Kerner.net

NAB Thoughts

I'm sitting in the Vegas airport waiting for my flight back to Springfield and pondering everything I've seen at NAB this past week. Here are my brief thoughts - some may get expanded entries later.

Technologies for Worship Conference - This conference was one of the main reasons I went to NAB this year. I've never been to an official church media event and I wanted to see if we were doing things similarly to other churches. Short answer is that Schweitzer's media is good, but is grossly underutilized (something that's been on my mind a lot before this event). The best part of this event was the hands-on sessions.

Final Cut Studio 2 - WOW! Multiformat timeline rocks, surround sound in Soundtrack looks great. This is going to be a must-have upgrade.

Adobe Media Player - I'm excited to see a desktop FLV player. This app is also an Apollo application which speaks well for that platform.

Red One - Red is going to fundamentally change the digital cinema industry. The short they were showing in the booth (shot by Peter Jackson and the WingNut team) was phenomenal. The quality of imagry from a "print" of Red footage is easily as good as film. The RedDrive/RedCode integration with Final Cut Pro is also sweet. It allows editing of raw 4k footage on the timeline. If you're wondering what that means SD video is 720 pixels wide, full HD is 1920 pixels wide, 2k is 2048 pixels wide and 4k is 4096 pixels wide. 4k footage is roughly what's used as a digital intermediate after laser scanning film. Being able to shoot and natively edit in FCP is killer - shoot, plug in the Red drive via firewire, and import to the timeline, then edit. The best part though is that this camera fully equiped is less than $40,000. Comperable cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more. 

Walter Murch - Wednesday night I went to an event that featured a keynote by Walter Murch, a legendary film editor (Apocalypse Now, GodFather Part III, The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain, Ghost). He walked us through his philosophy as an editor through the scope of his most recent project, Francis Coppola's latest film Youth Without Youth.  This was a very insightful presentation. It's going to prompt me to make some shifts in the way we handle some of our video editing workflow at the church.

Final Thoughts - This was a great event. Lots of gear to review, met some very interesting people, and got a great perspective on the state of video gear for the coming year. I've been feeling a pull to produce a short again (I worked on two in college). I'm not sure how it will work in the scope of all other areas, but I think I'm going to start writing a short to shoot later this year.

 

 

 

Schweitzer Web Update Launched

Earlier this week we launched the updated Schweitzer web site. There are some substantial design updates and major infrastructure changes - switching to the Web Empowered Church platform, which is powered by Typo3. We still have some content to migrate, so this is basically a soft launch (the only announcement is on this blog). We hit some technical snags that delayed the launch by about two weeks and during that time we neglected the previous site - thinking "Oh, we'll be launching the new one tomorrow." The update task list had gotten so long that it made more sense to launch the new site and move content rather than update the old site.

Remaining items for the next week or so:

• Sermon information - I'm struggling with getting a template that looks good with the SMS.
• Staff bios - several people turned these in hand written, and I wasn't in the mood to spend time typing before the site was launched.
• Better blog tools - right now the pastors' blog is powered out of Typo3, but it will be moving to Movable Type and imported via RSS - see the youth section for an example. I'd much rather train our pastors to use MT than Typo3 - our Youth Pastor already has it down.
• Servant Connector - We're right now updating our master opportunity list. Once that is complete the web team will get the core list imported and leave it to staff to add new opportunities.

Long range we're expanding the web ministry to include a software ministry. I'm lucky to have several people on my team that are professional software developers who are into the vision of building/providing tools for WEC. Here are just a few of the ideas we've kicked around: lyric management system for ProPresenter, volunteer scheduling, worship planning tools, etc. The first project I want to work on is a tool to read/render remote calendar data. We use EMS for all of our room scheduling and main calendar functionality. It has an ODBC interface, so I'm hoping it will be possible to get data from it into Typo3 without too much difficulty.

Now to Good Friday stuff then Easter...