Anybody gonna turn the lights on up in here?
One thing that the 2CanJam gig really brought to the fore is the need for good lighting over cheaping out and having to just use the lighting there. So I have been researching sequencing hardware and software for LED lighting along with sniping the electronics surplusers for really bright LEDs.So far the most fun in my quest was at the 8 Channel LED Controller v.3, the 24 Channel High Current USB LED Controller v.3' and the Chromation Systems 48 Channel Mono / 16 Channel RGB LED Controller pages because of all the neat stuff they had to download and goof on off line. Chromation Systems sells the kits, too, but provide a lot of dox in open access for the DIY diehards who just have to go it alone!
99 & forty four one hundredths of the parts are kitted up for some guitar pre-amp projects that fit in Altoids boxes. That's one each for mono and stereo guitars and a bass version as well, so that's going to be the pre-occupation for the rest of the month. That, and scrounging up a couple 150k quarter watt resistors for one project so I don't have to piggyback in an Altoid box. Power will be external, so that helps, but I'd rather not series or piggyback like I would for rack stuff.
It will be handy to have a little pre that could fit in a shirt pocket. We'll see how it goes.
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2 Can Jam fizzout
Have had a blast popping out mp3s for all the songs from the 2 can Jam along with DVDs of all the raw data from Cam 1 and DVDs featuring 11 songs as a sampler. And flipping certain songs into different formats.The Boyz (Greg and Rick) have not seen any footage from cams 2 and 3, and I'm not even sure Rick gave Greg his copies, so who knows what Greg got to see so far. (Rick broke up with him after the gig because "he smokes cigarettes and kept asking me to go to church", according to the vine).
Rick is so pro he doesn't know what net 30 is, so these files still belong to yours truly while certain bills related to production costs go unpaid. My advice is that if Rick Johnston wants you to do any work make him sign a contract because his word is worthless. Aunt Tracy is probably correct in her prediction I'd never get paid and I gave him a chance and took the gig anyway.
In the mean time I'm having fun tinkering with these media files and it looks like good ol' boy Greg just might get an OK little promo viddy for Christmas or his "Birfday" or just because I could.
And I'm still focused on more lighting for future gigs and all I've had budget for is a couple little tripods so I can return the one I borrowed from Kirk's Q3 Accessory pack and in the future all three will have their own little table top tripod.
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2 Can Jam
I got to record Rick Johnston and his buddy Greg gigging as 2 Can Jam at Hot Rods last Friday night. The guys were in fine form and played some tasty ditties.On the plus side, the sound was terrific and the little Zoom Q3 works very well in low light conditions. Just not that low light.
I tried out the little cams by Phillips and they worked pretty well for video. Next time, though, I am going to put a piece of tape over the mic port since the sound was distorted (as we knew it would be working that close to the monitors) when when turned down to two. Used them for stills as well and got some nice ones as well as a few blurry ones.
Copped a couple clips at 720p near the end and hope to use that aspect next time instead of 640x480.
All in all the "vidya" was too dark and the sound was pretty nice. It will take a little extra work to turn any of it into decent promotional media but we can do it quite handily given a little time.
I'm already looking at light bars and other micro spots and LED sequencers in addition to infinity mirrors and other 'disco' lighting solutions. LED fill lights are spendy but I think it would be fairly easy to make some from surplus LEDS and include controllers varying from simple dip-switch programming on up through PIC controllers.
It won't be dark next time and will be a lot more fun to film as well as to watch.
I was all ready to record two voice tracks, a guitar track and a keyboard track on the old MR8HD but Rick wanted to keep it simple, so what we got for sound on the Zoom Q3 is it for the mix for all time.
Burned three copies of the 8 Gigs of data from the Zoom and lo-fi DVD raw video rushes for immediate review. Just wish the rest of the team were as up to speed on their homework so we could choose which songs for demo and get that rolling.
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the ows sub-domain is occupied
The news engine has been replaced at ows.ettruck.com with an applications for librarians and An Open Educational Resource Library has launched with a few collections.The first collection in the library is the contents of one of my favorite files on Torrence, our little torrent server, which has, essentially, all the high-school textbooks anyone would need to pass a GED test. The California Free Digital Textbook Initiative Collection
Fifteen textbooks are included covering Algebra II, Calculus, Geometry, Trigonometry, Biology/Life Sciences, Chemistry, and Earth Sciences. One Biology textbook was excluded because the publisher did not include an acceptable license.
Now anyone can grab the bits they need as they need them and not have to toss toss away the big chunks that were not needed from the torrent file.
And the physics books are included in our little Open Educational Resource Library!
The torrent file physics textbook contents are not included in the torrent version of the archive, they are available here.
There is also a multi-media collection called Greetings From the Land of the Good Spirit! And The Puppy Linux Collection is there to cover software and Operating Systems as Open Educational Resources, too.
The site is Open Access but less prone to scripted spamming than pligg, mediawiki, and phpbb engines have been for us in the past.
There was an upload limit of 30M to mellow around, leading to other plug-ins to explore, and more on the way to implementation. The files are uploaded, I just have to go let the Omeka engine know they are there and begin filling in the meta data and processing the forms.
Some of these textbooks are HUGE PDF files. The Life Sciences PDF is almost 200M! Earth Science 135M! Geometry 100M! The rest are way more reasonable. Trig=89M! Biology=74M! Chemistry=52M!
It's going to be fun to see how it goes.
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FatDAW
Kirk and I have been given access to a dual core (2 x 2gig) to edit some of his movie clips on and to use as a Digital Audio Workstaton. It has Windows (tm) as one of its mult-boot functions, but most of the time it is booted to FatDog, a 64 bit version of Puppy Linux so it has been dubbed FatDAW.Comments - Edit - Delete