analog to digital

I was asked by my niece to assist with a video she was creating for a class assignment (8th grade) last week. Flattered, I of course agreed. It has been a few months since I last touched my MacG4 and iMovie but I was looking forward to helping her learn what it is capable of. She is already familiar with MovieMaker2, I showed her how to use it to make a photo slideshow last month. A 15 minute step-by-step example using her photos and she was up and running. My confidence was rewarded when she showed me a 'congratulations & farewell' slideshow she created for her best friend who was recently accepted into an IB program here in town.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, this is the calm before the storm. Turns out that the host family for the production work only has an analog camcorder despite having every other toy an upper middle class family in this town wants including a new super SUV. So four girls show up at my loft on a Friday evening with the expectation that in 30-60 minutes they would walk out the door with a finished DVD. Ouch! I start casting about for a solution and think of the 9600 All-in-Wonder card I installed last fall. Turns out there is an AV-in option and luckily I find the external adapter without too much trouble (I just moved into a new office space). The first problem I run into is that the connector (S-video like) has bent pins and won't work.

I then remember that another alternative I've read about is using a digital camcorder as a converter. There is only a single audio out port but I am able to connect a two-wire RCA cable from the Sony analog to my Sony PDX-10 and start capturing. Wait a minute, rather then capturing to miniDV tape in Recorder mode, it's capturing to my Memory Stick card. Well, that works OK except that now I have MPEG2 and guess what, iMovie won't work with MPEG2. So I move over to my XP machine and open up MovieMaker2. We start transfering to a new collection but I have to do it in a couple of transfers since my Memory Stick isn't large enough to capture the entire 12 minutes of video they have. When I load the Memory Stick for the second transfer, my original transfer has been corrupted. Well, by now it's been over two hours and ice cream only goes so far towards calming teenage girls and the parents are waiting to pick them up as well. I suggest I have some more homework to do and my niece volunteers to come to my place later that weekend to complete the editing once I have done my part. Everyone heads home and I start digging in.

Using MovieMaker2, the first thing to do is to transfer all video files to your computer. The software only creates links to the original files and that is what corrupted my earlier efforts - when I removed the Memory Stick the files went with. Once I loaded the captured video into a folder my niece was able to edit. The next problem we ran into is something I experienced last spring when I first tried to help a soccer mom with her video problems. MM2 doesn't have DVD burning capabilities, a 3rd party product is required. I thought I had that covered thanks to the new dual layer Sony DVD burner I'd installed over the holidays. The Nero software that gets such good reviews wanted me to use their editing tools however, which meant starting over. This is Sunday afternoon and my niece is ready to get home to her Dad's as is her older brother who is responsible for squiring her around that afternoon. I send them on their way and dig in again.

I ended up taking two seperate paths to completing the video. First, I attached my PDX-10 to the XP system and transfered the MM2 video to DV tape. That required a 90 minute rendering effort for a 10 1/2 minute video (!). Once that was complete, I transfered what is now a 3rd generation rendering (analog to MPEG2 to DV) to iMovie and burnt a DVD. There were other difficulties related to the rendering, including dropping frames, so the quality was poor but it did represent my nieces editing efforts which were good. She used titles and transitions to improve the production which from a content standpoint was excellent. The girls really did a good job on presenting the story of the Suffrage Movement and it's key characters.

The final path I took was working on my All-in-Wonder card until I could get the connector to attach to the card. I once again captured the analog video to the Video Recorder in a better quality 480x720 pixel compressed file. Once that was done, I transfered it to my PDX-10 which allowed me to use it with iMovie. I recreated my nieces titleing efforts and added one transition near the end that she hadn't used and it was time to send it to iDVD.

Anyone interested in seeing the result of that effort can visit http://homepage.mac.com/steveoleolson/ . Not bad for over ten hours of labor eh?

Bottom line - when my niece asked me before production began if I would be able to help them I did not sit down with her and discuss the details. I assumed I would have DV to work with and it would be a straightforward editing effort. Don't assume a thing!

my website goes live

I just finished reviewing my business website. The developer had some difficulty with both of the WordPress themes we attempted to use. I was more interested in going live then I was having him spend time wrestling with someone elses code. He ended up using the default Kubrik with sidebar theme available in WordPress (WP) while spicing it up a bit. There are several static pages so that it has a traditional website look rather then a basic blog but the key to the model is using WP as my content management tool. It took me a couple of hours this evening to get basic content loaded on the index page since I misunderstood the notes I had taken during an administrative training session we held earlier this week but I'm up!

Additional good news is that I was able to answer a couple of questions on my own by spending some time on the site. I was able to interpret his CSS code related to the titlebar he created that offers single click navigation to each of the static pages we established. I also identified the related code that offers the same capability from the sidebar. It took a few iterations to get it straightened out but I believe I understand the key components. He created a few other categories (Case Studies, Recent Clients, Vendors) accessible via the sidebar that I can populate using the blogging post model but I still need to sort out how he did that since I anticipate it will change.

I also want to drive a traditional blog model although I don't want to use the index page for that. The categories he created will help archive the information but I don't see/understand where the regular posts will be displayed. I need to talk to him about that as well as beginning the effort to publicize my business via Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It turns out that I rank #1 on Yahoo when you enter Rising Stream. I can only assume is due to the registration I submitted some months ago. I don't show up at all on Google (I gave up after 15 pages) so I can only go up!

email accounts, Outlook & SBC

Well, I've been struggling to get an email account set up using my new business domain and host. Actually, that part went pretty easily. It was getting the account set up in Outlook that was the real struggle. Fortunately once I went to the Dreamhost.com knowledgebase I discovered that my problem was tied to my SBC DSL account. Turns out that SBC no longer supports Port 25 for SMTP mail but by making a change to Port 587 in the Advanced set up tab, I am now able to send and receive my business domain mail via SBC.

I don't know the issues associated with why SBC no longer supports Port 25. The reason we care as users is that unfortunately that is the default setting in Outlook. Based upon a posting from a Dreamhost.com customer who also works as a NetAdmin for one of the RBOC's (think SBC, Verizon, etc.) the value equation is that Dreamhost.com is supporting an open standard in allowing me to use Port 587.

I'm a Microsoft Registered Partner and I have benefited greatly by being a stock holder as well as a user over the years. I'm also learning about open source this year by using BlogPress, MySQL and PHP for my other websites. Open Source 1, RBOC 0 is the score right now!

a fresh wind at my back

It's hard for me to admit because I am a geek at heart and the primary PC/Internet resource for my family and small circle of friends but damn, this web stuff can get your head spinning in ways I have not experienced since differential equations I guess. I was going to say 'since my first kiss' but that's the wrong side of the brain for this discussion at least.

March and it's proverbial 'in like a lion' behaviour has been good for me. I've hired a young man to help me develop a professional website for my sales & marketing consulting business. He's a very talented writer, a budding entrepreneur with an independent film theatre he & his wife are opening and an inveterate blogger. With his help I'm going to establish a website that has as it's back end the open source WordPress blogging software. Thanks go out to my friend Bob who opened my eyes to the ability to use blogging as a content management tool. He uses Blogger for two soccer sites, for a local high school team as well as the middle school team that he also coaches. I'm using the hosting company he recommended as well, Dreamhost.com, and it's turning out pretty well. There will be plenty more about that in future posts.

I've also got two additional domains that will be going up this year as well. The first will be a soccer video & photography production site, focused on prep and college soccer in the Ozarks region in Southwest Missouri. Right now I'm using a .Mac site but I should have that migrated before the fall season begins when my subscription expires. A link to that site is available in my profile.

The third site will be a genealogy site, focused on sharing the photos, videos, documents and stories I have been collecting on my family over the past decade. I'm a 2nd generation Scandinavian, born to a 1st generation Norwegian father and 1st generation Swedish mother. I visited Norway in March 2002 and met many of my father's first cousins, as well as visiting the farm my grandfather left in 1907 to move to the US. My hope is to do the same thing in Sweden sometime in the next few years. My Mom's grandfather came to the US in 1893 it appears while her father arrived in 1917, marrying my grandmother in 1925 in Minneapolis. Yah, dat's right, I'm a Scandi...

So here's my objective. First, I'm having a great time being a camera geek again and experimenting and learning more about photography and video and writing. As a sales & marketing consultant to technology firms, the internet and it's myriad tools are only going to become more important. So this blog will become my journal and reference tool for learning how to incorporate my interests and share them via the internet. Hopefully my family will benefit, personally and in their careers, in the same way that I already have. If you have found this site and learned anything, or have something to share with me in my journey, I look forward to hearing from you. Skol!

What have I gotten myself into...

I've been searching for a theme that could help me understand how/why I'm doing this. Providing a journal of my experiences as I attempt to become more literate in the technologies available to me now seems to be it. Coming from my introduction to photography when I first picked up a camera in high school to where I am now seems to be a worthwhile effort.

Where I am now is learning how to use the "iLife" suite of products to capture, edit and share my photos, videos and my musical tastes. The primary audience is Glendale High School here in Springfield. I have nephew who plays on the team and the parents are more then happy to let me 'have at it'. The boys seem to enjoy the results but the primary feedback I've gotten (it's been limited, a common issue for all of us I'm sure) is that the musical choices I make don't really pump up the young men, or 'boys' in the vernacular of the soccer team.

I've branched out a bit, doing some shooting at some SMS Women's soccer matches, a Drury men's game and then tonight a Middle School match. I also have experimented with using my Nikon Coolpix 2100 in MPEG mode and it turned out pretty well although I miss the lack of audio. I've transfered some 8mm movies to DV and from there onto my homepage. That's going to become a larger part of my efforts as the soccer season slows down with the fall season's end and the upcoming holidays. I am a genealogist which is what really brought me back to my photography habit as I struggle to learn about the issues involved in archiving these important parts of my families history while also creating new ones as we go forward.

The biggest issue I'm going to face with this blog is finding the time to use it effectively. I spent the majority of the day today creating DVD's of previously edited videos while also working on my first photo DVD in an effort to find a way to get my work out to the folks who should most appreciate it, the families and friends of the players. Once I take the time to identify photos for the DVD covers, printing and trimming them it all adds up to almost a whole day of effort to create five copies of the video DVD and five copies of the photo DVD, in their final marketable form. When do I do this?

I did get some very positive reactions from the Coach and the few players that were around when I delivered a copy of each of my productions to him after practice today. It's definitely a step above what they have been used to in past years although the 2003 video was professionally done. The problem we ran into there was that there were some "mistaken identity" caused by the time constraints we faced along with the distance (our producer was in Chicago). I'm going to be facing some time constraints myself if I don't get started on the end of season video, I'm procrastinating on the final storyboard. So, on that note, I'll close this so I can get some rest and be prepared to complete that important task early tomorrow!