Having @SwitchingGranny in the house for Brief 602 was fitting. She tries new things and on 602 we did too!

Canon 5D Mark II + Panasonic HVX200a

The new version of Final Cut Pro is supposed to handle working from different file formats in the same timeline better than before. It probably does, but not with the settings I used. I used the 5D Mark II for wide shots and the HVX200a for close-ups. Working with natural light, the Canon almost always gives me beautiful images. So far I haven’t gotten acceptable results using studio lighting. On Brief 602, you can see on the wide shots that Martha and Cali are blown out in places and they both look great on the close ups. I’m going to need to practice with shooting and lighting with the 5D Mark II to find the sweet spot.

Final Cut Pro and File Types
The 5D Mark II gives me a 1080p Quicktime movie using H.264 compress. The HVX200a is set to give me a 1080i movie and in this case I had it set for 24p. I dragged the 5D Mark II footage into the timeline first and let Final Cut match the settings to that video. I added the footage from the HVX200a and cut between close ups and wide shots. Every cut required rendering and that took several hours. The two videos started out in sync, but by the end, the footage from the 5D Mark II was a couple of frames behind the audio. Every adjustment required a render before I could see if the cut and sync were okay.

Before, when I mixed footage between the two cameras, I exported both files into the same format. I believe there is a way to not have to do that with this version of FCP. This wasn’t it!

Final Cut Pro and Exporting
I’m really excited about the new Share option in Final Cut Pro because we release four different formats of The Brief. Share gives us the ability to create all four version from FCP so I can potentially drop VisualHub from the workflow. However, as I’m writing this, I’m 1 hour and 17 minutes into the export and it still hasn’t completed one of the four versions. Most likely there are options I can choose to speed things up, but this is a first try and it’s disappointing. Estimated Time Remaining is nearly 12 hours!

Final Cut Studio in General
I was looking forward to Soundtrack to hear new sound effects and music beds. There aren’t a whole lot of new music beds, but the new sound effects are very good. I haven’t had enough time to actually use Soundtrack yet, but I’m very happy to have all the new sounds.

I was also looking forward to a boatload of Motion templates. There are a few, but there are many, many new assets and behaviors. I’ll spend a whole weekend playing around in Motion. I’m not sure about this but it seems like a lot of what I’ve always done in LiveType might be built into Motion now.

My first time out with the new Final Cut Studio wasn’t exactly a success. It took 10 hours to do what would normally take me 2 hours. I almost always blame the user (me) when there are problems, and I’m sure that’s the case here. This week I’ll play around and adjust settings and I’ll follow up this post with more after I’ve found solutions to my initial problems.

WordCamp Dallas last year was a major moment in the history of GeekBrief.TV. It was one of the first times we were able to actually break a tech story, instead of just reporting on it. That story was Woopra.

I’m honored to be invited back to speak at this year’s WordCamp, and I would love to see you there! The event takes place Saturday, June 27th and Sunday the 28th. You can either come for some of it or all of it, whatever works for you. There will be great information shared and awesome people! Of course, Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, will be speaking. John P, CEO of Woopra will be speaking as well. He’ll have some invite codes for those of you who still waiting to get in the beta, exclusive to those attending WordCamp Dallas. Lorelle Van Fossen, Giovanni Gallucci, Liz Strauss and Jonathan Bailey are some of the other speakers. Like I said, great information and awesome people!

They’re looking for some help to organize the event, so if you have the heart and the time, they would appreciate it! They’re looking for help with these things:

Organizing speakers
Designing WordCamp Badges
T-shirt Designs
Sponsors
Giveaways

If you want to offer your help in one of the above ways, or in any other ways you can think of, contact them here.

Date: June 27th & 28th
Time: 9:30 AM to 5:00 PM
Where: University of Texas at Dallas
800 West Campbell Road
Richardson, TX 75080
Cost: $30 (you get a tshirt and lunch both days)

Register for WordCamp Dallas (There are a limited number of spots available. It’s currently about 1/3 full, so get your spot soon.)

See you there!

9to5mac.com found a nice little pricey prize at Buy.com. They’re selling an unlocked 3G 16GB iPhone with a full Apple Warranty for $799.99. It can be used with any GSM carrier in the world, and since the phone isn’t jailbroken, it can be updated via iTunes.

If you’ve been waiting for an unlocked, blessed-by-Cupertino iPhone here is the link to get one.

9to5mac.com speculates that Apple is clearing inventory to prep for the next generation iPhone.

Our friends at Drobo have given us three Drobos to give away. Over the next few months, we’ll be announcing contests on Geek Brief and/or Twitter. We’re ready to give away the first one now!

On Brief 534, when I introduced Greg, I flailed about a bit. It’s hilarious to watch, but I was actually doing something on purpose.

The first comment below (no email entries, please!) to guess the significance of my body language, will win the first Drobo. The winning entry will have a particular keyword, so it’s possible to guess what I’m doing, but the winning entry has to be the first comment that includes the key word. Please only enter if you’ve never won another one of our contests. Thanks!

**Please note: Sometimes comments take a while to post, so unless you get an error, no need to repost the comment. They will still come through in the right chronological order.

Click here to Watch Brief 534

UPDATE: We have a winner! Joe Phelps guessed:

My intention was to give the cut sign so we could insert the show open, but Greg took it away, so I stopped mid-cut. Joe, please send me your address and I’ll have the Drobo sent to you!

I submitted an application to The Best Job in the World a couple weeks ago. People kept telling me I should, and at the last minute, I decided to give it a go. Tourism Queensland is doing a marketing contest to get someone to blog and create videos from The Great Barrier Reef for six months.

1) I was interested in the competition
2) I love shooting Geek Brief in front of nature
3) Geek Brief friends in Australia keep asking for a meetup, and if I win, I wouldn’t have to pay for a plane ticket! ;)

Out of 35,000+ applications, I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of 50 shortlist applicants! Here’s the deal:

Starting today (March 2nd) I need your help to vote for me in the competition. In about a month, they will narrow down the applicants to 11 people, who will then go out to Australia for interviewing. If I have the highest number of votes on the website, I’m guaranteed to be in the 11 Final Candidates.

If you’re reading this, chances are you know about my dream for The Big Trip. The economy said no to that for now, but I’m hoping I can have one over-the-top adventure before I have a child. Like I said on the entry video, I already feel like I have the best job in the world, thanks to Mevio. I would LOVE to do GeekBrief.TV in a beautiful, natural environment for 6 months and share the whole experience with a couple hundred thousand friends! I just want to say thanks to all of you who vote, and thanks times 30 to everyone who votes every day for the next month!

We have a contest winner! Actually, we have five since there were too many good ones. Thanks to everyone who entered!

Our Grand Prize Winner is Moxie Mo. He’ll receive the Bag O’ Schwag from Brief 514.

I may be moxie, but I still need this wonderful bag of schwag. It’s my birthday on the 21st too.

So here’s my poem:
Geekbrief oh Geekbrief, the best show, my muse,
Without my Geekbrief, my moxieness would lose
Although Cali is loved by all, she’s surely taken,
And we all know how crazy she is for some bacon.

You always give me shiny and happy tech talk
That gives me the confidence to walk the walk
Robots and lasers and Apple oh my!
Whenever I watch you, I feel I’m THE guy!

Neal’s lucky to have you, Cali, it’s very true
And lets all face it, we’d be devastated without you.
You’ve made my Moxie Mo Show a true success
And without the Geekbrief, I’d be lost in a mess.

So in closing, I’m saying, Geekbrief is the best
With all the podcasts, it stands outside the rest
May the Moxie Mo get your bag of schwag,
And if not, that’s okay, you shiny happy hag.

HAAHAHHA!

The second prize winner is Mike Dowden. He’ll receive a second bag of schwag that we pulled together from our gadget closet.

I need to give most of this schwag to my wife. Since GB200, when early on I forced her to watch GB before we fired up some other TiVo show, she has slowly begun to learn a lot more about Tech with each GB show.

But I didn’t realize how much she really paid attention until a couple of weeks ago when we were at the grocery store and she asked the cashier if she could use GB1, GB2, or GB3.

I looked at her a little puzzled (as did the cashier) and she said, “Cali says to use one of those codes at checkout. I wanted to see if they worked.”

I’ll have to show her the Go Daddy site :)

Our third winner is Brett Nordstrom. He’ll receive an EWOO eFizz Travel. It’s one of our favorite travel docks.

3 Reasons –

1. I married my high school sweetheart who is not into technology even a little bit. I have been watching you for about a year and I make her watch. She says and I quote, “Nothing good can come of you watching someone so cute that likes technology as much as you do.” Of course she is very tongue and cheek with the jealousy play. She is 34 and I am 35 and we have been married for 15 years (still madly in love) and I am almost never right. This would make me right for once!
2. We are taking our 6 and 10 year olds to Disney World for the first time on March 15th and I really, really, really would like a hi-def camcorder.
3. I hate to play more of the sympathy card but my Birthday is February 25th and my wife is making me choose between a Kindle and a new camcorder. Can you believe it, choose between hi-definition memories of our children or my continuing literary education. You must be weeping.

ZeroCool wins my pre-production Chumby prototype.

//roses are red
string roses = #ff0000;
//violets are blue
string violets = #0000ff;
//Calis Bag belong to you, or me ;)
File f=new File(CalisBag);
String cmd[]={”chmod”,”777″,f.getAbsolutePath()};
Process p=Runtime.getRuntime().exec(cmd);
p.waitFor();

Congratulations to all the winners! Please send me an email with your real names and addresses!

I just experienced what may be the most promising complementary service to Twitter since TweetDeck.

It happened accidentally. Neal was checking out a Web app called tinychat because The Red Ferret Journal recommended it. When you go to tinychat.com, you get a simple screen with a Click to Create Your Chatroom button. Neal clicked it and got a link to his chatroom. He sent me the link via iChat and then he clicked the Enter Chat Room button. It gave him the option of entering a Nickname or signing in with twitter. He clicked the sign-in with twitter and thought better of that option. He didn’t want to enter his twitter account information, but since there wasn’t an option to go back, he went ahead and signed in using his Twitter account. I joined him in the chat room and then other people starting showing up too. As they changed their nicknames they were names we knew so it was obvious that tinychat had tweeted the link to the chat. That would be annoying except that it’s optional. If he hadn’t signed in using his Twitter account it wouldn’t have tweeted. It would just be a private chat.

That tie-in to Twitter is what makes tinychat more than just another chatroom client because it makes it extremely simple to make a dynamic conversation happening on Twitter even more dynamic. Imagine, you’re watching The Big Bang on a Monday night. Sheldon says something particularly brilliant and so you tweet it. Your Twitter friends ping you back to tell you they’re watching too. You can have a conversation on Twitter that’s just fine, thank you very much, OR you can step it up a notch by moving the conversation to tinychat. People who want to chat about Sheldon, can join in. People who don’t can skip it.

Tinychat looks just like any other chatroom you’ve ever been in, but it’s ease of use in combination with Twitter that makes me think I’ll use this pretty often. It’s browser based and the twenty or so people that joined us during our test who were using Safari seemed to have the best experience. It also worked great for chatters on iPhones. The chat stalled out for almost everyone in the room at least once in the thirty minutes we used it. A page refresh brought them back in. Our participants wished for the ability to expand the chat window and the ability to moderate the room if any mean people need to be kicked.

Chats are disposable, unless you save a copy. When everyone navigates away from the page, it goes away for good.

The chatroom consensus was that the bugs we experienced were easy to overlook because the service is new and TinyChat + twitter will create better, more exciting conversations.

UPDATE: We tried the chat out for about 45 minutes and all was great! Having no moderator capabilities though is a killer. Once one person decides to crash the party (especially once they know they can’t be kicked), it’s a terrible experience for everyone. They have to come up with a solution for it to really be a valuable tool.

I’ll be live blogging the premiere of Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse. Check back here at 9:00 PM Eastern time. After the show ends, I’ll go live on Ustream so we can all chat about the show.

The transition from analog to digital TV has been postponed from it’s original date, February 17. When it happens, it not only affects TV reception. It also matters to churches, businesses, schools and individuals who use wireless microphones and other wireless audio equipment.

A lot of of wireless equipment operates between the frequencies of 698 to 806MHz. After the digital transition, in some cases it will be illegal to use those devices like you’ve been using them for years. They’ll continue to work, and over time, they’ll be subject to interference from new devices using the old frequencies. If you’re going to continue to use one or more wireless mics operating in the 698 to 806MHz range, you may have to register that use with an FCC database.

Both Shure and Sennheiser are offering trade-in plans to help you transition to equipment that is safe and legal. It doesn’t seem to be quite as scary for those of us using Lectrosonics Mics.

It’s complicated and here are some links that might help you navigate the change:

White Spaces Explained
Audio-Technica White Spaces Fact Sheet (PDF)
Shure – “The Truth About Wireless Microphone Technology” (PDF)
Lectrosonics – “The Sky is Not Falling”

Flash is the most popular format for viewing video on the Web. The iPhone has the best browser that can be found on a phone. The iPhone runs OSX. Apple and Adobe traditionally have had a good collaborative relationship, so why is it that we don’t have Flash or Flash Lite on iPhones? It turns out that it’s because it’s hard to do right.

Bloomberg TV interviewed Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen and got the scoop. Narayen said, “It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating.” Contrary to speculation, Adobe isn’t waiting on App Store approval. Instead, they’re working closely with Apple to develop a third version of Flash that is both feature rich and light enough to not choke the iPhone’s processor.

If you’ve been following my tweets today, you’ll have noticed a couple of odd things. For example:

http://twitter.com/CaliLewis/status/1127059000

and

http://twitter.com/CaliLewis/status/1127474406

First person to guess what happened with these two posts, will get a nifty little gadget from my Gadget Bag. Comment away…