Everything Is Sacred

I’m gonna be doing this a while

// April 1st, 2008 // No Comments » // Humor, Technology

It really only took about 15 seconds.

From Guest to Baby

// March 25th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Life, Parker, Photography, Technology, Video

I tried hard to come up with a cool, catchy title, and that was all I could muster. Hopefully the content will make up for the lameness. With Parker on the way, we knew we had to transform one of our extra bedrooms into the baby room, and would consolidate the guest bedroom and office into one room. I, of course, couldn’t do this the normal way, and wanted to do my best to document the transformation of the room.

First, I was a little late getting started. I had moved the guest bed out by the time I decided to start this endeavor, so that was never captured. My first thought was to shoot time lapse video using a video camera. The problem with that is that the work being done on the room was going to take place over quite a long period of time. I also wanted to be able to control when the camera was capturing, so I wouldn’t record tons of dead time. My final solution came in the form of a still camera. Christina and I own 2 cameras. My beloved Canon Digital Rebel XT and our trusty Canon S1IS, the camera we got as a Christmas present the year we got married. We had thought the S1IS had disappeared for over a year, only for it to show up (under the seat of Christina’s car) after we had replaced it. So it had been relegated to be the backup camera, the camera to take to the beach when on vacation, etc… Being a Canon, I was able to install software on my iMac to control it remotely via USB. I was even able to capture the images directly on the computer.

In order to mount the camera, I used a shelf bracket, the head from an old tripod, and some screws from the garage. I wanted maximum room coverage, so I put it in the corner by the door. I also needed continuous power so I wouldn’t have to keep taking it down to change batteries and then guess at the correct replacement of the camera, causing tons of movement in the final video.

After getting the camera up and taking a few pics with the iMac, I realized that I wasn’t going to be happy with the focal length. The shot was not near wide enough. I could only see maybe half of the room. I knew I had an old, cheap video wide angle adapter, so I fished it out of the garage gear stash and worked on a way to attach it to the S1IS. I ended up using the cheapest, easiest, and most universal method to attach it: duct tape.

The biggest problem with this (other than how it looks), is that whenever the camera turns off, it attempts to pull the lens back into the body of the camera. When it can’t do this, it freaks out. I had to untape the wide angle and reboot the camera a couple of times in the setup. The final solution was to always keep the camera on, always keep the USB plugged in, and never turn off the computer. If I broke any of the rules, the setup would be ruined. Once during the renovation the wide angle fell off, so I climbed up on a ladder and retaped it. I can’t really tell in the final video the moment that this happened, which is a good thing. So now, any time that I started working in the room I would set the interval timer shooting mode to shoot every X seconds (15 seconds usually, but sometimes more or less depending on how quick the work I was doing went). I was nearly done with the room when the camera flaked out on me and quit working. Oh well, I’ll post some real pictures of the room with everything else in it later. Here is the final video:

QT Update – A fix for AE?

// February 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // Technology, Video

I hope this helps. I’ve been really annoyed by the QT DRM issues with After Effects. Enough to make me scream.

Planning Center Online

// January 24th, 2008 // No Comments » // Church, Technology

Besides the amazing teaching and inspiration at Catalyst “Reverb” this year, the best thing that came out of the trip was learning about Planning Center Online. Everyone had booths in the lobby, and I of course collected all the swag that my arms could carry. The idea of Planning Center intrigued me from the beginning. To schedule our volunteers in the Communications Ministry at CBC we had been using www.cbcmediasite.com running a wordpress blog and inserting the weekend schedule as a blog post. It was working ok, but the biggest problem was keeping track of our volunteer’s crazy schedules. We also were creating tech sheets out of a Word document template and sharing them on Google Docs. So the idea of being able to do all that we wanted and more within one web based interface was very appealing. I signed up for a free account as soon as I got back to the hotel, and by the time I was back in San Antonio I knew I had to convince Betsy that this was the way for us to go. It has been an invaluable tool to us in the Communications Ministry since that time.

After we saw what PCO was capable of I attempted to pass on the love to both the music department and the youth department, but despite my best attempts it hasn’t caught fire with either group yet. I think, however, that that is about to change. I’m having a meeting this coming Tuesday with Scott (IT guy at CBC) and the music people to discuss the advantages of PCO. Currently I get 3 different emails from the music department from 3 different people. On Mondays we get the order of service from Ray, then on Wed or Thurs Ron sends camera cues and Lorraine sends the roster for both praise team and orchestra. I really hope the meeting goes well and that I can convince them of the benefits of everything being in one place and available to everyone at all times (not to mention the ability to include pdfs and mp3s).

I would be so excited if we actually have this in place where we can all communicate together… maybe then we could actually get ahead and plan some new things for our services (gasp!).

If you work on any aspect of a church service I strongly recommend that you check out Planning Center.

Inspiration

// January 9th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Art, Photography, Technology, Video

I’ve become a pretty serious Google Reader user. As you can see below, I’ve got 90 subscriptions and I can’t keep up. That’s pretty hard for me considering my obsessive habit of trying to keep my email completely free of any unread mail. It pains me every time I look at Reader and see all of those unread feeds. I’m getting more an more used to it, but as a result of having so many feeds, I’ve been neglecting one folder I have titled “Inspiration”. The funny thing is that right now I only have 1 feed in that folder, Motionographer. Motionographer states they seek to be an inspiration to filmmakers, annimators, and designers, of which I consider myself to fall somewhere within those groups. Tonight I started weeding through some reels they linked to.

Lindsay Daniels really has a great reel that I watched probably 5 times just to take it all in. It inspires me to take some of the strobist stuff I’ve been learning for photography and to translate that care and planning in a shot into video.

I need to take more time to be inspired I think.  I spend too much time trying to create and don’t sit back and soak things in enough.

Surface Parody

// June 24th, 2007 // No Comments » // Apple, Microsoft, Technology

How far will you go to get an iPhone?

// June 10th, 2007 // No Comments » // Apple, Technology

June 29th

// June 3rd, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Apple, Technology

It’s Coming.

Stuff It

// April 30th, 2007 // 3 Comments » // Technology

Well, it looks like I’m going to be unstuffing for a while. Wake me when its done.

Mac and PC in Starbucks

// April 19th, 2007 // 4 Comments » // Life, Photography, Technology

mac and pc in starbucks, originally uploaded by enderike.

I was getting coffee in Starbucks today and saw these two guys sitting and working on their laptops. They epitomized the commercials. The guy on the left is in his long sleeve button up shirt and tie, has business looking glasses and a conservative haircut, and was working on a pc laptop. The guy on the right had on a cool polo, trendy black frame glasses and the cool messy-look haircut, and was working on a Mac Powerbook. I couldn’t resist, so I took this pic with my cell phone. It was fun trying to act stealthy and take the picture with my cell phone without anyone noticing.