Bencredible

For those who have not seen me on camera, what is wrong with you?  Geesh, don’t you know I’m a huge online celebrity?  Man.

I am, of course about 30 pounds over weight.  I hold it well when I’m sitting behind a desk but as many of you know we are now standing for Spacevidcast.  It is time to diet.

I don’t just go on a diet, I go all out.  For many people this would cause them to immediatly fail, but for me if I can’t go 155% then I just don’t do it.  To help me with this I am using Alli.  Basically Alli attaches to fat and prevents it from being broken down which means it passes right through your system rather than being absorbed.  The good news is that the fat absorbion is far less which is healthier.  The bad news is that fat still needs to go somewhere.  So I’m considering wearing a diper to work.  I kid, I kid.

Or do I?

But fat absorbion is not my only issue.  I need to eat healtier, work out more and just generally have a better lifestyle.  While Alli is a temporary pill that will help me lose weight a bit more rapidly, I intend to keep it off which means I have to change most everything about my life.  I’m OK with this, but it won’t be easy.  The big problem for me is the amount of soda pop that I drink and basically the sugar intake I have.  As I understand it, excess sugar is stored in the liver and other vital organs.  When those organs are full of sugar the rest of it turns to fat which can lead to, you guess it, weight gain.  And boy do I like sugar!

I have just cut out soda for the most part.  One or two cans a week should be OK, but the three or four per day have to stop.  I have already been drinking a lot more water as of this weekend and plan to keep it up.

The first two weeks will be the hardest, but being that I’m on camera a lot more and frankly this is good for me I fully intent to keep it up.  The great community over at Spacevidcast should also help keep me on-track.  I’ll get a scale and give weekly report so Starbucks and Kat can yell at me if I’m not doing good enough.  Eventually I’ll get myself back in to shape… And by back I mean in shape since I have never actually been fit, ever.

As you can imagine Cariann and I have been prepping quite a bit for the big return of Spacevidcast. I always strive to look at what I’m doing and find ways to do it better. I think the new version of Spacevidcast will be no exception.

We have been driving to Watertown a LOT recently (which is where the new studio is) and today ran in to a big of a snag: the system we were going to use to hold up the plasmas won’t work.

We will be broadcasting from cafn8ed’s coffee shop and I figure since he has been nice enough to not only lend us his shop but also his time, we should return the favor any way we can. For starters the two shiny new plasma TVs we have could be used when we’re not there which is like 99% of the time. That means that they need to be on beefy stands that can survive the impact of a 7 year old who wants to run straight at the shiny object. This is not an easy problem to solve with a 120lb top heavy 6′ structure.

In the end I’m sure we will figure it out although we may not have a permanent solution in place for the first show. I’m also concerned that I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew, but we will find out. Cariann and I are slated to go back out tomorrow and do an equipment run through to make sure we have all the gear needed to make things work. Then on Wednesday we will be doing a dry run through without broadcasting to make sure that we’re all on the same page. After that… well… show time!

I usually like to surprise people with new set designs, web designs and whatnot but instead of taking the closed Apple approach I decided to open up the process and show everyone what has been going on behind the scenes. To that end here are a couple of photos showing off the general concept. Note that the stands for the plasma will be changing to something more like this:

EACH ONE of those stands is $500.00 plus about $100.00 shipping.  That’s over 1/2 the cost of the entire plamsa itself!  Speaking of, here is a look at what the wide shot will sorta look like (this is taken on the crummy iPhone camera and will look much nicer with the full cameras):

And this is what the tight shot will sorta look like.  Again crummy camera please forgive:

And finally here is a wide shot of the studio.  We will probably need to drape the side walls in black and we know we will need to drape the floor in black to make sure the look is complete.  What I really want to do is have a giant shot of the earth animating against the whole back wall and have the plasmas mounted from the ceiling but we simply can’t do that in this space:

Of course NONE of the cameras or lighting is set up in these shots.  I have no idea how I’m going to do the main lights and not get a ton of reflection on the plamsas.  We will make it work though.  The hair lights will be interesting as well, but I think I have a solution for those.  Right now my biggest problem is finding something pretty to put those Plasmas on that doesn’t cose just as much as the plasma itself!

Since we’re moving to a 3 camera setup, and cafn8ed is hosting us in his new studio space, I thought it was time for a new set.  This will be a very simple set.  The desk is *gone* and we will be standing.  The background is a giant black curtain, and we will have two 50″ plasmas over our shoulders.  In fact, here there are all boxed up, waiting to be put on stands:

There are a couple of problems with putting plasmas on camera.  First, I need to find some stands that are not scary expensive and yet are simple and elegant, preferably with casters so we can roll them on and off the set as needed.  I have yet to find any good stands that cost less than $500.00 and are 72″ tall.

Second, color calibrating a screen so it looks good on-camera is a bit of a pain.  The easiest way I have ever found to do this is to put SMPTE color bars on the screen, swing the camera around and fill the shot with nothing but the screen, and use a vectorscope/waveform to get the whole thing in to alignment.  It looks completely wrong in person, but on-camera it actually works quite well.  Each one takes a painful amount of time because they need to look exactly the same, and as with everything in life, no two plasma monitors are exactly identical.  Sigh.

The last and probably hardest problem is how to drive them.  To start I will probably just use a Macintosh with Keynote on it.  The main SVC logo animation will be on one slide, then when we start talking about news I’ll have additional slides with each news picture on them.  That’s fine to start, but I want to use these monitors a lot more than just that.  When we have call in guests, and my goal in 2009 is to have a call in guest for as many shows as possible, I want to have the guest on the plasma monitor as well as an input to the video switcher.  Two problems there: 1, the switcher only has three video inputs and 2, I have no way to switch between the Skype signal on the monitor and the graphics being used for the news and whatnot.  And if I *really* want to make it hard, I want to drive each screen indepenantly of the other one.  I’m thinking a VGA matrix switcher will do the job, but still have no idea how to get the Skype caller in to the broadcasting computer.  Anyone have any ideas?  Oh yeah, and anyone know of a scary cheap VGA matrix switcher?

We are getting there!  A lot of elements fell in to place this weekend.  I’m not sure we will be 100% ready to go by our broadcast date of January 16th at 2:00am UTC, but I think we will have enough to get SOMETHING cool out there.  And I know you guys all miss Spacevidcast, so I want to come back sooner rather than later.

This is Rev B of the Spacevidcast theme.  As you listen to this, consider the format for the updated show:

• Start with 3 coming up items.  This would be during the slower, repeating element of the music in the beginning
• Jump to a camera shot of C and I with a quick quote “… on this January 16th edition of Spacevidcast”
• As soon as we end our on-camera shot (which would probably only be 3 seconds) the main open hits which is the main beat of the music
• As soon as the main open stops, we come back to the camera shot with C and I

Now, think about that rundown and take a listen to this:
[audio:http://www.bencredible.com/wp-content/spacevidcast_lowressample2.mp3|titles=Spacevidcast Theme Rev B]

Of course there is debate here.  Cariann thinks that we should end the “… on this January 16th edition of Spacevidcast” at the point where you hear the countdown start at ’3-2-1-0′ and I think it should be right before the ’0′ of that same countdown and the open should start right on that beat.  We will play with it and create a faux show open to see which one flows better.

But all that aside, what does the community think of the updated song?

It is time to really make Spacevidcast something great.  We are already the first and only (that we know of) live streaming space show, but I want to make it the best show on the Internet in any category!  I want to build a brand that a lot of people will recognize when they see or hear it.   This is the first revision of the proposed Spacevidcast theme which is being written by audio uberchild Antonio Colangelo of Prophis Music.

Keep in mind that this is the first revision.  To put this in perspective the updated Spacevidcast site design went through a little over 100 revisions before we locked it down.  I don’t expect this to be even close to that difficult, but I’m sure there will be more.

[audio:http://www.bencredible.com/wp-content/spacevidcast_lowressample.mp3|titles=Spacevidcast Theme Rev A]

What do you think?  Leave your constructive comments below.  I won’t taint you with what I think, if I like it, dislike it or if I want anything changed.  Let me know what YOU think then I’ll write up a new post later with my thoughts.  Enjoy!

I have a number of outstanding items for the first episode of Spacevidcast in 2009.  As a quick aside you’ll note that I have started spelling it Spacevidcast as opposed to SpaceVidcast which will match the logo a bit nicer.  I was going to change the logo but it looked silly.

Outstanding Early January Spacevidcast items:
- Update the web site design
- Finish the new set design (requires two 42″ plasma monitors and two 6′ stands)
- Get the new show music (this is currently being worked on)
- Get the new show open.  I won’t start that until I get the new theme music
- Create the new show graphics
- Purchase 3 additional Blackmagic Intensity boards for the live show switching
- Fix CamTwist Studio 2 beta so the video does not tear on full-screen output
- Find a way to turn off the virtual driver in CamTwist to free up CPU
- Find a way to record the HD show while streaming the flash episode live
- Figure out how to drive the two 42″ plasma monitors independently
- Figure out how to do component HD switching for the plasma monitors (scaler?)
- Figure out how to feed the Skype computer for guests in to the 42″ plasmas as well as in to the CamTwist computer

I really want to get the new Spacevidcast site online as fast as possible.  I believe we are going to start getting some good media attention in January of 2009 and want to make sure it is much easier for people to find the clips they are looking for.  I had tried two external resources to cut up the comp and get it rolling but neither were able to do it, which means that I’ll be taking that project on again.  As such there may be an additional delay for show launch that was not intended, so we may be going live on January 16th at 2:00am UTC rather than January 9th as originally planned.  It is really unknown at this time, I’ll have a better feeling for it this weekend.  We won’t be launching until the new site, graphics, music and open are done.  Everything else is fairly optional.  I would like to push to get the first shows in 2009 done in HD from the start, but we’ll see if we have the resources to make it go.

The biggest problem with running a show that makes no money is that, well, it makes no money.  This means I can’t hire the resources needed to take some of these items off my plate.  It is my hope that with the improvements to the show as well as the marketing blitz I want to start we will grow the audience quite a bit allowing us to sell ads.  I guess we could sell ads against the show right now, but I’m having a hard time coming up with potential sponsors.  We’ll see how it goes once the updated show launches.

Stay tuned!  We have some amazing things in store for 2009!!!  Here is a quick tease of what the updated web site will look like:

I think I may have drank too much in the latest parts of 2008. Had a couple of martinis at dinner and from there went to Prairie Pub where I had a shot of something and two gin and tonics. Went to Mystic Lake and watched the balloons fall and old people lose a lot of money. Mystic doesn’t have booze, so we went to Canterbury and had another shot and a couple of white russians.

NORMALLY I can drink that much, but today I have the largest headache, dare I say migraine I have had in a long, long time. It is extremely crippling, which is bad because…

Today was the day I was going to get the new SpaceVidcast site online! Alas, my head hurts so much I don’t want to be looking at the computer screen for any longer than necessary. Fear not kids, we have a weekend coming up and I should be able to do it then, or if this cursed headache goes away soon I’ll begin work later tonight.

Have a happy 2009 and remember: space travel changes forever in 2010! That’s just one year away.