Update

A new photo showing the more or less complete layout.

Decking almost there....

Good day today, most of decking now complete and all lights now twinkling away :)

Decking

Good progress made today - bottom deck more or less sorted with lights in too :)

A few more photos

Almost there now... floor laid, all electrics, sky and data finished and tested. Will now press on and get the rest of the garden decking completed....

Almost there....

Plaster is now almost dry so painting can begin soon :)

Spent the weekend off and on sorting out the side fascias and front soffit, complete with LED downlighters. I am really pleased with how these lights look.

Cladding

Western red cedar cladding now fitted and I'm really pleased with the results. Plasterer is coming tomorrow so it won't be long now for completion.

Rockwool and Plasterboard

Things are coming on well now. Walls have all been filled with RS60 high density Rockwool and some of them have now been plasterboarded too. Should hopefully have all plasterboarding finished in the next couple of days as my plasterer is booked for the weekend. Western Red Cedar cladding from Canada (courtesy of Benchmark Timber, www. benchmarktimber.co.uk) is also due this week, so I am hoping the exterior will be complete soon as well.

The photos were took with my phone so apologies for the poor quality. As can also be seen in the photos, the first fix wiring is in place for the 4-way consumer unit (which is fed from a 6mm SWA cable from the house consumer unit, via a 40A MCB and RCD), alarm system and lighting. I have decided to make two lighting "wells" out of MDF which will be painted white, the same as the walls and then positioned immediately beneath the roof eaves. These boxes will house some low voltage LED lighting strips (http://www.tlc-direct.co.uk/Products/FL4205WH.html). These lighting strips are modular in design and can be simply connected together in series to provide the amount of desired light; I am hoping that these will provide a nice subtle amount of lighting, shining up the ceiling. The decking surrounding the lodge will also house some LED spot lights as will the front soffit overhanging the front doors. Both set of these lights will be fed from a sensor complete with a timer so that when nightime approaches, the lights will automatically come on and then run for upto 8 hours. Wiring has also been provided for a slimline panel heater to keep me warm in the winter - I have used Nobo slimline heaters before and I really like their design, so I will be going for one of these again (http://www.elementshop.co.uk/product.php?pid=703&cat=).

For the sockets, as I did previously with the garage conversion, Starline dado trunking will be used. Using this system not only means that I don't have to worry about cutting plasterboard around endless backboxes, it also means that the amount of sockets can be decided upon later (and also additional sockets in the future can also be easily added).

Another successful day...

Floor fully insulated today with Celotex GA3090 (90mm thick) then overboarded with 18mm t&g floorboards. Perimeter edges then all filled with mastic.

Roof complete

Roof completed today :)

Shingles

Annoyingly, the felt shingles didn't arrive when they were suposed to, so I only got half the roof done this afternoon. Only took a couple of hours to get this far, which I am pleased about.

Progress update

Productive day today, even though weather was shocking. Managed to get all panels on, breather membrane and battens. French doors fitted as well. Looking good.

Watertight

Managed inbetween the recent bad weather to get the 18mm roofing ply on, together with the roofing underlay. The building is now watertight and ready for the felt shingles which will look far more attractive!

Roof rafters now on

Roof rafters, apart from front and rear ladders now on....

Lodge gets going

Had a very productive couple of days and as can be seen, the frame for the whole lodge is now up, as is the ridge board and one rafter.

The work begins

OK, so have spent the last few weeks off and on (as have had a lot of assessment lately) building the deck joists which will form the foundation for the lodge, together with the decking surrounding it.

Here is a time lapse video of the past couple of days work....

Blogs in Blackboard

Started to think about next year's teaching and am definitely going to go down the Blog route for one of the assessments in both of my main Modules. I was going to get the students to create a Blog using BLOGGER, however I have now discovered that Blackboard (the University's Virtual Learning Environment) has a Blog tool built in which can easily be configured for each Module. Doing this means that all students enrolled on the Module will automatically be able to add entries to the Module's Blog. They can only see their own entries (together with my comments) but I can choose from a drop down box which student's Blog to view - brilliant! This means that it isn't necessary to navigate to an indivudal student's Blogger address, instead all Blogs will be viewable directly from within the Module Shell within Blackboard.

Images, movies, audio etc. can easily be uploaded too and the Blog can be exported as a standard HTML package for archiving purposes too.

There is also the option to automatically link the Blog to an assessment within the on-line gradebook too. I like it!

Another roof option - much cheaper :)

OK, forget the previous post on lightweight roof tiles. I have not found a much cheaper solution with similar longevity. Felt shingles laid directly onto a felt underlay on standard OSB roof boards:

http://www.katepaluk.co.uk/gbu0-prodshow/SuperKLGrey.html

For the whole roof, including edge trims and ridge tiles, the total comes in at only £238 inc. VAT.

Lightweight Roof Tile

OK, following on from previous post on my new "lodge" - I have discovered a ligthweight roof tile which I now plan to place on the roof:

http://www.britmet.co.uk/

The tiles are much lighter than traditional roof tiles and have a 40 year guarantee. They can also be laid on a 12 degree pitch or greater (luckily mine is 13) so they seem to be more than suitable for what I want. The company also sells matching barge board trims and ridge covers so the end result should be excellent. Price is around £550 all in for my roof which I don't think is bad considering its longevity.

The Lodge Studio......

OK, so I have now moved house and have spent the last four months completely redecorating, laying new floors, fitting a new bathroom and en-suite, updating the kitchen and ripping out the fireplace(!). Not bad going considering I've been at work full time as well and the house is over 1500 square feet. In my previous post I discussed converting the integral garage into a new playroom / studio, but we have now decided that perhaps a garage to put old paint tins in and the cars, would actually be useful. Therefore, I have designed a new "lodge" which I am about to start building in the garden. I have been calling it a shed, but this doesn't really do it justice as it will be fully insulated and plastered just like a house :)

Unlike the shed I built two years ago, this one is going to be built from pre-fabricated panels which I will build firstly in the garage and then (hopefully) bolt them together on the foundations.

Plans are attached for anyone interested and I a plan to document its construction. I am currently researching different insulating products and also a lightweight roof tile as I'd rather not use felt! Some of this work might be useful for an MSc I am about to start this September in Energy and Sustainable Building Design.

Should be good..... now, where did I put my cement mixer?

Too high video bit rate.... again

Been researching this issue and basically, DVD SP4 assumes that it is the video rate which is too high even if the error is being caused by something else. Essentially, the combined bit rate of one video track, all audio layers and all subtitle layers must not exceed 8Mbps (if using 5 angle streams or less). Therefore, with the two uncompressed WAVE file layers encoded using 1536kbps each (standard 48kHz, 16 bit) or effectively 1.5Mbps and with the AC3 layer encoded using 448kbps, or approx. 0.5Mbps, this gives a combined rate of 3.5Mbps, only leaving 4.5Mbps maximum for the video stream. Having the audio all encoded to AC3 solves this issue, which is what Apple recommend and this also then makes the files adhere to the standard DVD spec.

Have ordered the Apple Training Book on DVD SP4 which looks a good read.

"Too high video bit rate"

A group of students ran into an issue yesterday when burning their final multi-audio layer DVD for their Audio Post Production coursework. The brief is for the students to create a 3 minute soundtrack for some original or found footage but there must be three audio layers: stereo mix, stereo mix with commentary and 5.1 ac3 mix. For some reason the DVD project in DVD SP4 would not build and the error message "too high video bit rate" kept on appearing. Firstly I tried lowering the maximum bit rate within the encoder section of the preferences window; no joy. Next I tried compressing their video file into an m2v file in "COMPRESSOR" so that no transcoding was required within DVD SP4; still no joy. Next I tried converting their audio files into AIFF 48kHz 16 bit files (even though they were already in this format); still no joy.

Finally I tried building the disc with just the main stereo audio layer - hooray, success! However, this was no good since they need to have three audio layers to accompany the video stream? I next tried just the main stereo stream with the 5.1 ac3 stream - hooray, even more success! What about just adding the main stereo and stereo with commentary layers I hear you ask? No joy! Therefor, for some reason DVD SP4 would not build the DVD when it had two uncompressed audio layers even though I have done this and demo'd this many times successfully?

Any how, the only option was for me to convert the uncompressed stereo with commentary file into 2.0 ac3 (using the Dolby Digital Professional 2.0 preset within COMPRESSOR) and then to re-import this into DVD SP4. Now, with the uncompressed stereo mix on layer 1, ac3 stereo with commentary on layer 2 and 5.1 ac3 mix on layer 3, everything worked fine. This is slightly frustrating however since I wanted the students to submit uncompressed versions of their two stereo mixes. Very strange?

Summer Schools

Already have got four different summer school type activites lined up to take place over the next couple of months or so. Should be good as the ADR sessions always go down well - think I will do something new this year, perhaps a scene from something like Monsters Inc; should go down well with the kids.

Blu-Ray again

It appears that you can't even buy a Mac Pro with built-in Blu-Ray player (let alone BURNER) - what are Apple playing at? How can companies provide clients with one-off Blu-Ray discs from DVD SP 4 - presumeably they can't!

ADR Sessions

Running Intro ADR sessions this week in class and again, the exercises appear to be going well; it's something which students really seem to get into. Running with ADR Studio again (alongside ProTools) and getting the students to both engineer and record some of the replacement lines for a provided piece of footage. Have just been looking into another piece of software by Gallery called "VirtualVCR" which, as far as I can see, will also provide the visual streamer at the cue point too.

Blu-Ray support in DVD SP 4?

Just been thinking about a new module I am working on which is basically Audio Post Production for TV but aimed at audio type students who have never done any video before. I was just thinking that I should cover Blu-Ray / HD DVD Authoring but it appears that at present, DVD SP 4 on the Mac does not support Blu-Ray. I don't want to use Encore - does anyone know if Blu-Ray is supported by DVD SP 4?

EyeTV

Currently researching products for recording TV programs and then streaming them around the house to various devices. I have come across a product for OSX called "EyeTV" and it looks awesome. Basically, the interface looks more or less identical to iTunes and has the ability to automatically place recordings made into a shared iTunes library for accessing around the house and even more cool, is the fact that it can make recordings available in Safari for devices such as the iTouch / iPhone to stream wirelessly! 

There are different products available, (i.e. Freeview or Digital Satellite) and there is even one with dual tuners so one can record either two different programs simultaneously or record one and view another. I think the setup for me will be a Mac Mini and EyeTV dual tuner setup at the "nerve" centre (the software will even power up the computer when a recording is scheduled) together with either a network storage device, or large USB device plugged into something like Apple's Airport Extreme for sharing the storage (and also providing Wireless-n for iTouch devices etc.). 

You can even log on to the device via the web to program it- nice! The system is very similar to Sky+ obviously, however the problem with Sky+ is that there is no way to stream its content anywhere around the home. You therefore need to watch the recordings in the room where they were made.