

Once you have all of your materials it is simple to put this thing together.

1. Unpack your cube.
2. Expand your cube, be sure to fold the flap into place.
3. Cut your 2′x4′ sheet of foam into 2-12″ squares and 1-26″x14″ sheet. Do this carefully with a serrated knife, like a bread knife. You will want to saw through the foam gently so that you don’t tear it and make a mess. You will have some left over. I am going to cut two smaller squares and place them under my monitors in my edit suite to isolate them from the table that they are sitting on. I hope this will take some of the “boominess” out of them.
4. Take the long sheet of foam and fold it in half, turn your cube so that the opening is up and place the foam against the bottom. Carefully making sure that it is in there tight. Then unfold it, making sure that it is straight against one side of the cube.
5. Then you are going to place the other two squares against the other two sides of the the cube.
6. Then turn your cube so that the “side” without foam becomes the bottom.

You have done the hard part. All that’s left is to place your mic inside, towards the back and start recording.

One thing that I noticed after I got this put together was an annoying little gap at the top. I was able to fix this using a small piece of velcro.

Here are some step by step photos.

Let me start by saying that I don’t use Media Shout every week. I used to, but now we have several other people that create our MS content and run the show on Sunday mornings. However, this past week I had to use MS for a special presentation. This meant that I had to start from scratch and build my own script. Let’s see…how can I sum up my experience with Media Shout? Well, to put it bluntly…IT SUCKED! Why you ask?

1. It will not playback mp4 files natively. You have to use a third party codec pack and even then it is not reliable. Because of this I had to play my beautiful mp4 files in QT Player, not very elegant, but it didn’t crash the machine every time like MS did.
2. Doesn’t recognize the correct video dimensions. If I create a cue with an mp4 file (did this before I realized that it wouldn’t work) MS sees the video as being larger than it is and uses the wrong aspect ratio, I have to go in and manually create the correct dimensions for each video!
3. Too many clicks. In MS it takes way too many clicks to do anything. For example, I wanted to play a video from an in point to an out point and have it dissolve in and out. To do this, I had to create a 1 sec black cue that dissolved and continued to the next cue automatically and place those cues before and after the video cue. Why can’t the video just dissolve in?
4. The interface is clunky. We are using MS 3.5.??. We have not and probably will not upgrade to 4.0. The interface of 3.5 is clunky and confusing. It takes weeks for someone to become comfortable enough to run a service.

I just said that we probably will not upgrade MS to 4.0, and I mean it. I am looking very hard at ProPresenter. Why? Well, for starters look at the list above and from what I have seen about 4.0 they have not addressed the video playback issue. I do not understand this. With video being used every week, why would you not make your product work with the latest and greatest codecs? And all you Mac haters out there, don’t start with Macs are more expensive and all that crap. It is simply not true. In fact, our MS computer is a $2500 HP workstation. And it can’t playback an H.264 file without crashing. For less money I can get an iMac that will perform better.

Bottom line is that MediaShout is losing the battle to remain relevant.

Anyone have any other thoughts?