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. 

A few more training videos....

Have produced getting on for twenty "training" type videos for my teaching over the past year or so and a couple can already be found on this blog. I thought I'd attach a couple more here: the first is on the idea of basic "workflow" which discusses aligning audio and video files within the NLE first before then exporting the whole sound mix to ProTools for further tweaking etc. The second discusses using the software "ADR Studio"....

More building works.....?

Have got my eye on a new house which contains an integral garage. If I manage to purchase the house (offer been more or less accepted, just waiting for my house to sell, but almost there I think), the plan will be to convert the integral garage again. This time, as the property is almost new and also as it is integral, the project is going to need full building regs and planning approval, so I am already researching a suitable design which will easily exceed current regs. The plan this time will be to create more of an Office / Studio / Games room, so this time I think the Vocal Booth will be left off the design in favour of a ceiling mounted projector and Playstation 3 :) with all AV cabling installed etc....

As permitted development rights to convert the garage have been removed for the property (this seems to be more and more common nowadays with parking at a premium), an additional parking space across the small front garden might be required. This is a bit of a headache as it also means getting the kerbside dropped by the Council too, however, worth it in the end I reckon.

Looking forward to getting the old jigsaw out again.

Multiclip editing in Final Cut

Recently been preparing an exercise / demonstration to illustrate the uses of merging clips and using multiclips within Final Cut Pro, synchronised using free run timecode.

A really good exercise will be to setup a two camera shoot, say to record an interview, with the audio being handled by a separate audio recorder with all three devices synchronised together using FREE RUN timecode.

Once the footage is captured, both clips can have the same higher quality audio attached by simply using the MERGE CLIPS (by timecode) command which is fine when dealing with single pieces of footage with separate audio. However, a neater method when using multiple cameras is to use the MAKE MULTICLIP (by timecode) command. This will create a multiclip containing the two camera angles and the higher quality audio file (the same method could also be used if one of the cameras was used to record the audio too). By using the MULTICLIP ACTIVE TRACKS command and setting this to VIDEO ONLY, it is possible to carry out a live edit, toggling between to the two camera angles, whilst still keeping the audio track constant. For an edit to be achieved in real time, one must remember to set the PLAYAHEAD SYNC to "OPEN" so that the VIEWER and CANVAS windows are ganged together.

As with all of my teachings, I have created a Quicktime tutorial file showing these methods, but the quality, once posted onto Blogger is not particularly great - however, it's here for reference if anyone is interested in viewing it....



Following on from what I said earlier about using the MERGE CLIP command, something to touch up here in relation to that is that of nesting sequences within sequences. Let's say that some footage has had its separately recorded audio file aligned to it using the MERGE CLIP (by timecode) function. What will have been created now is a clip containing BOTH the camera's on board audio and the separate audio; i.e. 4 audio tracks. To make it so that each time a section of this clip is used, audio tracks 1 and 2 don't have to be manually removed or muted, another neat trick to drag the clip onto a new sequence, remove the camera's audio and then edit this sequence into the main edit sequence, if that makes sense!

Text book again, again, again

Heard back from Focal Press about the text book and it appears that my proposal / idea is a little too vague for them and needs to be more concrete. I therefore reckon I will perhaps re-work the idea so that is something more along the lines of "ProTools for AV Post Production", i.e. making it more of a hands on ProTools training guide, with some supporting theory. I need to get my a**s in gear and have another go.... being a bit lazy at the moment.