Braintrust Digital Production Blog

AirTurn AT-104 hands-free page turner review

2010-08-17T21:34:00.006-04:00

AirTurn AT-104

Boulder, Colorado based AirTurn, Inc. has introduced a USB powered hands-free page-turning device especially for musicians who wish to use digital sheet music. The AT-104 is a two-part hardware system that enables you to move forward and backward in an electronic document one page at a time. Part one is the USB transmitter, which is connected to a pair of pedals of your choice. Part two is a simple USB dongle that acts as the receiver when connected

The AT-104 receiver

to your computer. AirTurn’s “Professional package” which sells for $198.95 comes with the AirTurn transmission hardware, the MusicReader and MusicConverter software, as well as a pair of BOSS FS-5U pedals.

Hardware

The AT-104 hardware is small and inconspicuous - as it should be for a musician wanting to use it for performances. The USB receiver is about the size of a typical flash memory stick, and the transmitter is only about as big as your palm. Glossy black plastic shells help to conceal the hardware even more. I tested the AT-104 with my both my home piano and the one I play at church. I found that the only reason people noticed the pedals and transmitter was because they observed the computer sitting atop the piano and wondered what I was doing.

The BOSS FS-5U pedals and AirTurn's transmitter

Although AirTurn does not manufacture the BOSS pedals, they are the brand included in their “Pro pack” and deserve mention. The FS-5U pedals are second to none. An attractive and rugged all-metal construction and rubberized bottom to prevent sliding make for an impressive product. The sides of each pedal are “tongue and groove” enabling you to lock together an unlimited number. The pedal mechanism gives a good, strong resistance. As good as these pedals are, I would still like to see a broader surface area to keep from missing the pedal.

Function

The technology behind the AT-104 is relatively simple. Whenever a pedal is depressed, the transmitter sends either a “page up” or “page down” command to the receiver. Of course, this command will then display the next or previous screen in your document. The kit did everything it was supposed to do when I set it up. The USB receiver was plug and play on my MacBook Pro and in Windows XP. I also opened up some Microsoft Word documents and PDF files to see how the pedals moved pages in different software. These programs were able to understand the commands as well and would perform a “next screen” type of “page up/down” action. In other words, they would not necessarily skip to the next whole page but would rather show the next screen of type wherever the bottom of the monitor had cut off the text.

Using the AT-104 takes some getting used to. It’s a bit disconcerting to have the music instantly change pages when you’re used to naturally compensating for the delay and motion of a page turn. I also found it a little confusing during certain measures trying to operate the piano pedals and tapping the BOSS pedal together. After practicing for about fifteen minutes, I noticed improvement, so I’m sure it wouldn’t take long to re-train my technique.

I did not experiment with how far the transmitter and the receiver could communicate, but I was able to operate it from across a room. That’s probably far enough for most applications. The response is very quick with no noticeable lag. There is a delay adjustment in the MusicReader software that you can tweak to prevent double page turns when the pedals are depressed more than once in quick succession.

Software

If there is a weak link in AirTurn’s AT-104, it is the MusicReader software. Since AirTurn doesn’t develop the software themselves, I can’t fault them directly for many of the complaints I have. The interface is probably best described as “clunky.” It appears almost identical in Windows and OS X, and seemed pretty “buggy” when I used it. I initially tried using the software in a limited user account on OS X, but it gave me errors wherever I turned. It seemed to run fine under an administrator account, but I opted to try Windows XP instead. Even in Windows, it crashed several times and failed to convert files properly and consistently.

The MusicReader software interface

MusicReader uses a MRS file extension, which requires using the included MusicConverter software to turn PDFs, JPEGs, or other files into the MRS format. According to Hugh Sung of AirTurn, there are several reasons for the proprietary format’s use. There are some image filters applied to documents, algorithms recognize white space between staves to help intelligently determine resizing and half-pages, and it adds an annotation layer to mark on. Still, since PDF is such a broad standard, being able to use PDFs in MusicReader without conversion would be welcomed. One PDF that I tried to convert in multiple ways was simply refused. I ended up having to export JPEGs of each page and convert them individually with MusicConverter. I then had to piece the music back together to export as a MRS. Not exactly intuitive or user-friendly.

Despite its shortcomings, the bundled software basically does what it’s supposed to do. It moves the pages forward and backward on command. There are some nice features that help me overlook some of its quirks. The ability to annotate on the music is especially nice. This essentially gives you text, drawing, and highlighting capabilities for making notes or marks on the music. It’s non-destructive, so the marks that you make stay in MusicReader and don’t affect your original file. MusicConverter also enables you to setup repeat points in a piece. This keeps you from having to rapidly tap your foot to get back to a previous page. You can simply re-arrange or duplicate pages needed for the repeat in a piece to allow you to keep tapping forward through the music.

Summary

While the AirTurn AT-104 fills a gap for today’s music performers, there are certainly some improvements to be made for future revisions. Native support for PDF and possibly Finale’s MUS format would be very helpful. However, for those musicians with a vast digital music library, being able to use their music without having to print everything on paper is invaluable. Like many things, sheet music is moving increasingly into the digital realm and being purchased online, making devices like the AT-104 more vital than ever.

AirTurn has promised a Bluetooth version around the end of the year. This will enable support for more devices such as the Apple iPad and other tablets that lack USB ports. Hopefully that version will bring with it a simplified and cleaner app that will appear more at home on modern operating systems and make it easier for musicians to adopt a new technology over a very old technique.

For more information on AirTurn, go to www.airturn.com.

Adobe CS5 new feature walk through video

2010-06-27T17:36:00.000-04:00

Want to see some of Creative Suite 5's new features in action? Watch this video to see how Rotobrush, RED support, and camera lens correction works.

Adobe CS5 First Look

2010-04-12T00:05:00.023-04:00

CS5

Today, Adobe is announcing a refresh to its Creative Suite products, putting the software package at number five. CS5 offers significant improvements to performance through a variety of updates, not the least of which is a new engine called “Mercury.” Tim and I have been working with the beta version of the Master Collection suite for several weeks, giving us time to explore the new features and functionality of the programs included. For our purposes, we’ve constrained our comments to the Production Premium package.

“The need for speed”

CS5 is a milestone update for Adobe because the company has now optimized the suite for 64-bit. The complete departure from 32-bit for Premiere Pro and After Effects will leave users with older operating systems out in the cold, but will provide noticeable performance gains and more compact file sizes to adopters. Mac users won’t experience so many woes as Apple’s OS has been 64-bit for some time. Adobe recommends Windows 7 64-bit as the ideal PC operating system for CS5. Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and InDesign have all been tweaked to take special advantage of the 64-bit architecture. Preliminary informal tests have shown that renders in Premiere Pro and encodes in Media Encoder are noticeably faster, however specific benchmarks have not been performed due to the beta status of our software.

Adobe has also developed a playback engine for Premiere Pro and After Effects called “Mercury” which leverages the 64-bit architecture and GPU for especially efficient and powerful. In a pre-release demo, Adobe demonstrated Premiere Pro playing back seven simultaneous HD streams with live effects without GPU support. Nine or more were possible with the GPU.

Although Photoshop has been 64-bit since CS4, even it seems to have gotten a little bit of grease in the joints. There is now a preferences pane for GPU settings, allowing you to tweak the preferences to your desire. Alternatively, you can use a GPU auto-calibration, which runs a number of tests on a pair of images to determine which settings work best for your system. I was particularly impressed by a new zoom option called “Scrubby Zoom.” When this feature is enabled for the zoom tool, moving the mouse left or right while holding down the left mouse button causes the image to zoom in or out rapidly. This may not sound very exciting, but it is wild to watch. Not only does the image zoom as quickly as you move, but the resolution auto-scales in real time as well. The result is going from 50% zoom to 1,200% zoom keeps the image sharp from start to finish. No more waiting for the software to redraw the screen when zooming in large steps.

Pre-production and production

In the fall of 2009, Adobe introduced a new online/offline application called Story. Story is a collaborative screenwriting tool that can be used as a web app or offline through their Air run-time. You can read our review of it here. During a pre-release tele-conference, Adobe reps claimed that they are not trying to break into the screenwriting software game, but that they are simply trying to fill a niche market and round out their software package. The biggest advantage to Story, which is included with the Production Premium suite, is its ability to integrate with other programs within CS5.

OnLocation, which is largely unchanged from CS4, can import a shot list from a Story script, making recording with OnLocation a bit simpler. The transcription feature that was introduced in CS4 can also now reference the Story script to better analyze the speech contained in clips. We found this new feature to be lacking greatly in our review of CS4, so this modification will hopefully greatly improve the accuracy of transcriptions.

Post-production

Premiere Pro got a very mild interface update. The “tools” panel has been moved from the bottom right “vertical” version to a “horizontal” version at the top left. This was a welcome change to me as I generally find myself only selecting tools by keyboard shortcut anyhow, negating the need to have the tools readily clickable. The move also affords more valuable real estate where it’s needed next to the sequence panel.

The file-based editing templates have been updated. Native support for the RED camera’s R3D raw file format has been added and performs adequately. Although RED users are not normally using the R3D files to edit with, that capability is now included. We tested this feature with some 4k footage generously provided by Matthew Rogers of Macville Productions. The screenshots provided are taken from a short film called “Larry vs. the Aliens.”

After Effects maintains its spot as the top motion graphics editor with a new tool called the “Rotobrush.” This paintbrush works similarly to some of the smart tools found in Adobe Elements software. You select the foreground for rotoscoping with a standard left click and use the option click to select the background. A quick swipe over the areas gives After Effects enough information to guess what part of the image you want to select. You can then zoom in to fine-tune your selection. Once again, smart algorithms may help save motion picture effects artists from retinal failure related to long-term pixel-level editing.

Soundbooth and Media Encoder both offer minor updates. Adobe now offers loads of scores for free direct download through the Resource Central panel in the program. Media Encoder now has an option in the preferences pane that allows for auto-start of encoding queues. The default time is two minutes after a file has been added to the queue, but the countdown can be tailored to the user’s taste. This helps to eliminate the time spent waiting for large Premiere Pro sequences to load in the queue just to click “start.”

Adobe says that shipping versions of CS5 should be available in the US in about a month. Once we get our hands on release versions of the software, we’ll be posting a more in-depth hands-on review with at least one real-world project.

Here's Adobe's press release about the Production Premium suite.

Galkin meeting intro and DVD menu

2010-03-28T15:52:00.000-04:00

Each spring Oak Ridge Baptist Church hosts a week of special outreach meetings. In years past, they’ve used the DVD format as a substitute for paper flyers or brochures as an invitation. Last year, Braintrust produced and edited the entire DVD. This year, we helped again, but we were involved only on the shooting and DVD creation side of things. With some help from our friend Jeremy Dooley, we used two Canon digital still cameras to shoot time lapse from two angles. From this we created an image sequence, showing the church auditorium filling up before a morning service. This intro that plays when you first insert the DVD transitions to a “Welcome” from the church worship leader and then to the menu itself. The menu contains footage that Paul shot during a service showing the viewer a montage of the activities that occur during the worship at ORBC. You can view the introduction and menu below.

Timelapse intro

Extron Institute School of Engineered System Technologies: Day 2

2010-02-27T06:12:00.000-05:00

Day two at the Extron Institute in Raleigh brought more overwhelming but highly beneficial information. Today's topics included multi-image processing, AV Resource management, and commissioning hybrid video systems. The day finished with a feedback session that allowed the class participants the time to share concerns and wishes directly with Extron senior engineers and product managers. This gave the everyone an invitation to speak directly to the manufacturer's representatives providing us a prime opportunity to tell them what we saw in their products: likes, dislikes, and desirable features.

Multi-image processing explored the depths of switcher/scalers: the difficulties they help overcome and the challenges presented by mixed resolutions and aspect ratios. According to a chart in the presentation material, there are currently 22 accepted resolutions spreading over 5 different aspect ratios. These variants can cause some difficulty when dealing with a few inputs to only a few outputs. When dealing with video wall or high-volume output situations, the complexity level will rise exponentially. Extron also showed off their new annotation graphics processor, which allows real time on-screen drawing and typing. This can be used with a third party touch screen interface or a more traditional mouse/keyboard combo.

We also got a chance to play with one of Extron's newest control products, the TouchLink line of touch screen configurable controllers. These seven-inch displays come in either a tabletop or wall mount configuration. They're easily customized with their proprietary GUI Configurator software, allowing system designers to tailor their interface design to the client's needs and requirements.

The commissioning discussion covered optimizing mixed analog and digital video systems using test patterns and representative images. Choosing notoriously troublesome images to help find flaws in image setup. This instruction was followed by some examples where we examined the weaknesses of some given systems.

We ended the day with a great steak dinner at Fleming's. I look forward to seeing further innovations, such as increased distance over twisted pair transmitters, from Extron in the coming years as digital systems (hopefully) become more standardized.

Extron Institute School of Engineered System Technologies: Day 1

2010-02-25T22:24:00.000-05:00

Today was the first of a two-day class in Raleigh, NC that I am participating in. Extron electronics invited me (as well as about 40 other consultants) here to attend this training to inform us of their newest product offerings as well as new trends and changes in the world of AV design and integration.

Trying to absorb the information given today for 8 hours was akin to the proverbial "drinking from the fire hose." Even so, I left with a greater understanding of several technologies that I was largely unfamiliar with before. Though the topics ranged from energy star rated amplifiers to twisted pair range extenders, I was most informed and intrigued by the sessions on digital signal transmission and fiber optic transmission.

Though transmitting digital video signals is not cutting edge, the growing use of High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) digital rights management is adding an enormous layer of complication to commercial AV system applications. Consumers are used to seeing this and dealing with it in such applications such as downloaded audio and video files, but the limits that HDCP and its close cousins Advanced Access Content Protection (AACP) and DisplayPort Content Protection (DPCP) enforce create a veritable nightmare for designers and integrators trying to create extensive commercial systems.

To understand the difficulties provided by HDCP, one must have the "keys." HDCP compliant devices use keys to ensure that everything in the signal flow is following the rules set forth under the DRM specifications. Let's look at one example of a Blu-Ray player outputting a signal to a receiver, which in turn outputs to a monitor. All of these components are HDCP compliant. The Blu-Ray disk begins to play, and a key is sent to the receiver. The receiver sends back a message to the player saying that it is compliant with the HDCP specs. It can then send the key on down the line to the monitor, which also sends a confirming message back to the Blu-Ray player. Once this relationship is established, the disk will play as designed. As long as every item in that signal flow is compliant and says so, the viewing experience will not be interrupted.

If however, the rules are broken in any way, the HDCP police will shut down the image. There are several ways for this to happen. One scenario is if one component in the signal flow is not HDCP compliant, like an analog device. This device is not capable of sending and receiving the key information, so it causes an interruption in the flow. For commercial applications, this can potentially cause great difficulty. In general, a Blu-Ray player will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 keys that it can distribute. If you have 16 devices in that signal flow, everything is gravy. When you get over 16, one of your devices in the chain will get left out in the cold due to HDCP. Resolving this issue with DRM is one of many to be overcome as content encryption becomes more widespread in the coming years.

Fiber optics is another area that captivated me with the potential. Although a type of fiber optic technology was researched way back in 1877 by John Tyndall, it has only recently begun to be seen as a more feasible transmission method for AV applications. The theoretical capacity of fiber (a mighty 100 Gbs) alone is enough to make it a serious contender for future data transmission. With a possible point-to-point application of about 100 miles, it puts the icing on the cake. Two factors seem to be standing in the way of it rapidly becoming the de facto standard for data transmission. These are cost and complication.

As a few examples of the cost of fiber, the test and installation equipment needed costs tens of thousands of dollars. One example video matrix system that Extron provides can easily near the $750,000 mark. Still as the need for fiber's capabilities approaches, associated costs will inevitably drop.

Today's sessions focused on efficiently and effectively getting the signal where it needs to go, while tomorrow will focus on processing and control of those signals. I'll give a summary of Friday's findings in the evening.

Adobe Elements 8 Organizer Review

2009-10-27T18:17:00.001-04:00

On September 23 Adobe announced the debut of Elements 8. Tim and I posted a pre-release review that highlighted the new features that Adobe incorporated into the “hobbyist” level Premiere/Photoshop combo. You can find that article here. I’ve had some time to work with the Organizer and Premiere on my PC and to see how well the new features worked. Tim will follow up with a hands-on review of Photoshop on the Mac, which incorporates Bridge CS4 as an organizer.

Photoshop.com

One cannot use Elements 8 without noticing the pervasive presence of Adobe’s Photoshop.com. The software is heavily integrated with web components. Each purchase of Elements 8 comes with a free 2 GB of storage with the option to purchase a “Plus” account with 20 gigs. The welcome screen that launches when you run either Photoshop or Premiere prompts you to log in with your credentials to display some of your account info and helpful tips from the web as seen here.

Auto-Analyzer

The new Auto-Analyzer that’s been introduced in Elements 8 pretty much does what one would expect it to do. It can be set up to automatically run whenever new media is imported in the Organizer. It utilizes the files’ embedded metadata along with algorithms to determine Smart Tags to apply to each photo, document, or video. Common examples are high contrast, blurred, shaky, and motion. I imported almost 500 photos and videos into Organizer and let the Auto-Analyzer run on all of the files. It performed quite well, but there were a few understandable hiccups. One photo was a close up of a hand on the end of a guitar fret. It was taken with a long telephoto lens, and there was a lot of background in the image that was out of focus due to the depth of field. The analyzer tagged this as blurred even though the subject was sharp as a tack.

Facial Recognition

Mac users that are familiar with iPhoto will be interested in Adobe’s attempt at face recognition. Functioning similarly to its Apple competitor, Organizer endeavors to locate people’s faces in images and videos. The user must go through the images, name the individuals, and delete any extraneous face boxes that the Auto-Analyzer mistakes for people. As people are named, the software builds a database of characteristics present in the faces. After it “learns” what someone looks like, it will automatically suggest and fill in names of people that it thinks it knows. This sounds great in theory, but in practice it falls short of perfection.

“Portrait” style photos where the subjects are looking towards the camera are easy for the face finder. It didn’t have any trouble finding all of the individuals in my photos. If faces were not upright in the frame, the analyzer didn’t seem to recognize them as a face at all. It also had trouble with people not looking directly at or near the lens. Faces that were partially obscured due to looking different directions were sometimes discovered and sometimes not. There were a few photos that tricked the analyzer into putting faces where there were none. For some reason, it seemed to single out several hands in different photos, thinking they were faces.

Whenever the software finds a “face” that isn’t really a face, you need simply to click the “x” on the box to remove it. However when you click the “x” it always asks for confirmation to remove it saying that, “this person will be excluded from people recognition.” This wouldn’t be so bad if you could disable this dialog screen, but for now you can’t. This can really slow down your progress when the algorithm finds lots of “non-faces” in some of your images. Having to click twice each time you want to remove a box is very frustrating.

The “learning” of individuals worked fairly well. It recognized most of my family members quickly and began suggesting their names with their faces within three or four photos. It even found the face of my son in a portrait hanging on a wall.

Tagging and Editing made easy

Keyword and face tagging as well as performing basic photo enhancements have been taken to a new level of efficiency in the new Organizer. When browsing your library in full screen mode, you are faced with several panels around the screen. At the bottom is a pop-up panel with the main controls. Here you can toggle the other panels, move up and down throughout your library, and exit the full screen mode. On the left are two panels: one for making quick edits of your images, the other for keyword tagging. At the right is an optional filmstrip view allowing you to quickly jump to any photo or video in your library.

The quick edits are everything you would find in the regular quick edit portion of Organizer, but using these commands in this display allows you to view your changes at maximum size, letting you better scrutinize your changes. You’re also given the ability to mark for printing and to rate a photo.

The tagging panel shows a familiar “cloud” display popular on many websites and blogs. All of the available keywords are displayed with the most popular being larger in size. Not only does this make it easy to spot your most used keywords in the list, but it simply makes it easier to click on them since they become larger “icons.” The tagging panel also displays any albums that you’ve created and allows you to add images to those as well.

In my opinion, the Organizer portion of Elements is what makes it stand above the competitive products available, even more than the editor and Premiere. Most of the editing functions of Photoshop and Premiere can be had in software from other manufacturers, and some can even be found in freeware applications such as Gimp and Picasa. Although Adobe specializes in making these very “amateur-friendly,” they’re not offering a completely unique product. When it comes to a day-in, day-out piece of software like Elements, I look for something that will make the mundane task of importing, repairing, and organizing my personal photos and videos as easy and straightforward as possible. The Elements Organizer has always met my expectations, and version 8 raises the bar in ease of use making it worthy of your consideration.

Adobe Elements 8

2009-09-23T21:44:00.001-04:00

ADOBE ELEMENTS 8
Adobe today announced the availability of its Adobe Elements 8 packages, both Photoshop Elements 8 and Premiere Elements 8. Windows versions are available for both Elements, while Mac users will have to settle for the Photoshop Element only.

Adobe says the products fit in the "hobbyist" area of Adobe's mass-market push, the opposite end of a continuum that includes Photoshop CS4 on the high end and Elements at the low end. Still, with previous versions of Elements that we've reviewed, the hobbyist versions hold their own on basic tasks.

During a pre-release conference call, an Adobe spokesperson mentioned that Elements is, essentially, a balance of ease of use with power or "headroom."

"We continuously hear from focus groups that they want software that's straightforward and easy to use," he said, "but they don't want us to limit the software in case the user wants to do more complex edits."

We'll highlight a few key features in each program, demonstrated during the pre-release conference call, and then we'll follow up with a hands-on review. There's also an online component, which we won't address here, other than to note that online albums support video now, as well as photos.

ORGANIZER
Adobe has spent quite a bit of time updating Elements Organizer, its "Ultimate Media Management Hub." Organizer has been part of Photoshop Elements since version 3, but the company is now shipping Organizer with Premiere Elements 8 for Windows, or as part of the bundle of both Elements.

Adobe's rationale for expanding Organizer is that user capture devices are capturing both photos and videos. This blurring of the lines between photo and video capture devices means management of those two types in the same place is important.

Auto Analyzer
Organizer has an auto-analyzer tool that tags shots and videos for quality and interest, as well as other key tagging examples Adobe gleaned from user focus groups.

Smart Tags will filter down to particular types of content (one face, two faces, small group, etc) and auto-classify the content. Additionally, in terms of quality, the auto-analyze function can find images that are too dark or too bright or other quality characteristics. Scores based on high or low quality, such as blurriness, contrast, provide a subjective quality basis so that images can be rapidly filtered or eliminated.

This analysis also includes "people recognition" as a way to eliminate the need to manually add tags when a person appears within a video scene or a still image. This
people finder works on the principle of finding a face, then prompting for name of person. As the name is entered, Organizer begins to build up information about the person, offering an auto-complete function for names, then moving on to giving suggestions from a list of names.

In one example during the conference call, Adobe demonstrated that the manual cataloging of five shots apiece for two people was all it took before the auto-analyzer began to suggest one name from a list of possible names whenever that person appeared in a shot. The system then moves on to a more definitive suggestion, asking "is this . . . ?"

Keyword tagging for video is a bit more complex, and Adobe acknowledges that tagging isn't always based on the first frame of video.

"Tagging is based on content," the spokesperson said, "so keywords can be added at any time while watching the video. Tags are applied to on a scene-by-scene basis rather than the entire video."

Organizer also contains a full-screen preview, much like iPhoto on the Mac. Users can use full-screen to expand images to a much larger size, making the choice of images or video playback much easier in full-screen mode. To quickly edit particular images a quick edit panel pops up to deal with one-click issues such as rotation or auto-color adjustments. Video tagging can also be performed in the full-screen mode.

PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS
Photoshop Elements 8 has three primary new features: Photomerge Exposure, Recompose and Quick fix previews.

Photomerge Exposure offers the user the ability to make extensive light and dark adjustments to specific areas of an image. For example, let's say you have an image of your wife standing in front of the Eiffel Tower at night with the tower lit and fill flash on your wife. Chance are good that the either the tower is too dark, or your wife is too bright. Not that having an overly bright wife is a bad thing. The exposure tool will allow you to adjust brightness on either the tower or your wife to improve the image quality. Photomerge differs from Photoshop's HDR capabilities by only fine-tuning exposure in a single image as opposed to merging multiple copies of the same image taken at different exposures.

Recompose borrows an algorithm from Photoshop CS4 called Content Aware Scaling. This tool allows you to scale an image without distorting the content. If you have two or more people in a scene that aren't close enough together for your liking, this tool will allow you to "squeeze" them together without making them look squished. It also works vertically which can be useful for eliminating unwanted backgrounds. You can specify the areas that you want the algorithm to keep or discard by using a green or red brush and "painting" over parts of the image.

PREMIERE ELEMENTS
Premiere Elements 8 has a series of "smart" features, including Smart Fix, Smart Trim, and Smart Mix. It has also added motion tracking and newer "instant movie themes," effects, and transitions.

Smart Tools
Smart Fix in Premiere Elements performs essentially the same image adjustments to video clips as it does to still images in Photoshop Elements. It performs a quick evaluation of the video content and adjusts characteristics such as brightness and contrast to improve troublesome clips or simply to make an already good clip look even better.

Smart Trim is a particularly innovative new tool in Premiere Elements 8. This tool analyzes a video clip and identifies suggested cut points inside of the clip. One of the ways the algorithm accomplishes this is by looking for motion. Let's say you have a clip of Tiger Woods lining up a 25 foot putt. He may remain stationary for 30 seconds before he finally putts the ball. Smart Trim will look past all of the heightening drama before the putt and suggest an "in" point just before he swings his club.

Smart Mix can also be called an auto-ducking feature for audio. It will find the points in a dialogue audio track that voices are heard. It can then automatically mix the other audio tracks, such as music or sound effects, down so the dialogue stands out loud and clear.

ECONOMICAL MOTION TRACKING
This new version of Premiere Elements ships with a feature usually only found in professional level post-production software, motion tracking. In the Adobe demo that we viewed, this feature performed very accurately and quickly. The tracker can be set to follow a point of interest in a clip; then an object can be assigned to "follow" the parent. Other video clips, titles, animated clip art, or images can all be assigned to follow an object on the screen.

BONUS FEATURES
Adobe now offers additional options for output of completed videos. The ability to directly upload to YouTube is a feature included under the "Share" tab. This export option will automatically format your finished masterpiece for optimal viewing on the popular video-sharing site. Also Podbean is a new partner of Adobe allowing users to directly upload vodcasts to their account.

Any purchase of Elements 8 includes 2GB of storage on Photoshop.com. Although the Mac version does not include the Organizer, it does include Adobe Bridge CS4 which can be used in place of another organizer such as iPhoto. Photoshop and Premiere Elements 8 are available immediately as a bundle for Windows computers for $149.99. Photoshop Elements for the Mac retails for $99.99.

ORBC AV photo gallery

2009-09-10T21:29:00.000-04:00

We've posted a photo gallery of the Oak Ridge Baptist Church project here. Now you can see how the install is being used in everyday service.

Dedication service modifications

2009-08-10T18:03:00.001-04:00

On Friday, Paul was asked by the youth pastor of ORBC to help set up a temporary overflow system for this Sunday. They’re expecting possibly up to 400 people in attendance at the 10:30 AM service, and they wanted to be prepared to send people to the fellowship hall to watch the service on a closed-circuit system if necessary. The church purchased a 3500 lumen Dell DLP projector, so we set that up and fired it at a blank wall in the fellowship hall. There wasn’t time to permanently install the motorized screen that’s intended for that room, so we settled for a light beige wall that reflected pretty well. The video signal was transported from the Canon XHA1 in the auditorium via a component > cat5 extender box to the projector. The component extender is passive, so the signal loss was very noticeable. Since it was so late in the weekend, we didn’t have another option, so we recruited some teenagers on Sunday morning to tape black trash bags over the windows to block out any excess light. Doing this made the brightness acceptable.

We also utilized a second camera, a Sony FX1. This was not connected into the feed to the fellowship hall, but was used during the sermon and a special testimony time at the end of the service. The choir stayed on the platform during the service to keep extra seats available in the pews. Since there is a projector firing at the rear wall of the auditorium, we had a camera operator follow the preacher with the Sony. That image was then projected onto the rear wall so the choir would be able to see him from the front and not just the back.

At the end of the service, some church members came to the platform holding cardboard signs with personal testimony written on them. We zoomed in on these individuals and followed them on the stage as well so that everyone in the auditorium could be sure to read what was written. The image was projected onto all three screens in this case.

The service went very well with no noticeable hiccups. We ended up not needing the overflow room since everyone fit into the auditorium, but it was good to be prepared just in case.

Final touches

2009-08-01T10:32:00.000-04:00

Today we finalized all of our installation. We installed a shelf for three amplifiers in the nursing room of the infant nursery. We installed an extra duplex outlet up on the wall where the amps could plug in. We also placed one of our two Network Sound wall plates here. The audio runs from the DSP in the sound booth to a wall plate in the sound booth. From there, the Network Sound plate converts the unbalanced audio signal to twisted pair and transports it to the closet in the fellowship hall. The Zone Server is installed on the rack there. From there, it comes out of the Zone Server and travels via twisted pair to the wall plate in the nursing room. At the Zone Server location, the signal comes out stereo RCA and goes into an Audiosource AMP100. This gives us an audio feed for the fellowship hall which may be used at a later date for an overflow audience if the auditorium gets too crowded. The feed that goes to the nursing room enters all three amps there. These amps power speakers in the lobby, cry room, and both nurseries. The lobby speakers are installed so that people can hear pre-service music when they enter the building in the morning. Also, when the service is underway, anyone in the lobby can hear what’s going on so they don’t make a disturbance. The cry room is a room adjacent to the auditorium that is for people that want to hear and see the service but may be sick or have children with them. The windows are sound-proof so that they can watch, but not disturb the rest of the audience. The speakers in the nursery are for the nursery workers to know when the service is coming to a close so they can get the childrens’ things ready for pick-up. The system works great, and is versatile for different use down the road.

All of the original scope of work is now completed, but we have more work ahead of us. There are two rooms where we will be installing projectors and screens. The fellowship hall will get a 4000 lumen projector and a 8x10’ motorized screen. One of the adult Sunday school rooms will get a 1200 lumen projector and 100” 16:9 manual screen. This work will probably be done around the end of the year.

Closed circuit video and HD recording setup

2009-07-20T14:45:00.001-04:00

Last October, ORBC began recording all of their Sunday AM and PM services as well as any special events that they had. Paul was asked to recommend what equipment to purchase. They needed something that could be operated with minimum personnel and lowest intrusion. The first purpose was to record all of the services to DVD. The main reason for this was for distribution to church members who couldn’t come to services regularly due to health reasons or age. This way they could still feel a part of the congregation and keep up with what was happening without actually attending services. The second purpose was for future expansion of an extension service in another room. At the time, the auditorium was getting very crowded for Sunday services, and they needed a way to get people to be a part of the service as much as possible without actually being in the sanctuary. Here’s what we recommended:

Canon XHA1 HDV camcorder
Canon Console software
Gefen component extender
Bescor motorized pan/tilt head
Wall-mounted fixed camera support

We chose the Canon for it’s stunning image quality. For the extension service, we wanted to be sure that the people that had to watch the screen would get the highest quality image possible. Poor image or audio quality would be distracting and result in the audience losing interest and not being involved in the service.

Canon’s Console software is a great addition to the A1, G1 or H1. It allows Windows computer control of any of these cameras in almost every aspect. Console can record an HDV 1440x1080i M2V file, and it offers options for SD as well. The services are recorded in HDV to get the best image quality in the final output.

We chose the A1 because it offered the features we needed at a reasonable price. It supports XLR audio-in which enables us to get a direct feed from the sound board if desired. The Canon optics are superb as one might expect, and the custom functions available on the menu are second to none when it comes to customizing the camera to our needs.

The Gefen component extender is a pair of boxes that converts a component video signal to cat5 and vice versa. This allows us to send a component video signal up to 300’ on a single network cable. The fellowship hall is almost that far from the auditorium.

The Bescor is a low-priced, wired remote head that is compact in size. A very simple option, it allows for smooth pan and tilt of a mounted camera up to fifteen pounds. Although it has a wide-ranging speed control, it does not allow for smooth starts and stops. This results in a somewhat jerky image at times, but with experience can be used effectively.

Our resulting system can be summarized like this. The camera is mounted to the wall at the back of the auditorium just behind the sound and lighting booth. It is right about eye level with someone standing behind the pulpit on the platform. All of the control and signal cabling run behind the wall, under the booth floor, and up to the counter. There is a Windows computer and external monitor in one corner of the booth that can be controlled by a single operator. The camera is focused and exposed before each service, and the HDV M2V file is recorded directly to a compact 250GB external USB hard drive. The operator uses the joypad-like control for the pan/tilt head, and the mouse can be used for zooming during the service. Paul takes the hard drive home each week and mixes the audio from the camera microphone (for congregational singing or where ambient audience noise is best) and the audio recorded from the board.

The resulting final edit has a great sound and image that fulfills the church’s goal well. Once the church reaches a point where they need the overflow room, we’ll be able to transport the video signal to the projector in the fellowship hall for viewing.

Opening service report

2009-07-13T06:20:00.001-04:00

Tim and I were able to attend the opening service at Oak Ridge Baptist this morning. Things went smoothly enough for a first service. Everyone was trying to get used to the new facility and find out where all the rooms were that they needed. It was a good crowd with about 300 in attendance. The auditorium is designed to seat about that number. The service went smoothly with a few minor AV glitches. The AV team will have a slight learning curve with the new equipment. All in all, it was a great day, and we’ll be continuing to finish thing up over the coming weeks.

A long day at church

2009-07-11T19:30:00.001-04:00

The youth room required a ceiling-mounted projector, a pair of wall-mounted speakers, amplifier, volume control, and VGA and 1/8” audio input. The youth pastor already had a Benq projector that was sufficient for the job, so we mounted that with a Telehook pole mount. This versatile mount allows for multiple adjustments including tilt and roll. This allowed us to mount it on the cathedral ceiling of the room and still get it to point at the proper angle for the image display. We flanked the image area with two Polk Audio speakers. The amplifier is an Extron MP122. It’s very small (only about four inches wide). We mounted it under a shelf that’s built onto the wall above the riser that is used to support the youth pastor’s Macbook or Nintendo Wii. The volume control and AV hook-up are in-wall mounted right above the shelf for convenience. Take a look at the photos below to see what it looks like. The “custom lighting” is the brain child of the youth pastor.

ORBC installation heats up

2009-07-01T12:20:00.001-04:00

Things are happening very quickly around the property now. The landscape is nearing getting finishing touches. The auditorium furniture is all installed. The last of the trim work and painting is being done. The last of our speakers were installed this week, and we had some help from a retired electrician from the church with all of the soldering. We’ll now concentrate on finishing up the youth room which will have a ceiling-mounted projector, two speakers, a manual pull-down screen, wall-mounted volume control, and a wall-mounted VGA and 1/8” audio input for connecting a computer to the projector and speakers.

ORBC AV installation continues

2009-06-07T16:20:00.001-04:00

Over the last two weeks we made some minor modifications to our design and equipment list to reduce the number of power points the church would need. We originally incorporated some Extron compact amplifiers for each room’s speakers, but we reduced the number of amps in order to not need so many plugs throughout the building. We designed the placement of the amps strategically for easiest access and lowest intrusion. We’re utilizing Audiosource AMP 100 models throughout the building. These amps have a great feature that automatically powers them off when there is no signal, saving energy and maximizing the life of the amps.

Along with some re-design, we installed lots of speakers and wall plates, ran lots of CAT5 and speaker cable, and tested out our nifty Network Sound audio distributor. This device converts multiple audio signals to digital and transports them via twisted pair cable. The transmitter is a standard-sized wall plate that has RCA inputs. Shown here...
The receiving unit is a small box with a digital display and remote control, allowing you to choose which of six outputs you want to send the sound to.
With up to six inputs available on this model, any audio source can be sent to any zone. Thanks to Barani at Network Sound for providing us with this great solution.

We got the four speakers installed in the fellowship hall and tested the acoustics of the room. We’ve decided to modify our design again slightly to correct for some of the echo in the room making the audio more intelligible. Instead of having two speakers in each overflow room, we’ll have one in each in different locations from the original plan. They’ll be ceiling mounted near the corners of the rooms as opposed to wall mounted on one side.

The Draper motorized screen and projector mount for the fellowship hall arrived this week, so we’ll be installing those next week.

Oak Ridge Baptist Church AV Installation

2009-05-20T17:19:00.001-04:00

In February of this year, we were asked by Oak Ridge Baptist Church of Oak Ridge, TN to provide design, supply, and installation services for some of the audio-visual equipment in their new facility currently in construction. After coordinating with the construction project manager and electricians, we developed a cost-effective, innovative design that will cooperate with the system being installed in the main auditorium as well as work independently in various parts of the building.

We will be getting a slightly delayed audio feed from the main sound board in the auditorium to provide sound to seven rooms throughout the building. Each area will have independent volume controls enabling the occupants to turn the audio off completely if desired. There are two classrooms that have moveable walls allowing them to be opened up to become an extension of the fellowship hall. These rooms, along with the fellowship hall, will have a “B” system allowing them to be switched to local audio from the fellowship hall. This will allow overflow in the event of a large crowd in the fellowship hall for a special event. One of these classrooms will have a third option of connecting a microphone to it’s speakers for audio in just that room.

The fellowship hall will have a DLP video projector connected to a DVD/VHS player, and a VGA wall plate for computer connectivity. There is also an 1/8” audio connector for computer audio input. A motorized screen will be mounted to the exterior wall of the room. Our video and audio signals will be transmitted over twisted pair cable utilizing mostly Extron CAT5 extenders.

The youth room is similar to the fellowship hall having an independent audio and video system with a video hook-up in the wall at the front of the room for the youth pastor to connect his MacBook into. The projector will be ceiling mounted with a protective cage to keep it safe from flying balls or teenagers.

Since March, we’ve already done some preliminary work by putting holes in the drywall and sill plates to drop our cables. This week, we’ve begun the finish work by installing speakers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be running our cables, installing the projectors, and getting our audio feed straightened out. Stay tuned...

Here’s a panorama of the auditorium as it is right now.

The fellowship hall showing the two overflow rooms with moveable walls.

Youth room with a stained cement floor and riser near front.

Adobe CS4 Master Collection Review

2009-04-20T17:04:00.000-04:00

Written by Tim Siglin & Paul Schmutzler
April 9, 2009

Approximately a year and a half after Adobe released its Creative Suite 3 (CS3), the new Creative Suite 4 (CS4) is now available to the public in the same suites: Design Premium, Production Premium, Web Premium, and the all-in-one Master Collection.

With CS3, Adobe took its video product line several notches above the norm in quality, allowing it to elbow its way into the spotlight alongside other premium video software manufacturers such as Apple and Avid. The product introduced many features, including consistent user interfaces with brightness sliders, outstanding support for Flash video, and a new, easy-to-use audio processing program called Soundbooth. All these features allowed Adobe to catch the eye of many video professionals who previously incorporated only Photoshop in their workflows.

Each and every one of the suite’s features and technologies has been improved in CS4, some significantly. With an eye toward accelerating workflows and an initial foray into mission-critical metadata entry and retrieval, the product has some noteworthy improvements that merit attention.

Recording With OnLocation
We decided to start our tests by using OnLocation CS4, a direct-to-computer recording program that works with MiniDV and HDV cameras (see Figure 1). The first version of OnLocation, formerly DV Rack from Serious Magic, shipped with CS3 but was only available for Windows operating systems. OnLocation CS4 fixes that cross-platform oversight, as it is completely rewritten from the ground up to take advantage of both Intel-based Macs and Windows.

OnLocation CS4 is a direct-to-computer recording program that works with MiniDV and HDV cameras.

We wanted a way to test several of the features in rapid succession, so we chose to set up in a church auditorium, where we could test with both house sound and ambient sound. We could also work through a workflow that involved OnLocation, PremierePro, and Adobe Media Encoder (now a stand-alone product).

Paul set up a Canon XH A1 to record a 1080i HDV signal and connected the camera directly to the FireWire port of a MacBook Pro (2.16 Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD) with OnLocation CS4 installed. To test speech-to-text capture, an audio feed of the house sound from the sound system was connected via XLR to get the best possible audio.

OnLocation CS4, as well as several other CS4 tools, is now based on the concept of “workspaces,” where only necessary windows appear on the screen. The calibration workspace in OnLocation, for instance, provides a view of the camera image, vectorscope, waveform, and shot list all in one place. This proved to be too much for the processor on our slightly slow laptop, so turning off the camera monitor view resulted in a significant boost in performance. In short, OnLocation requires all the computer resources it can muster, so be prepared to have your most powerful workhorse on the job if you use it for a mission-critical shoot. Our laptop had significant lag in displaying the camera’s output, which would prove impractical—or at least disconcerting—in most situations. After acquiring a white balance from the projection screen behind the platform, we were ready to record, and OnLocation worked very effectively in this regard. There was no noticeable delay from the moment the record button was pressed to the time OnLocation actually began recording, and more than 1 hour was recorded with no dropped frames. While using the production workspace, there was a lag between real time and the computer display.

Having seen the same thing in similar programs such as Canon’s Console software, this is a common side effect with using a FireWire connection from a camera in order to view a real-time image. While this lag was more acceptable than that of the calibration workspace, we still recommend using a separate confidence monitor if you need real-time feedback from the camera.

OnLocation also offers the option of adding all the metadata you could dream of before you complete your shoot by allowing you to enter the data in a convenient tab on the right side of the interface.

Editing With Premiere Pro and Soundbooth
After recording, we packed up our gear and headed back to our office to import the footage into Premiere Pro. Our test editing system was a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 250-gigabyte hard drive.

Premiere Pro CS4 took about 10 minutes to index the 12- gigabyte MPEG-2 Transport (M2T) stream of multiplexed audio and video that OnLocation had created. It would be nice to see other format recording options in OnLocation, akin to the way that Focus Enhancements FireStore Direct To Edit technology handles hard-disk recording, but this would make even more processing power necessary.

Premiere Pro CS4 has a GUI that is more efficient and attractive than its predecessor.

After the footage was indexed, it was apparent that the pixel aspect ratio was incorrect when we opened the clip in the viewer. However, by simply reinterpreting the footage to the HDV standard of 1.333 widescreen, the video appeared correctly, saving us the time of reimporting content.

We weren’t able to open any of our old Premiere Pro CS3 projects because of the prerelease nature of the software, so we weren’t able to check out some of the complex edits we’d done with CS3. The release version fixed this issue. We did notice that Adobe has added a few features to Premiere that make it a little more efficient and attractive.

In the same window where you’ll find History and Effects, there is now a Media Browser option. This window provides a way to search any hard drive connected to your computer, finding any media that Premiere Pro can import. This is a timesaver, as you don’t need to keep clicking File > Import for every file needed for a project. Another new tab you can add to your workspace is called Resource Central—another part of the CS4 suite that blurs the line between offline and online usage. Within the Resource Central pane, you can access tutorials, sample files, and extensions for Premiere Pro and other video products that Adobe offers.

What used to be called the User Interface preference in CS3 is now called Appearance. In addition, it appears that the adjustable brightness introduced in CS3 was a big hit because Adobe tweaked the slider to enable users to make the interface even darker or lighter than before. You’ll also find better control over where your cache files are stored. Also metadata has a greater use and benefit in most of CS4.

Soundbooth 2 shows some significant improvements over the first version, which was introduced in CS3. A feature sorely lacking in the original Soundbooth was multitrack audio production, and the new Soundbooth’s multitrack interface aims to please. The interface is simple and not at all intimidating, as it uses dashboardlike controls that pop up when the mouse hovers over a track. One click on a track will quickly switch from the multitrack production interface to the file editing screen. After making editing changes, it’s another single click right back to your multitrack layout. For our testing, we used Soundbooth only to make some minor improvements to our sound quality and to get a transcription of the narrative, so we’ll expand our assessment in a future article. After reducing our hour of footage down to a 3-minute test clip in Premiere Pro, we added fades in and out, adjusted the color, and exported the timeline to Adobe Media Encoder CS4.

Encoding With Adobe Media Encoder
Adobe Media Encoder is a stand-alone product that works in harmony with After Effects, Premiere Pro, and other Adobe tools, but it can also be used on its own, similar to the way that Apple Compressor works either with Final Cut or on its own. Put any audio or video media in the Adobe Media Encoder queue, choose your compression settings, and let it go to work. You can also choose a specific timeline within a Premiere Pro project to compress without opening Premiere, which is a timesaver for those who just need to get the compressed file out the door as quickly as possible. Adobe Media Encoder also supports watch folders that will automatically begin a preset encoding session as soon as a file is placed inside.

Adobe Media Encoder CS4 works with Premiere Pro or as a stand-alone encoder.

Having chosen H.264 Blu-ray and Dolby digital audio for our compression, we let Media Encoder load our timeline into its queue. Two hours later, our 3-minute test compression was done. In place of FLV and F4V files, which were having a few issues in our prerelease version, we exported a QuickTime streaming file at the full 1440x1080 size, which turned out to be excellent quality.

Adobe Media Encoder can also upload a completed compression to a user-identified server, a significant step in workflow enhancement. However, as Tim mentioned in an article on StreamingMedia.com, automated FTP transmissions are only available on Adobe’s more expensive Flash Media Encoder Server. There is also the option to have Media Encoder delete the original file after verifying a successful upload to a remote location.

Transcription With Premiere Pro and Soundbooth
Adobe has added an autotranscription feature to Premiere Pro and Soundbooth. In theory, you can take a video or audio clip and run it through the analyzer, which will spit out a speech-to-text metadata file that times each word to a synchronous frame of video. There are several tools that do this and do it quite well, but they range from a low-end price tag of about $18,000 to more than $100,000. Adobe licensed a set of speech-to-text libraries that are acceptable for the price range, even though they seem to lag behind other speech indexing, search, and retrieval systems we’ve used.

Adobe recommends using clean audio with minimal extraneous noise, meaning that you may want to use Soundbooth to clean up the audio before attempting the speech-to-text transcription. The program also has the ability to distinguish between more than one speaker and label each individually.

In our tests, the autotranscription feature performed very poorly. It had 95%-plus accuracy when our speaker had noticeable breaks between words, but it dropped to the 50% range when he spoke at a natural rate with few pauses. While we could suggest it was the Southern accent, this wouldn’t account for the lack of accuracy, since the South is not exactly known for fast talkers. The transcript did make for some very humorous reading, though. We tried running a few other videos through the transcriber in hopes that they would have easier-to-transcribe audio tracks, but we didn’t get any better results.

The transcript is also available as only metadata, with each word tied to a particular frame of video. So editing the transcript requires clicking on and changing every single word individually. It would be nice to see a modification that allows users to export the transcription to a text document for ease of distribution and editing, as some of the other systems on the market do, and to reimport the edited file with autoparsing (compared against the original transcription).

We like the transcription feature in concept, but we think Adobe can do better, especially with some of the systems out there having more than a decade of trial-and-error testing. Hopefully, these shortcomings will be improved as technology advances and future Adobe releases come along.

The Case for Metadata
If there’s any common thread in all of the CS4 applications thus far, it’s metadata. The dictionary definition of metadata is “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.” Not so descriptive, especially since we were always taught never to define a word with the same word. The practical benefits of Adobe tying metadata in at every level can’t be overstated, though, so let’s look at why Adobe has incorporated metadata entry and retrieval extensively into the new product release.

Probably the most common and well-known metadata today is the infamous ID3 tags that all of our digital music files come with. These wonderful little bits of information help us keep our iPods and media player libraries neat and tidy by providing all the track and album information for our music. But this same technology is available in any computer file. Look at the properties of any file on your hard drive, and you’ll see all kinds of information that you may not have known was there, such as the software developer’s name, the version number, a URL link to the company’s homepage, and so on.

Adobe understands that having the power to edit this information about your original digital content can be extremely advantageous. The metadata that you add to your videos can, in theory, be carried into and displayed in every major media player that will be used to view your content. Not only is this metadata addiction a good marketing strategy, it also helps make the Adobe Media Player and interconnecting technologies such as Adobe’s Bridge tool more dynamic and easier to search. If you’re having trouble finding the video of the recent presidential inauguration that your intern logged and tagged for you, try searching for keywords such as historic, president, or overcrowded, and you’ll understand that we’re entering an era where search is becoming a major part of workflow acceleration.

Impressive but Imperfect
In summary, although the release of CS4 pushes Adobe’s video software further into the spotlight, it doesn’t make as large a first impression as its predecessor did. Adobe Media Encoder, OnLocation, and Soundbooth in particular have seen some real growth, but Premiere Pro’s updates are significantly more subdued unless tapeless workflows (such as native AVCHD or the RED camera) are your primary method of acquisition.

If the company can heavily optimize the speech-to-text and metadata tweaks in updates for the release version, it will make the upgrade especially attractive to content creators who do a significant amount of repurposing. More specifically, content creators who deal primarily in streaming video and who want to ensure that their content always gets distributed with credits and copyright information intact will be able to capitalize on metadata tagging for search engine optimization now that Flash files are searchable by major search engines such as Yahoo! and Google.

Orginally published here.

Pettit Promo

2009-03-02T10:35:00.001-05:00

Each spring Oak Ridge Baptist Church hosts a week of special outreach meetings. In years past, they’ve used the DVD format as a substitute for paper flyers or brochures as an invitation. Braintrust Digital was asked to shoot and edit a personal invitation to the viewer from Senior Pastor Tom Craig. This is the resulting video that was incorporated into the final DVD along with directions to the church, samples of music and sermons, and information about ORBC.

www.orbc4u.org
www.spea.org

Galkin Project Completed

2008-06-29T13:19:00.001-04:00

The Galkin DVD is now complete. The team gave final approval of all five videos, and we’ll be sending the final master off for duplication very soon. Below, you can view the introductory video that is the main video on the DVD. This video will be used to introduce church congregations to the team so they can be familiarized with the team members, their background, and the goals and focus of their ministry.

Galkin Project monologue re-shoot

2008-04-28T13:28:00.001-04:00

Our shoot on March 28 went very well. It threatened to rain all day, but we only had to stop once for about five minutes while a brief shower passed over. The overcast sky gave us even lighting, and we utilized some silver-coated foam core for a bounce light. We got started almost two hours later than scheduled because we forgot to factor in a one hour time zone change since the team was coming from Nashville. They also had some trouble with their trailers when they were leaving the church in Nashville. Will and Aaron were much more focused and clear during the takes. They had obviously really nailed down what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. Since they were both present for the shoot, they were also able to help each other clarify their thoughts.

We had some issues with some strong winds getting picked up in the audio. That ruined a few good takes, but we still had enough good ones to cover all of the thoughts in the script. At another location, there was a woman (apparently mentally handicapped) who decided she wanted to serenade the entire crew while we were in the middle of shooting. Will kindly encouraged her to wait until we were done shooting to continue her concert.

The editing of all of the monologues and pick-up shots that we re-shot is very close to completion. We expect to mail a DVD to the team next week for them to review again. This should be a final version, and we can expect the final delivery of all of the DVDs to be before the end of May.

Galkin Project Re-shoot Preparation

2008-03-24T13:32:00.001-04:00

Today we're in total logistics mode. We're settling all of our shooting locations, making phone calls for permissions, checking and prepping equipment, and going over everyone's outlines. Will and Aaron have sent their outlines over, and we're going to give them a little touch-up work to make sure the ideas will be communicated clearly and effectively on camera.

Tennessee SBIR Proposal Assistance Center

2008-03-10T15:35:00.001-04:00

Charles (Chuck) Shoopman wanted to launch the Tennessee SBIR Proposal Assistance Center, he talked to a variety of partners. Chuck got the SBIR Assistance Center off the ground in January 2006, in collaboration with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the NNSA Y-12 Facility, Technology 2020, the Knoxville-Oak Ridge Innovation Valley, the East Tennessee Economic Council, and Integrated Manufacturing Technology Initiative. A blog post about the University of TN SBIR Proposal Assistance Center can be found here.

Galkin Project Feedback

2008-03-10T13:34:00.001-04:00

The whole team has watched the DVD several times and given us feedback. They found a few tweaks to make that will make the whole program smoother. The major development is that they have decided that they want to re-shoot all of their monologues. After eight months of continuing to develop and refine their message, they believe that they can communicate everything much better. So we've gone from production to post-production and back to production. The whole team will be in Nashville until just after Easter and will be going to the Atlanta area after a two day break. Since Knoxville isn't too much out of the way, they will spend one day and one night here. Before shooting, we'll review their outlines and prioritize the segments that need to be reshot. We'll do all of the ones we can and see how much we can do in one day. It will be a long day of shooting, that's for sure.

TTDC Podcast

2008-03-07T14:09:00.001-05:00

Eric Cromwell gave a great overview of the role the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation hopes to play as it becomes “relevant again” as the new CEO put it. Podcast in AAC format with chapter markers. A blog post about the direction TTDC is going can be found here.