Bencredible

Cariann and I have been looking for a place to put SpaceVidcast.  We’re starting to get scary popular and I want to take the videocast to the next level.  That means I need a studio and C-Band satellite.

Originally I was looking in Minneapolis, but that’s scary expensive.  Then last Thursday at Best Buy headquarters I ran in to CAFN8ED who some of you may remember from back in the TE days.  He mentioned that his coffee shop, Crow River Coffee Company, had a very large and very creepy basement as well as a concrete slab that we could put a C-Band dish on.

Later that day Cariann and I popped over to Watertown to take a peek at what he had.  Saying it needs a ton of work would be an understatement.  Check it out (and note the creepy handprints on the wall):

There are basically two rooms that will become one.  There is a huge wooden wall that will come down, and all the stuff you see in the rooms will be pulled out and recycled/thrown away.  From there the ceilings are about 9 feet tall… which is a wee bit strange.  My concerns are that there is no HVAC in the room so it can get bitterly cold in there, we will need to carpet the whole place and make it acoustically sound, and I’ll want to put up some sort of light grid to get the lights of the way but I’m not sure there is enough height for that.  Oh yeah, and one of the main support beams has a LOT of rust on it.

Being that is the a LOT less money than moving SVC to downtown Minneapolis, I’m game to try and make it work.  Worst case scenario I’m just out some time and work that would go in to cleaning the place up.  I’m excited because this is exactly what is needed to make SpaceVidcast grow even faster.

When it is all said and done we’ll have a studio that can be used for a ton of things including SpaceVidcast. Oh yeah, and we’ll have the resources to bring in a live audience and feed them! How cool is THAT?

Cariann came up with this when we were chatting in the car last night (on our way to Sonic).  Let me know what you think.

SpaceVidcast – Making Space Commonplace

I have been hunting for a good slogan since we started the show.  Is this the one?  Does it need love?  Have a better idea?

[EDIT] Heh, oops, I corrected the slogan from Space Made Commonplace to Making Space Commonplace as it should be.  hehehe

As per my post yesterday, I’m always trying to improve the quality of SpaceVidcast (and dare I say anything I do).  To this end I want to have access to the HD satellite feed that NASA provides but alas that requires a 6 foot or larger dish.

I was complaining about this tonight to PSB, who very quickly found me a TEN FOOT satellite dish.  The advantage of the larger dish is it will get a better signal than a smaller dish, and by smaller dish I mean the smallest a C-Band dish can go is about 6 feet.  A 10 foot dish is basically a broadcast quality dish designed to ensure that one gets the best signal possible.  Oh, you think 10 feet is large?  Then come larger.  A lot larger.

So what to do?  A ten foot dish is huge, unsightly and a pain in the butt to work with.  Having access to the HD feed from NASA would be a huge score for SpaceVidcast.com.  That box I just received will be able to decode the HD signal and record it straight to the iMac for recording and re-broadcast, so I would be in a great position that other space video sites like space.com, etc. won’t be in.

My goal is to make SpaceVidcast the best space video site on the Internet.  I believe there are five things needed to make this happen, and these five things hold true for any video related site:
1 – Get a great community of evangelists
2 – Have best of class audio and video quality
3 – Make it easy to view, share and find content
4 – Have best of class content
5 – Be timely.  Don’t hold on to media forever.  If it is older than a week stale, you’re probably too late.

Alone it’s not possible to do all five things and have a full time job, but that’s why a core group of evangelists is so important.  By having people who not only are passionate about the topic you’re interested in but who are also willing to help spend time in making the videocast better you end up with a show immensely better than what otherwise could have been done.  And to this end we have *awesome* evangelists at SpaceVidcast.com.  My point is, I can only concentrate on one or two of the five items at a time.  Lately I have been working on #4 and #2.

Lets talk about improving the video quality of SpaceVidcast for a moment, shall we?

One of the things we do is record NASA TV 24×7.  This allows us to find interesting clips from NASA, edit them up and re-post them as even more interesting clips on the SpaceVidcast.com site.  For example if we want to have an archive of all the STS-126 footage we have, we’ll just grab that from NASA TV.  The problem is that the signal we get is digital from the satellite then converted to analog in the satellite receiver then back to digital to bring it in to the computer all before we can edit it.  So we’re stepping on the video a lot.  That’s bad.

To improve the quality of our NASA TV feed I recently purchased a FireDTV S2 which is a little set top box that the satellite plugs directly in to.  Rather than converting the video stream a bunch of times, this box takes the raw MPEG 2 sent to the satellite and puts that on the computer.  This box normally doesn’t work in the US, but it just so happens that the channels I need are not encrypted so in my specific case it will work fine.

FireDTV S2

Last night my FireDTV S2 came in the mail, and I was all excited.  I pulled it out of the box and immediately I was bummed.  I had forgotten that European power bricks use a different type of outlet.  So I went online, found a 12volt 2amp power brick at Best Buy, ran over and purchased it.  Brought it home only to realize that the FireDTV S2 actually can get its power from Firewire, no power brick required.  Heh, oops.

OK, got the unit powered up, running and operating.  Time to do a test record.  Got the media, perform an export and… on noes!  It looks like poo!!!  The satellite is capturing at 544×408 resolution rather than the 640×480 resolution I used to be capturing at.  In the old scenario I had hardware decoders that would convert the video to a slightly higher resolution and in hardware remove the interlacing.  Now I have none of that, I have the raw signal from the satellite, interlacing and all.

No need to panic.  Much.  I take the file and after playing for hours and hours in Episode Pro with different variations of frame size, GOP structure, de-interlace filters and such I think we finally have a file that is a touch better than the system we had before.  Will anyone notice the quality difference?  Probably not.  So why do it?

There are several reasons that I have spent the time, money and aggravation to make this work.  First and foremost is that rather than recording a 4Mbps MPEG 2 file now I’m recording a 2Mbps MPEG 2 file right from the satellite.  Smaller files mean fewer hard drives which saves me money.  That is good since I bankroll SpaceVidcast out of my own pocket.  This also opens the door for us to do HD when we’re able to get a C-Band dish.  The second reason is that this process will allow us to get videos out the door faster.  Rather than exporting to h.264, adding a bug, re-exporting to h.264 then uploading to YouTube now all we need to do is export to YouTube and the bug, deinterlace filter and cropping options will all be set at the same time.  So it is faster, we save money, we step on the video less and we look better than before.

Will this make a difference in the end?  Dunno.  I believe that every little bit helps.  Good enough is never good enough, so just the fact that we continue to find ways to improve the video quality and speed to market should be enough proof that we’re in this because we give a damn.  I think that shows to people watching the episodes, which in turn helps them become evangelists.  Evangelists in turn help produce and promote the show which helps us get better gear which helps us get more evangelists, so forth and so on.

I’m a huge fan of Red Digital Cinema.  These are the guys who are changing the video landscape forever by making insanely great cameras at a really low cost.  Right now they only have one offering which is the Red One and while that’s a nice camera, it’s not what I need.

At NAB 2008 Red announced Scarlet, a 3k resolution camera for $3,000.  Since I’ve been looking for a higher-resolution camera for SpaceVidcast, this seemed to be about perfect.  My goal was to buy a MacPro, fill it with BlackMagic Intensity boards then get a couple of these cameras for $3,000 and plug them in to the Mac via HDMI (I could probably use HD-SDI boards too if I wanted).

Problem is… Red scrapped the Scarlet.

Well, not really scrapped it, more like they are changing it.  November 13th is when we’re supposed to learn what the revised Scarlet will bring.  The thing with Red cameras is that they are not really designed to work in a live video scenario.  Each camera captures the RAW image which you then bring in to a computer and apply exact color specifications to the picture.  This is great for anyone looking to make hollywood grade movies, but at SpaceVidcast we’re just looking to make awesome quality live video with community interaction.  So here’s hoping that the additions to Scarlet make it a great live replacement to the DV camera we’re currently using (one of the reasons our show is not HD yet).

Red Scarlet Teaser

I have a few more behind-the-scenes SpaceVidcast updates I’ll be posting here in the coming days.  I would give you a great excuse for not posting recently, but well, I don’t have one.  My November resolution is to post more to Bencredible about the happenings at SVC.