As a self-employed consultant there are the occasional days (or weeks, if I'm honest) when the phone doesn't ring or the e-mail doesn't arrive. When you have no clients to service, the temptation is to think 'woe is me' and do nothing.
Each time this has happened, I've focused on ramping up my marketing. This might be as simple as going back through my business e-mails for the past few months and see if I've missed an opportunity or need to follow up on an enquiry. It might mean writing another of my regular newsletters or looking at what needs to be updated on my web site.
Each time I have done this it has produced new business. So whilst it's not the natural thing to do when business is quiet, so far I've proved that it works.
Why not give it a go?
Thursday, January 3, 2013
The right tools for the job
It's ideal for road building making short work of the scrub and even trees that get in the way. The cab is air-conditioned and there's a CD player and CB radio installed as well.
It's true to say that the D5 is a big boy's toy but one that's very useful for road making.
Got me thinking about the importance of selecting the right tools for the job. The D5 would be no good for a garden path or even for landscaping in the backyard.
How often do we stop and think about the tools needed for the job at hand? Selecting the right one will give you the best start for whatever you're doing.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Lessons from history ...
It's amazing how ignorant you can be about your own country's history. I have just finished reading Peter Fitzsimons book 'Eureka - The Unfinished Revolution'. It's the story of the massacre by government forces of the diggers on the gold fields of Ballarat on the morning of Sunday, December 3rd, 1854. The diggers had agitated long and hard for the gold licensing laws to be repealed. The government at the time was concerned that the new colony might go the way of America and that there would be a revolution against the Queen.
The court cases following the attack, at which all the accused diggers were acquired of treason led to the downfall of Sir Charles Hotham, the governor of the state of Victoria.
Ultimately all the changes the diggers had agitated for became law with a number of the leaders of the revolt ending up on parliament.
It's a great yarn and although I knew of the Eureka Stockade as an event in history, I had no understanding of the reasons behind it and how the diggers ultimately triumphed.
Well worth a read.
The court cases following the attack, at which all the accused diggers were acquired of treason led to the downfall of Sir Charles Hotham, the governor of the state of Victoria.
Ultimately all the changes the diggers had agitated for became law with a number of the leaders of the revolt ending up on parliament.
It's a great yarn and although I knew of the Eureka Stockade as an event in history, I had no understanding of the reasons behind it and how the diggers ultimately triumphed.
Well worth a read.
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
Sharing our feelings?
Welcome to the start of New Year. My resolution is to write something meaningful each day on this blog. Not sure it will be world shattering, but if it gives you pause to think, then I'll be happy.
With our local church about to send off a team to Cambodia, I've been reading "The Road of Lost Innocence", by Somaly Man.
Somaly was left orphaned during the Pol Pot era in Cambodia and sold into the sex slave industry.
I'm yet to finish the book, but one thing she highlights as she was cared for by a variety of family and non-family members is that Cambodian society taught you never to share your feelings.
With anyone. If you shared your feelings, this made you vulnerable to attack and abuse. In the Pol Pot era, keeping silent about what you had seen or heard was your best defence.
Its true of course - keeping quiet does 'protect' you, but what a diminished life that would lead to.
One of the biggest problems today in the Cambodian Church is that people still do not trust each other.
This year - find someone you can trust to share your life and thoughts with.
With our local church about to send off a team to Cambodia, I've been reading "The Road of Lost Innocence", by Somaly Man.
Somaly was left orphaned during the Pol Pot era in Cambodia and sold into the sex slave industry.
I'm yet to finish the book, but one thing she highlights as she was cared for by a variety of family and non-family members is that Cambodian society taught you never to share your feelings.
With anyone. If you shared your feelings, this made you vulnerable to attack and abuse. In the Pol Pot era, keeping silent about what you had seen or heard was your best defence.
Its true of course - keeping quiet does 'protect' you, but what a diminished life that would lead to.
One of the biggest problems today in the Cambodian Church is that people still do not trust each other.
This year - find someone you can trust to share your life and thoughts with.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Videoing your church service - yes or no?
I attend a suburban Baptist church in Sydney. We have three Sunday services with an average of 600 people worshipping with us.
Our building is just over two years old and is equipped with a good digital sound and lighting system. Even before we moved into our new building, we audio recorded every service and these are available as an mp3 download from our web site, generally within 30 mins of each service ending.
I'm one of the people who volunteer to run our AV systems each Sunday and professionally I have worked in the Radio, TV and Film industry since 1972.
We have just started discussing whether we should video record our services and make them available on our web site using a Vimeo or Youtube embedded file. We always have video on our web site - generally its promoting an upcoming event or its an interview with a recent featured speaker, such as Kate Bracks, but so far we have resisted the move to video-ing our services and putting them on-line every week.
Audio vs Video
Audio recording any church service these days is pretty straight forward - especially if you just want to record the sermon. You can take a split from the FOH sound system and record it digitally on a computer or digital recorder. At the end of the service, its usually just a matter of cleaning up the top and tail, maybe applying some compression and then converting it to the mp3 format. Uploading it to the web is again a fairly quick process.
Once loaded, it's accessible from anywhere in the world.
Video
Video however is another process all together. Unlike the audio process, we don't use video cameras as a normal part of our services. So we would have to bring one (or more) in and set it up somewhere fairly unobtrusive. Generally this means at the rear of the auditorium which means we are limited to a front on shot of the preacher, generally in mid-shot. At the end of the service, the process of getting the recorded video ready for upload to the web is nowhere near as quick and simple as it is for audio. (Unless of course you have some H.264 compression hardware, which doesn't come cheap)
Generally the video file has to be loaded into video editing software, minor corrections made to colour balance and maybe exposure with the finished 'edit' then exported into the H.264 format ready for upload to Vimeo or Youtube. Bear in mind this is footage from a single camera, shot in a continuous take. The upload can take a couple of hours for a 30 minute sermon at reasonable quality. This almost 20 times longer than it takes with an audio file.
The question I have been asking myself is; would the extra time and equipment involved in shooting our sermons with a single camera and uploading it to the web, add 20 times the value compared to someone just listening to the audio on a podcast?
Multicam?
The problem of course with shooting a service with a single camera is that visually, its boring. Using two, three or four cameras will obviously produce a far better finished product, but the additional equipment, operators and probable post-production time involved would blow that 20 times figure out to 200 times, if not more.
Sure, it would look great but again, would the extra time and dollars involved give a person watching it, 200 times more value than the podcast?
For our church and our services, I don't think it would.
Plus, when you're relying on volunteers to look after lighting, sound and AV every Sunday, finding another five to ten people every service to do a multi-cam video is a pretty big ask.
One of our problems of course is that we all watch quality television every night and therefore we have come to expect similar quality in web videos. Even on cable TV, any church services we watch (generally from the US) are all produced with top of the range equipment and crews which are not even remotely possible for our church in suburban Sydney.
Audience
The other question is how do we judge if it is worth it? I'm sure that if we did provide single camera coverage of our sermons every week we would get people to watch the videos. But how many viewers makes the process worth doing? And how do we measure what additional value the visual aspect brings to the viewer, compared to just an audio podcast? Unless there is some quantifiable real value in the work and time involved, is it worth it?
Others are doing it …
It's easy to fall into the trap of saying, "well, other churches of a similar size to us are doing, so why don't we?" But committing the necessary resources just to keep up with what other churches are doing is not really good strategy.
What do you think? How do you judge if it is worthwhile?
Our building is just over two years old and is equipped with a good digital sound and lighting system. Even before we moved into our new building, we audio recorded every service and these are available as an mp3 download from our web site, generally within 30 mins of each service ending.
I'm one of the people who volunteer to run our AV systems each Sunday and professionally I have worked in the Radio, TV and Film industry since 1972.
We have just started discussing whether we should video record our services and make them available on our web site using a Vimeo or Youtube embedded file. We always have video on our web site - generally its promoting an upcoming event or its an interview with a recent featured speaker, such as Kate Bracks, but so far we have resisted the move to video-ing our services and putting them on-line every week.
Audio vs Video
Audio recording any church service these days is pretty straight forward - especially if you just want to record the sermon. You can take a split from the FOH sound system and record it digitally on a computer or digital recorder. At the end of the service, its usually just a matter of cleaning up the top and tail, maybe applying some compression and then converting it to the mp3 format. Uploading it to the web is again a fairly quick process.
Once loaded, it's accessible from anywhere in the world.
Video
Video however is another process all together. Unlike the audio process, we don't use video cameras as a normal part of our services. So we would have to bring one (or more) in and set it up somewhere fairly unobtrusive. Generally this means at the rear of the auditorium which means we are limited to a front on shot of the preacher, generally in mid-shot. At the end of the service, the process of getting the recorded video ready for upload to the web is nowhere near as quick and simple as it is for audio. (Unless of course you have some H.264 compression hardware, which doesn't come cheap)
Generally the video file has to be loaded into video editing software, minor corrections made to colour balance and maybe exposure with the finished 'edit' then exported into the H.264 format ready for upload to Vimeo or Youtube. Bear in mind this is footage from a single camera, shot in a continuous take. The upload can take a couple of hours for a 30 minute sermon at reasonable quality. This almost 20 times longer than it takes with an audio file.
The question I have been asking myself is; would the extra time and equipment involved in shooting our sermons with a single camera and uploading it to the web, add 20 times the value compared to someone just listening to the audio on a podcast?
Multicam?
The problem of course with shooting a service with a single camera is that visually, its boring. Using two, three or four cameras will obviously produce a far better finished product, but the additional equipment, operators and probable post-production time involved would blow that 20 times figure out to 200 times, if not more.
Sure, it would look great but again, would the extra time and dollars involved give a person watching it, 200 times more value than the podcast?
For our church and our services, I don't think it would.
Plus, when you're relying on volunteers to look after lighting, sound and AV every Sunday, finding another five to ten people every service to do a multi-cam video is a pretty big ask.
One of our problems of course is that we all watch quality television every night and therefore we have come to expect similar quality in web videos. Even on cable TV, any church services we watch (generally from the US) are all produced with top of the range equipment and crews which are not even remotely possible for our church in suburban Sydney.
Audience
The other question is how do we judge if it is worth it? I'm sure that if we did provide single camera coverage of our sermons every week we would get people to watch the videos. But how many viewers makes the process worth doing? And how do we measure what additional value the visual aspect brings to the viewer, compared to just an audio podcast? Unless there is some quantifiable real value in the work and time involved, is it worth it?
Others are doing it …
It's easy to fall into the trap of saying, "well, other churches of a similar size to us are doing, so why don't we?" But committing the necessary resources just to keep up with what other churches are doing is not really good strategy.
What do you think? How do you judge if it is worthwhile?
Friday, April 13, 2012
iPhone external mic connection - solved!
The attached image is a triumph of sorts as it shows the solution to a problem that has been driving me nuts the whole week.I wanted to connect an external, professional mic to an iPhone 4 (running iOS 5.1). Research showed me that the iPhone needed an external mic to have an impedance of at least 800 ohms or else it wouldn't switch over from the internal mic.
So I bought a cable on line from Sescom, via B&H. It arrived but wouldn't work. I was using a pro Sennheiser mic, but my iPhone just wouldn't switch over from the internal to the external.
I even pulled the XLR connector apart to see if it had the right impedance
matching circuit in it, which it did. The strange thing was that the mic and cable worked fine into my iPad.The solution is to insulate the base of the TRRS connector from touching the iPhone case. (The screwdriver is pointing to the offending part). Once this was done - Bingo! Worked fine. I now need to refine the solution and I have told the nice guys at Sescom how to do it. A small neoprene washer should do the trick. The supplied TRRS plug on the connecting cable is different from the ones A
pple supply, in that the Apple ones don't extend the sleeve connection to the base of the plug.This base (screwdriver blade in pic (L) indicates the offending area) comes into contact with the metal case/antenna that is around the iPhone. In effect it's then a connection between the 'sleeve' of the plug and the case. This obviously causes the audio circuits to malfunction and not switch over to this external input.
Nice to have worked it out.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Nostalgic for the analogue age
Like almost everyone working in the field of sound recording, video production and graphic design I use a computer. I often marvel that what once took a room full of one inch video tape machines, a rack filled with character generators and then another room with a 24-track audio recorder, can now all be done on a 13 inch laptop. And all in high definition with surround sound.But visiting Old Parliament House this week I walked through the former press office and became somewhat nostalgic for the analogue days of audio recording.
The Cuemaster cart machine (pictured) was the only way of playing multiple
audio tracks one after the other in radio. The Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder was used to record sync audio for interviews, documentaries - even feature films.Whilst the digital world provides wonderful versatility, nothing like using a blade and splicing tape to edit radio interviews to help you get a reel feel for the medium.
Ahh - memories ....
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