Social media maven...

..or at least I'd like to be!

I've been told many times that I should make more use of FaceBook and YouTube. 

I've been on FaceBook for ages but it's not been a smooth ride. I think I've fallen into a bit of a trap of mixing business and pleasure in my personal FaceBook account. I did start a "ScreenCastsOnline Group" a while ago, but I've not really kept up with it.

FaceBook have introduced "Pages" to address some of the issues for companies and businesses to promote and communicate on FaceBook. This seems to be the logical way of both promoting and communicating about ScreenCastsOnline within FaceBook.

So this evening, I put together a "ScreenCastsOnline FaceBook Fan Page" and sent a call out via Twitter to see what could be done with it. At the time of writing, I've had 115 people sign up - all within the space of a couple of hours - amazing!

In that time I've linked the page to my ScreenCastsOnline Twitter account and added a "Fan Page" panel to the sidebar bar of this blog.

So I'll try and start to use the page for any ScreenCastsOnline related news and keep my personal Twitter account for… well just the daily stuff that I incessantly tweet about. We'll have to see how it goes but feel free to go over and sign up if you're a FaceBook user.

As far as the YouTube account is concerned, I was a bit perturbed that someone had already setup a ScreenCastsOnline channel. Oh dear.

The good news was that it was unused and hadn't been updated for months and had zero content. I quick email to YouTube would get me control back! Well, if I could find away to contact YouTube that is. No way could I find a contact address or a form to fill in.

Following some Twitter advice, I sent a message to the person who had setup the account. 

Within 30 minutes I received a tweet from the guy who was more than willing to hand over the account to me. 60 minutes later and I had the username and password (since changed as he was gracious enough to remind me) and I started to look at how the YouTube channels worked. There's nothing up there for now but I have some plans and I'll let you know when (if?) it's worth subscribing.

This Social Media lark is a full time job!

Compressor woes...

Well, I will have to keep it short today!

I can't believe I've been doing video and screencasts for over 4 years and I'm still fighting Compressor most weeks. Compressor is the application within Final Cut Studio that encodes video as the final stage before distribution. It "compresses" the huge master video files I create in FCS, usually many gigabytes in size, down to a manageable hundred megabytes or so. 

Encoding is one of the most CPU intensive computing tasks and benefits from as much horsepower as you can throw at it. As an application, Compressor has lots of whistles and bells and even has distributed processing built in. This allows you to use additional machines on your network to share the encoding tasks, speeding up the process significantly.

At least, in theory that is what it's supposed to do. 

It can work for a couple of weeks and then just stop working properly.  The worst part is that there doesn't seem to be a known set of actions you can go through to make it start working again. I'm afraid it tends to be "waving the rubber chicken time" to get things working again.

The problem has been exacerbated recently by some really strange quirks I've been trying to work around, due to the final encoded videos being handled differently by QuickTime X and QuickTime 7. The exact same file in displayed slightly differently in each application, with the version in Quicktime X (and iTunes) being cropped by a few pixels, loosing part of the menu bar. The same file viewed in Quicktime 7 is perfect - Noooo!!!

So here I am on a Friday morning, publication day, having to try and coax six videos through the encoding process. I started early Thursday afternoon not expecting any major issues, but still haven't cracked it.

It may well be my fault in that I use the production Mac Pro as a standard desktop machine. I should really "ring fence" the machine and just use it as an editing and encoding machine. 

Perhaps that's what I'll do, rebuild the Mac Pro from scratch and just install Final Cut Studio on that machine, using my MacBook Pro as my day to day machine. Perhaps I should apply some rigorous change management on the Mac Pro and keep it one build behind the latest and greatest patches and updates, backing up before an install and testing before acceptance. After all, I was a fully qualified ITIL Service Manager in my previous life!

Anyhow, I'll have to do something as this is bonkers! 

Update on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 1:57PM by Don McAllister

Following this post, @themacdaddy sent me a link on Twitter to "Compressor Repair" - A free utility that checks out a few settings on Compressor and attempts to repair them if necessary. Thanks Phillip

Magic Mouse Musings...

Typical, I start off my new daily bog posting regime and state that I'm not going to do long essays and look what happens!

So I'll keep this one brief.

I used to be a big fan of the Mighty Mouse, except for the constant jamming up of the ball and those ridiculous buttons on the side. What a strange place to put buttons? I switched them off after a days use. However, after seeing rave reviews for the Logitech MX Revolution mouse, I decided to jump ship and go with a non Apple mouse.

I've been using the Logitech MX Revolution for quite a while and I've been very pleased with it. It's sculptured to fit the hand, has a brilliant "weighted" scroll wheel and is bristling with buttons. I particularly liked the scroll wheel as it enabled you to move quickly through a long document just by spinning the wheel. It also has a tilt function which I used extensively when scrolling horizontal timelines, especially in Final Cut Pro. Even so, although the tilting scroll wheel my extremely useful, it was the most awkward part of the MX in use, as it seemed to require a considerable amount of effort.  Confession time - I hardly used any of the buttons. I set them up several times and each time I'f forget what I'd set up. I did use the middle mouse button occasionally when I remembered I'd setup up Deja Menu.

Even without taking advantage of all the buttons, I was pretty happy with the MX, probably my best mouse to date.

Then along came the Magic Mouse with it's sleek lines and multitouch. As a service to my viewers and readers, I was duty bound to get one!

After reading about its capabilities, I was a little concerned at how well I'd be able to get by without the "weighted" scroll wheel and the much needed tilt function. The absence of extra buttons wasn't really a deal breaker for me as you might imagine.

As soon as the new iMacs were available, I nipped into my local Apple store and tried one out.

Amazing!

The scrolling via touch is effortless and very smooth. What's even better, is that you can set up scrolling with momentum that mimics exactly the behaviour of the "weighted" scroll wheel of my MX. It's almost like Apple went out and examined the features of the best mouse on the market and emulated it via multitouch :-)

Both vertical and horizontal scrolling are supported, in fact full 360 scrolling is available.

Unfortunately, the Magic Mouse was not on sale at this time but as soon as it was, I returned and bought one. The acid test was using it with Final Cut Pro and how well it enabled scrolling when navigating the horizontal timeline.

Well, I have to say, it works a treat!

Much, much better than horizontal scrolling with the MX. The timeline flies left and right with a feather touch on the surface of the Magic Mouse. Superb! After a weeks use, there is no danger of me returning to the MX

Some other points of note:

• The two finger swipe works but I don't really use it that much, don't really need it.
• Scrolling can be one or two finger - useful if your swapping between a laptop and desktop.
• The travel and noise of the mouse click buttons is a bit excessive at first but you soon get used to it.
• The absence of extra buttons really hasn't been a problem for me. I use a combination of the new Expose in the Dock feature of Snow Leopard a lot and have just set up some hot corners. No big deal.
• The low profile of the mouse seems to match the Alu keyboard exceptionally well. I was a bit concerned about the low profile of the mouse after the sculptured feel of the MX but in use it's been fine.
• Seen a few posts about battery life. After full week of constant use - baring in mind I'm a heavy full time Mac user - my mouse is showing 79% battery life.

On reflection, the Magic Mouse has been a pleasure to use. I'm still in awe of just how well the touch surface feels and operates. 

Well recommended!

PS OK, so I'll keep the next blog post brief...sheesh!

KA in Vegas...

OK, something completely unconnected with memberships, renewals and ScreenCastsOnline!

1st Disclaimer - Whilst I was over in Las Vegas for the BlogWorld and New Media Expo, I was delighted to receive some complimentary tickets for one of the Cirque Du Soleil shows. These were being offered to various bloggers free gratis in exchange for a quick write up or mention on their blog.

I sort of wondered if I should take up the offer but in all honesty, I was going to buy a ticket for one of the shows regardless and no doubt, I would have written something up anyway, so I accepted their gracious offer and saved my self some cash!

2nd Disclaimer - I'm a huge Cirque Du Soleil fan.

My 1st Cirque show was at La Nouba at Walt Disney World Resort at Florida, many years ago. I was blown away, not only by the artistry of the performers but by the technology - Wow! I'd never been to a purpose built venue before and the impact was stunning. That show certainly set the bar high.

Last year, I paid to take the family to "Love" - The Beatles themed show at the Mirage in Las Vegas. The show had a special meaning to me being a Liverpool lad, but I wasn't expecting to see the technology on the same scale as La Nouba as after all, this was in a hotel, not a specially designed theatre.

Boy was I wrong! Absolutely amazing!

My good friend Victor Cajiao of the Typical Mac User and Typical Shutterbug podcast was lucky enough to score some tickets for "Love" this year, but he was also lucky enough to get a backstage tour as well.  Victor has created a fantastic Photo-Audio presentation of his backstage tour - well worth checking out.

So this year, I got tickets to see KA at the MGM Grand. Again, although it a hotel (mind you, can you call Vegas hotels, hotels? More like resorts!) the theatre looks to have been purpose built. It's difficult not to give too much away, but aside from the skills and talents of the obviously world class performers, the true star of the production for me is the stage itself. If you have any appreciation for engineering and large structures, this is the show to see.

I could hardly believe my eyes at the staging of this production. Phenomenal!  I can only imagine that the void that contains the stage must extend to at least 150ft below the auditorium. The sheer mechanics of moving the amount of hardware around to such extremes and with such smoothness and precision is truly mind boggling!

I don't want to detract from the artistery and skills of the obviously world class performers, but the geek in me just marvelled at the technology of it all! Speaking of the performers, how on earth they manage to do that performance for two shows a night is beyond me.

So as you might expect, KA gets a big thumbs up from me, but if you've ever seen a Cirque Du Soleil show before, you'll have expected that already!

Thanks to Cirque for extending this welcome to all the bloggers and podcasters at Blogworld and New Media Expo.

Just testing...

So Squarespace have now launched their new iPhone app to create and manage posts on your Squarespace website. Very nice!

Looking forward to the next version which will allow you to manage comments via the iPhone.

Sweet!