The last week has been insanely busy: all because of Scouta TV, my new video podcast.
A few weeks ago a decided to go ahead with a video podcast idea I’d had for a while. So I reached out for a co-host and some help in recording and post-producing. After a few emails, and a few messages through Twitter and Facebook, I got together with Grum and Saywood.
Last weekend I bought myself a copy of Final Cut Express, and played with it and a video camera I borrowed from Simon. It looked pretty flexible, and I felt I’d mastered enough to warrant our aim of recording the first episode on Tuesday night.
I also spent a few hours in Blender. Even though we knew we’d be a little rough around the edges, I wanted to at least have a semi-decent intro animation. I’d played with Blender about six odd years ago, and managed to remember a bunch of what I needed to, to get the job done. I also have to say it’s come a long way. I love that I can do ray-tracing in the application now. Too much fun.
It took a little while to setup the equipment on Tuesday. The main issue was audio, funnily enough. Simon’s camera was overriding our microphones, and because it didn’t have an audio line in (a must for video podcasting), it was giving us low quality audio.
We eventually swapped it out for Grum’s camera, and by about 9pm we were rolling.
Now, I never had any illusions that video production was easy. I’ve had enough experience with audio podcasts to know that I was biting off a fair chunk when we embarked on the project. But, the damn annoying thing is that a simple mistake, or omission can cost you several hours.
One major hurdle included not having enough disk space. I’d cleared up over 15GB for the effort, but that really wasn’t enough. So Thursday evening I shot out to Harvey Norman and Next Byte, and bought a new Apple Airport Express and a 1TB Western Digital USB drive. Hooked together they’ve become my wireless NAS. I offloaded everything I could to that, and now have plenty of room on my PowerBook’s internal drive to deal with everything I need.
I think I need to do some serious reading on workflow, because the whole post effort took me all of Wednesday through to most of Friday, including a couple of late nights. This’ll obviously get easier as I go, as I now know a lot more than I did a week ago, but I also figure there’s some smart ways to do the editing. I’ll do more research when I’ve rested for the next few days.
Anyway, it’s now live. Thanks to everyone that’s made great comments on the Scouta TV blog, and via Twitter.
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