A few months back I had the privilege of doing FOH, projection design, and sound design for a local theater group.  The performance of Agatha Christie’s  “And Then There Were None” surprisingly had lots of sound effects, many of which ran concurrently.  One of the set guys mentioned that in the past they had used Qlab for the sound effects.  So just a few days before dress rehearsal I down load the software HERE had it loaded in up in less then an hour and had enough understanding to program and run the show in about 3 hours.  Let me just say as a video guy this was one of the first times I ever did serious audio work that made sense to me.  The program is laid out similar to a nodal compositor (which I have only ever seen and only vaguely understand)  it has lots of great functionality, and oh yeah it’s FREE.  I think this is a great little piece if software that the church market may have overlooked. 

This was my project file after 3 hours of work, I was really pretty proud of this since again I had never used this software before. While I know the garish color sheme is pretty rough believe it or not I did that by design.  I wanted everything to be easily seen and no misunderstanding about what each cue did.

The big red Xs on the left side there show you that I have moved my source files since the show. There are tuortials for this software all over the inter-webs. So church sound guys go download it and try it out. If you ever need precision audio cues, or sound effects, for what ever reason, THIS is the software for you.

Today was a strange day at our church.  Let me set the scene for you. Our regular teaching/senior/founding pastor is in Uganda on a mission trip checking, among other things, the feasibility of us doing family mission trips there.  So this weekend our high school pastor and the high school worship band (read as the band that plays for out high school kids, not the band made up by our high school kids) handled “big church” today.  In the past when other speakers and worship leaders are given opportunities like this the programing team has been careful to point out that it usually works best if whoever it is doesn’t deviate from our standard template too far.  This weekend our high school crew did a good job, Donnie was a great speaker and Jake and his band sounded awesome. We had a few kinks that we fixed, minor transition details ect…, and by the second service things were going good. (more…)

So the family and I took a 5 day long trip to disney this past week. I think the best way to sum up my thoughts is in an award style post, so here we go:(oh spoiler alert YOU WERE WARNED)

Coolest use of technology: Kim possible scavenger hunt- If you have never heard of this it here’s how it works;at Epcot they give you a cell phone with clues and pictures that tells you to be some place and look for something, when you find it the phone sends a signal that makes the something do… well something.  For example we had to find a stein display in germany, when we did the steins started singing to us.  Then we had to find a glockenspiel (still don’t know what that is) when we did it set off this 6 ft tall cuckoo clock thing it was AWESOME!

Coolest Ride: Toy Story- This was a tough one, and the winner is only technically a ride, yeah you sit in a little car and it moves but the best part of this ride is the 3D shoot’um up aspect it basically moved you around to different target ranges and you shoot the targets with a 3d animated nerf gun.

Biggest surprise: Voyage of the little mermaid- Well here is the thing, my youngest has this thing for Ariel, so we ended up at this show… the special effects were REALLY cool! I knew we were in for something good when they opened the doors and the haze was so thick it literally poured out.  At one point they use a laser through some kind of beam splitter to make a false ceiling of laser light and then rained water through it … yeah cool stuff.

Best projection: Cinderella’s castle- So for this one the geek in me wants more info, cause I saw where the projectors were these things HAVE to be 2-3 hundred feet away minimum.  There were 2 double stacks per section (4 projectors, one side looked like it had 6) hitting at least different atleast 4 different sections.  I can’t even speculate on specs, but I would love to know what they were using cause it looked like a million bucks…. which coincidentally is prolly what they paid for them.

Environmental Projection

Biggest “How did they do that?”: Turtle talk with crush- this one was cool mainly because my oldest got picked to talk to Crush first and got asked a bunch of questions, and then Crush asked ME a bunch of questions.  Which really has me wondering how it’s done, which of course causes my wife to go search these things out.  Rather then explain it check out this article.

Biggest disappointment: Me- Yeah like something from Disney was going to make this one.  Pride got the better of me  and yes a I am a little ashamed… At one point during one of the fireworks show the guy next to me was snapping pics as fast as he could (which was not very fast) and in a moment of pride I ramped up my 7D to high speed and snapped out 3 bazillion pictures in about 2.3 seconds just cause I could.  yeah I felt a little bad about it later, but not much

For Christmas this year we went to see my parents who have recently moved pretty close to us. So the family congregated not far from our house. There were 11 of us in the house for Christmas dinner and what I found most interesting about this large group of people is that I was only blood related to 4 of the 11, and 2 of those are MY kids. Now I love my family and we all get along pretty well together and we make the whole family thing work, but it still strikes me as odd that all these random people I call family aren’t really related to me. Yes it’s dysfunctional, yes it’s broken, but I find it reassuring that it is those very same areas that God has the opportunity to do the most work. A friend of mine, Micheal Dean Chadwick, always says when God can’t find a straight stick he will use a crooked one.

I don’t watch a lot of sports, I may watch the championship game in most sports, but not much else.  Part of the reason for this is the time I my career where I followed teams and players around the country for basketball games.  I got to know some of the up and coming pros today before they were household names, and to be honest a good chunk of them were arrogant self-centered children with bad entitlement issues, and still are.  Now I know I am painting with a wide brush there, but it’s what I saw.  So when I read something like this story it gives me hope that money and fame doesn’t ruin all of them.  Like I said I don’t keep up with sports but Braylon Edwards could easily be my favorite NFL player now. That is a level of generosity that is really just unprecedented.  The fact that he not only came through with a promise he made to a bunch of kids 6 years ago, that no one in their right mind would have held him to, he didn’t stop there. “The 79 students were provided with laptops and other supplies to help them out when they arrived on campus.” I can’t say enough how encouraging it is to read things like this, Braylon Edwards if you are reading this… YOU are the man!

Some of you may know by now that my ponytail started tweeting in the middle of the Christmas production this past weekend.  @MarkHsPonyTail

The reason for this… turns out I didn’t keep @joewoolworth busy enough. In a fit of boredom inspired creativity, he came up with the idea that my ponytail should be tweeting.  5 minutes later my ponytail had an account and all of the volunteer team for that night was following it.  The next time you think your volunteer staff is giving you a hard time just check out some of the tweets from my ponytail, which apparently “did all it’s own stunts in Disney’s Tangled.” My volunteers immediately jumped in with suggested tweets, and by the end of the day they had almost 100 tweets, 20 followers and wait for it….merchandise. Yeah you read that right ponytail has it’s own brand.  So it saddens me a little that my ponytail is destine to overshadow my real social media presence, which admittedly would not be a tough, but it saddens me none the less.

The stage design for this series needed to be quick, easy and look like a million bucks.  We ended up not have as much time as usual for set up for this series but because tear down from the previous series required the tearing down of a house… no I am not kidding.  Needless to say that took way longer than our average tear down so this one had only a couple of days work put into it.  The concept is easy but requires some intentionality, and patience that some people may not be willing to put in.  All of projection surfaces are foam core hung with tie-line. What I did here amounts to poor-mans-grid mapping or single destination grid mapping.  I went into the masks layer in pro presenter and drew all the negative space, all the area we were not going to project on. This is a tedious process, easy but tedious, that said the results are tough to argue with. If you have been keeping up with my blog then you already know that I modeled for all the pictures.

The result is all of the surface receive just the part of the image that would be in that area, like grid mapping. The difference is it didn’t require Pro video player, a bunch of TV’s, or a band of mac mini slave nodes to pull off. This goes back to creative solutions to expensive problems. The mask for this required lots of squares, I think 50 some odd total. We are projecting that single image from a Mac mini at 3840×720.  The panels are coming right off the computer the center screen passes through the video room first so we can overlay text before sending the single back out or change the source entirely.

Behind the foam core we have 4′ wide x 20′ long sections of mosquito screening zip-tied together, we made this screen cyc about 6 months ago, and frankly it was a big enough pain in the butt, and looked so great we have incorporated it into all the deigns since it went up.We crumpled the screen to give it depth and dimension it looks great when the lights rake it.  We are lighting it with MEGA light N E Color Strip Pro on the sides and ETC Color Commands in the center (so it wont flicker on camera).

Our new sermon series is called “Break Out” the series is about how to break free of the bondage of not forgiving, so we wanted to the series art represent the struggle.  We ran down a few different concepts involving chains and other forms of bondage, but we decided all of those were a little to cliche.  The team came up with this concept that originally involved a person pushing his hand through spandex, and that seemed a good representation of the struggle.

So in our first test we found the spandex kinda got us the look we desired, but we couldn’t capture a picture that really did it justice.  So we punted and tried our number 2 theory which was plastic drop cloths. While a little on the creepy side this was a much easier image to capture and manipulate.  After the initial test we had the idea that we could work words into this as well that tone down the creepy factor a little. It didn’t take us long to come up with the idea of printing words on transparency film with big thick text and the result was really awesome.  As it turns out transparencies were the most expensive thing we needed for this shoot.

Which brings me to a side note; while I thought over-head projectors were dead, apparently no one told the people that make them.  Transparencies ended up being almost $50. Color me surprised, I thought we would get it for $5 tops. I mean churches and schools were driving that industry… how many churches and schools use them now? I digress.

In the end thanks to some pretty creative editing by Josh this bumper turned out really good. All editing color grading done in FCP 7 and the film flashes done in After Effects with the free preset from allbetsareoff.com.

If you like that then stay tuned for my next post where look at the stage design for this series.

Great ideas take planning and preparation, but sometimes the best ideas come out of desperation. That was the scenario with the video team this week.  We were told a week prior that the band would be closing out our sermon series with a song by Nichole Nordeman called Legacy.  It’s an awesome song, and we tried and tried to come up with a concept for something to do visually to accompany the song and kept coming up empty handed.

Wednesday afternoon week of (gulp), I remembered a vignette I had seen a few years ago about a Roman cross builder, and started recalling how cool it looked seeing someone building a cross.  I had a clear picture in my head of the shots and images that I would like to see if we made a video adaptation. Armed with this concept I sought out our Video Producer, Josh, and pitched my thoughts to him, and we discussed it for a while until we were both sure that we had the same images in our heads.  The main thing was coming up with a way to tie this concept to the song, we both really loved the idea, but neither of us could come up with a way to tie in a cross being built to legacy. A few hours later it hit me, it literally just came to me… WE are Jesus’ legacy, and THAT was the the tie-in. FYI, I am not theologian enough to come up with that on my own, if you are pickin up what I am puttin down.

First thing the next morning (T-minus 1 1/2 day to air), we went and found the props; axe, chisel, hammer.  Then we went to a lumber yard to look for rough wood.  We settled on split rail fence posts… for a couple of reasons; 1) they were rough looking and 2) they had notches pretty much pre-cut into them.  The plus and minus on that was our talent didn’t have near as much work to do as it looked like, but we had to shot around them in the establishing shots, as you can see below.

To set up the area for the shoot we got some black fabric from our props closet and then some black fabric covered pipe and drape stands.  We basically got as much black fabric as we could and covered the saw horses and the floor, then used the pipe and drape to block the windows in the room.  After that is was all down to shooting. Gear for this shoot included 2 canon 7D’s, one with a Canon 24-70 2.4L and and the other with a Canon 50mm 1.4, 1 Lowel Rifa and 1 Lowel Omni, and two Manfrotto tripods

Josh has a Poor-Mans-Dolly, which works REALLY well, along with the Manfrotto tripod he used that had a boom feature built into it (that I did not know about).  This allowed him to get some REALLY cool shots off the dolly as pictured above. Josh built his Dolly out of 2 pieces of 1/2″ plywood, so it weights a metric ton, but for a couple of shots we had both of us and the gear on the dolly with no problem. Josh ran the A cam and I grabbed whatever he wasn’t using and got some b-roll.  The two of us managed to tango around, trading cameras as we went, to get nice complimenting shots.

The other plus of running 2 cams is it really cut down on the time we needed our talent.  We managed to get the barista from our coffee shop to be our hand model.  Which reminds me, if you are in the Raleigh/Durham area be sure and stop by the Gathering Place in Hope Community Church for the best cup of coffee around (thanks again Joe).  Turns out he was actually pretty good with the tools, plus he was a ton of fun during the shoot. After the shoot Josh spent 5 hours with it in post that night, to capture, transcode and rough cut. Luckily we spent so much time on the set up we really had tons of good footage to pick from, so after 3 hours it was already ready for the polish. The next day he added some lens flares with Knoll Light Factory in After Effects, tightened up the text transitions and it was done.

It amazed me how fast we (meaning Josh) were able to turn this one out. Most of our projects take a lot longer and aren’t nearly as fun or creative. Having a good solid concept makes the workflow so much easier, I think it has something to do with having the goal in mind, that and actually being a pretty good shooter/editor helps a little too. Easy for me to say because I didn’t edit it, but it seems like this project, once we got moving on it, practically made it self. So here is the final footage, the Legacy music was not included for copyright compliance, the current track is”Race Against Time” by Jordan Hancock.

Typically when you hear the term “creative solution” it’s code for “cheep fix.”  Most Tech guys I know are masters of creative solutions or “thinking outside the box.”  My good friend Mike Sessler wrote a blog on “doing more with less” that is right in this vein.

Well I had an issue a few days ago that put me not only outside the box … I totally lost the box.  I am hoping this post gets me some MAJOR geek points.  I wont lie to you, this is going to be detailed and deep, if you are not a tech person I will understand if you don’t read any further.

Now that it’s just us Techies, here is the back story for the problem I ran into.  We recently purchased a Ross Crossover switcher for our multi-site. This signifies a big change for us because we have always had a firm “the multi-site gets the same tech as the main campus (scaled if possible)” policy. This is great for training purposes, since our multi-sites lives in boxes 6 days a week training on their gear is tough impossible.  So they train at the main campus on the same “family” of gear, usually ours is the bigger version.  So since we bought a Ross Crossover for the multi-site at some point we are going to trade in our FSR Eagle 300 at the main campus for a Ross Carbonite, to keep all the gear in the same family.

Set up: our Eagle 300 is a 2 ME scaling switcher.  We use 1 ME for side screens and 1 ME for the center screen.  On the side screens Lyrics are in the DSK bus.  The computer generating that signal is also split via a distribution amplifier (DA), pre-switcher, and comes in as a regular source so that we can utilize the position adjustment in on one of the mixers and then we key the mixer (as opposed to an unscaled DSK).  The result is we have 1 lyric computer that puts lower thirds on the side screens (keyed over IMAG), as well as those same lyrics, repositioned into the center of the center screen (keyed over a looping motion background) So we have lyrics in 2 slightly different locations, coming from one source, each going to a different destination.

Problem: You cannot replicate this configuration with the Carbonite. The DVE Key which lets you reposition the input doesn’t let you key it as well. The regular keyer cannot be repositioned.   So you can have the position change or the key but not both. The way we do things we REALLY need both.

Potential Easy Solution: Pass lyrics through a DA, pre-switcher, then pass 1 signal through a scaler to reposition it before passing it on to the switcher itself.

Cost of solution: 1 scaler (thousands of dollars)

Creative solution:  (Ok if the problem confused you there is no chance you will get this FYI, you have been warned)  Since we use Pro Presenter as our lyric source, what we can do double the size of our lyrics (from 1280×720 to 2560×720) and pass our lyric computer feed through a double head to go(DH2G).  Then you have to do some creative formatting of lyrics in pro presenter.   If you duplicate the lyrics on each slide, so you have 2 copies of each text box, you can position each text box in 1/2 of the slide.  Imagine the 2560 screen cut in half.  Now format the first  1/2 for one destination and the second 1/2 for the other destination.  The result would be 1 of the feeds off the DH2G would have lyrics on the center and one would have lyrics in the middle.  Since the signal is split into 2 outpus, you have the single lyrics source would hit the switcher in 2 places one with lyrics in the middle and one with lryics on the bottom.

Cost for solution: 1 DH2G ($229)

And it’s just crazy enough that it might work.  Based on my initial test (which was just to see if you could even do this in Pro Presenter) this should work  One of the obvious down sides is that you can’t import the text and just use it, the set up time would be and investment.  That said you would only have to do it once per song, so it wouldn’t be the end of the world.