Sorgatron.com

This year’s Chachi Plays for Kids moved to the welcome walls of the Toonseum, where Chachi did a marathon to raise money for the Toonseum and Father Ryan Arts Center to help arts programs for kids.

While Chachi setup his gaming along with Brother Matt, I setup the command center where I’d live for the next 24 hours.

The setup should look familiar.  It’s the same thing I used last month in our inaugural pro wrestling filmings.  The same switcher, audio mixer, and miniDV cam interfacing this all into the laptop.

The difference is that we’re using WireCast to stream out to Justin.tv instead of recording for a DVD.  The live switcher in hardware gives one less thing to go wrong, relieving the laptop of some duties.  We simply setup a graphic for the website and imploring for donations and streamed.  The Datavideo was great for doing the minimal picture in picture duties I did last year and we didn’t experience a single crash.

The setup was great for the shots on the Gameplay and Chachi too.  As you can see in the shot to the right, there was a nice couch to the setup.  Perfect for determining the mics.  Once on each end of the couch to get all of the cursing when Chachi was beating Ginny at Mario Kart.  Mics and cameras were pretty much out of the crowd’s way as
end caps to the players.  Which is nice, since there was a good crowd for Friday night of about 25 people.

Last year, we tried to stream the event.  I initially had this idea to have some content rolling as we went, but the setup was so exhausting, we were lucky to have a live camera on Chachi the entire time.  This year, the setup was a breeze.  And we had a plan.  Chachi and I came up with some questions, and we developed a bit of an exit interview, and were presented with their shirts for participating.  It was like an assembly line of awesome.  The questions were pretty basic.  Stuff about art, going 24 hours, and the game they played with Chachi.  We had some great moments from it.  Everybody had some great things to say, and it gave a great reason to still be on the feed as Chachi took his in between breaks.

It was also great to get a few volunteers in during the Tetris tournament for a little bit of play by play, including my Mayhem compatriot, DJLunchbox and Dudders.

The Surprise

It’s always something, isn’t it.  While the setup was flying, I found something…interesting.  I had the Wirecast going, and brought a spare laptop to check on the feed going out and the chat room.  Well, the video worked fine.  Then I attempted to sign into Justin.tv.  And my account was suspended?  Not exactly.  It seems, according to the wiki I was sent to, WAY at the bottom of the page, Justin.tv doesn’t like open proxies.  I didn’t inquire, but I presume it had something to do with Toonseum’s internet setup.  No problem.  Just pulled out the iPhone and loaded the app off wifi to make sure things were good!

So another year.  Things go so much better, it was an amazing experience.  We’re already looking at making it even better next year.

Keep an eye on ChachiPlays.com for videos as I cobble them together out of 24 hours, and Unsung 21 for a small feature.

Manning the switcher at RWA in West Newton

I know I’ve been a little quiet lately, and that’s because for a bit of a ramp up that’s been happening the last month.  At the beginning of the year, I had the opprutunitiy to take over video production and DVD distribution from Digital Horizons for local wrestling groups International Wrestling Cartel and Renegade Wrestling Alliance.  I’ve had the fortune to shoot ringside through the prior rigime, and owe a lot of what I’ve grown from working with Tony F and his company.  It’s also great to be working with two organizations that I have some great friends also working for in some capacity. So we recorded shows for both in the last two weeks, and a the growing pains are definitly there.  We’re doing everything we can to get up to the level of quality that Digital Horizons was delivering, and hope to take it a bit further.  But first, we have to get my tech, and Chachi behind camera, up to speed… A few things we’ve learned:

Manage your cables: One of the items of knowledge my new ringside camera protoge had to learn the wrong way was caring for the video cord.  Our first shoot we lost two of them, and no more backups, thanks to this after two matches.  Thankfully, our redundancies worked out.  I let the ringside cam record his stuff untethered the rest of the night, only to take the monotonous task of post editing later.  Ouch.  It was salvageable, but I think we could have the new guy a bit more up to speed if I could watch his shots live the rest of the night.

Prior knowledge helps.  I’ve been developing a system for producing these DVDs as swiftly as I can.  Thankfully, I’ve had some experience at my old employer filling in on vacation days for the front office and duplicating my own music CD back in 2007.  Great start, but higher volume thanks to the groups’ already existing catalogues and audience.

Communication is key:  This has been a pretty steady problem.  We had to get a new set of headsets to try to communicate from my live switching station to the camera men.  The first night, no one could adequately talk to me, mostly  the second, we lost one of the headsets to battery issues.  Thankfully, we realized we just needed some AAA’s to pick it up.  We couldn’t get the cams lined up color wise, but the shots were so much better (that, plus ringside’s time taken to critique his previous week’s work).

Attention to merchandise pays off:  Wife of the Sorg took over the merchandise booth side of our operations.  In the past, it was always sort of a neglected side of the night’s activities.  Someone not associated with the company would man the DVD table, or be unattended as we setup and do our business shooting the show.  Missy offered to take over, and I’ve let her run with it and my thoughts for it.  We started taking credit cards at the show with Square, which meant over 50% of our sales at IWC were via plastic.  How many of those sales would have been non-existant or less due to the lack of access?  We also started taking pre-orders going into the show and for the next show to make sure people got what they were looking for.  We also took orders of that same night’s show, to be sent out later that week as the DVD was completed.  There were few requests, but people were enthusiastic and it should grow as people see we continue doing these plans.  The booth looked tremendous with the last show playing back to get peoples’ attention.  Plus the advantage of putting a vendor of the fairer sex behind a booth at a wrestling show is invaluable.

I’ll miss ringside shooting, but it’s still great to be a part of it, and I truly enjoy switching.  The video guys are getting up to speed, and we can only improve.  Our first month out and our redundancy systems held (3 cameras recording to MiniDV and one record to a MacBook Pro).  If that’s as bad as it gets, it’s only up from here.  And the IWC setup at Court Time is the toughest shooting we will have all year for six total shows. So how did they turn out?  Here are teasers for our first DVD releases of 2012 from Sorgatron Media.

Every once in a while, I tend to spout my longer thoughts on my Google+.  And they make it to blog form here: 

I’m starting to see the problem with search.  I live in the Google ecosystem with Google+, Youtube, Gmail, and the rest.

In the past week, Google unveiled some new social search features that have me worried.  Maybe it’s who I follow, but I have this issue on Google+ where my feed is full of posts by social media luminaries like Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, or Leo Laporte.  They often drown out the more localized “real people” I interact with, but thanks to the new slider tools, I’m able to handle this a little more effectively.

Now with these new search features, I notice a similar effect happening.  Instead of the usual results, I see a lot with familiar faces attached, often the same names I see in my overrun Google+ feed.

While I appreciate the the social integration, I’m worried about the fishbowl effect.  If I’m constantly being fed results from within the same circles I cultivated on purpose in my social stream, this lessens my chance of stepping outside of that box.

One of the most interesting is a random search we did on Wrestling Mayhem Show for Diamond Dallas Page’s Yoga for Regular Guys.  Even before I could find the official web site, I was greeted with no less than two posts by Chris Brogan.

It’s early in the new settings, and as with everything Google, it will change as they get feedback, but still, some early flags on how I search.

As I’ve detailed on here before, we’ve been continuing to do our Google Hangouts amongst the Mayhem Crew, and inviting others to join us.  We get some people drop in, but they haven’t been the greatest.  Here’s what transpired this past week.  NOTE: if there’s a term that we talk about you don’t know, DO NOT GOOGLE IT!  Trust me:

 Of course this is mainly when we do the Public ones for wrestling shows. Google Hangout was used to great effect when I wanted to corral the Wrestling Mayhem Show regulars to touch base on how the show was going and how we can reach out. The Hangout with Extras that’s been seeping our was great to share some outlines and other documents, and including people on the phone that had issues with their connection. Fast becoming a big utility for me. I’ve considered doing more business on Hangout as we go…

This was a HUGE year.  Last  year, I was into building the groundwork for what I hoped to be a move away from unhappy and employed.  This year, things were put even further into motion, growing, and I couldn’t be happier.

Courtesy Veronica (@v_Rock)

5 Year Anniversary

5 Years of Tuesday nights.  Crazy.  We celebrated the milestone in January at the fine Sharp Edge on Penn Ave downtown Pittsburgh.  We opened with a live AwesomeCast and into the show.  We had a great group of friends and past show guests such as Joe Dombrowski, Chest Flexor, Jimmie Demarco, and Michael Facade who all braved a blizzard that kept half of our RSVPs away, sadly.  What a great way to start the year!

Hitting the Cons

The idea came up alongside Mulango of Mangtoons to get our faces out there to the people for our respective projects.  We both shared a booth for the Pittsburgh Comicon and Baltimore Comic Con.  I discovered how many wrestling fans attend these events and learned a great deal about what to do to hopefully make ourselves more visible in the future attempts at these events.

We also worked on bringing a little bit of the events’ flavor to the network.  Dan Greenwald of the fantastic Comic Book Pitt helped us out in Pittsburgh to see who to talk to about the Con and Pittsburgh independent comic book scene.  I went solo in Baltimore and talked to an illustrator for Doctor Who comics, some other podcasters, and other stuff that caught my interest.  For New York Comic Con, Chachi and I got press passes and rolled around the floor for four days talking with producers at South Park Studios, some of the minds behind the Voltron relaunch, Ubi Soft for the upcoming Shoot Many Robots, a private preview of Max Payne 3, and so much more.

So this year, we hope to do a similar circuit, bring more of a crew, better equipment, and better planning.

Some new beginnings

Theere was a lot of new stuff being pumped out this year.  We started the year with Chachi Plays for Kids, which raised about $3000 for Make Room for Kids and went on to receive a proclamation from the City of Pittsburgh.  We launched Unsung with the Pittsburgh Foundation to showcase the non-profits and charities in the area, my client in S’eclairer finally launched the Chatterbox, a roundtable podcast to talk about everything going on there, and Build a Baked Good as a vehicle to promote Cafe Solstice.

Another start, then stop, was Freelance 4 Real.  I felt that the stuff Justin Kownacki does on his blog was tremendous, and personally needed an ear to talk freelancing since I dove in head first myself.  We had a tremendous run of shows with lots of friends and acquaintances to hit different sides of the freelancing landscape.  Maybe in 2011, we’ll see a resurrection of this concept.

And of course it was the end of April that I completely cut the reigns of my day job, working solely for myself with clients.  It was a scary time, and I’m still building out my work from it.  I’m not making as much, and spend way more time, but I havent’ felt more happy with everything than I do now.

Great Guests

We had another year of talking to some great people.  We had a talk with Dave Lagana, who started a social media revolution with IWantWrestling.com, Johnny Gargano, fresh off of his trip wrestling in Japan during the devastating earthquake, started a series on wrestling comic books, the maker of the US Championship and current TNA championship, and so many many of our usual friends on Wrestling Mayhem Show.  AwesomeCast saw talks with more local start ups like NoWait and GenevaMars, more local OG media folk like Mikey, Jim Lokay, and Uncle Crappy representing radio, TV, and newspaper respectively, Cynthia Closkey shared her experience at NeXT Computers in the wake of the passing of Steve Jobs, the guys from Seattle’s Technothusiasts joined us.  Freelance 4 Real was made on the guests from social media, acting, and programming giving their take.  Chatterbox has already had a great run of experts in Pet Loss, Universal Healthcare, Yoga, Reiki, and a host of other life topics.

Some Upgrades

Chachi joined on board as my “CTO” and has been tremendous in helping make this dream a reality and sort of feel like a real business.  We upgraded some tech throughout the year, including a HD camera, a couple of video switchers, and other random gadgets to make our job easier and expand what we’re going to be able to do for clients in the next year.

Aside from the shows for clients mentioned above, we did some work for the local Democratic group, Science Journal, Digital Horizons, and of course even more work for Pennfuture.  It was a great year, and we have so many plans for growing in the new year.

I couldn’t have done a lot of this stuff without the support from people like Chachi, Rob, Mulango, my understanding wife, the Mayhem Crew, the great clients that let me deliver their message, and everyone else around that’s inspired me and helped solved problems in the last year.

There’s a good bit going on in the last several weeks where I’ve found the shape of my work in 2012 changing, and thankfully, being added onto. While two things are up in the air as of the moment, one opportunity I was happy to be a part of was PWO in Parma, OH this past week.

I had the fortune to be tapped to help out with a video production that had to be thrown together within three days. Considering, I was pleased with the results and love knowing I have another month to narrow down the bugs that came down the pipeline.

We used a datavideo se-500 I was going to buy anyways for the upcoming work next year, but was pushed to get this thing together a little bit quicker. We ran two cameras via S-Video, preserving widescreen for Sportstime Ohio’s edit of the show. Audio was a mic set out for commentary. The very same used for interviews at NYCC or during Unsung. Ambient noise was intended to be an old Canon miniDV cam mixed real time thanks to the se-500′s mini-mixer built in. All pushed via S-Video at another higher end, but still consumer, Sony MiniDV cam I use to interface the Wrestling Mayhem Show and AwesomeCast cams to Wirecast, Firewired to my Macbook Pro running QuickTime X for capturing the mixed show on top of recording tapes in the Sony and each camera ringside and hardcam.

And thank goodness for redundancy…

The Problems

Ambient Audio: I think it’s a connector or my camera, but I didn’t notice until we had the louder crowd noise that the audio on this channel, thankfully separated from commentary, kept cutting out periodically. Like maybe from a peak. Luckily, we had the camera tapes, and I spent some time syncing the hard cam tapes to the edits the next day.

QuickTime X Fail: While it seemed rather reliable for most of the previous week’s IWC Hard Cam capture live, it started to choke right out of the gate. PWO recorded four 45 minute episodes that night. Of those, two were captured in whole. One choked at the beginning, but captured the rest. One was a complete scattered capture mess. I can’t tell on the fly if it’s a choke on frame rates or not. I’ve been capturing tapes using this method the last two weeks with little issue. I’m chalking this up to letting the laptop sit there in Quicktime for a few hours. Perhaps cleaning out my often stuffed hard drives and my just completed RAM upgrade should help.

I often don’t think. I just do.  And what I do is Mayhem.

That’s what I’ve done for 300 Tuesdays on my life.

300 times I’ve recording rantings

300 times I didn’t watch prime time television.

300 times I probably didn’t get the sleep I should of.

300 times I discussed wrestling and people have thought it important enough  to listen.

300 times I had a good time with good friends.

300 times I didn’t care what people thought of my passion.

300 times I’ve had the time of my live.

Here’s to another 300 episodes of the Wrestling Mayhem Show.

A thing of the past...

Recently, there has been a lot of chatter amongst my Modern Warfare 3 co-horts to dive into the Netflix Party feature to watch maybe some wrestling or movies socially. This is sort of a big deal since most of us are scattered across the city of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, or all the way in San Antonio, and we already use Skype for our podcasting discussions and Google Hangout for our RAW watching on Mondays.

But, as the attached link informs, the update this past week to Xbox 360 kills the feature. No longer can I throw popcorn at my friends’ avatars.

So what’s an online socialite to do?

Hack it.

Not Really.

It’s a little more of a work around, and not nearly as interactive and synced, but we simply loaded a party so we could chat, and attempt to sync up our times on the Netflix stream as we watched WWE’s Greatest Cage Matches of All Time. For the most part, it worked.

And it brings up some other options…

Microsoft is introducing such features as UFC (supposedly including Pay Per Views) MLB (if you still watch baseball) and other video features over the next few months. The idea to drop into a voice chat with your Xbox friends, if you already have that community established, is promising, and gives another way to do with without sitting a laptop between you and the television.

Original Google+ Post.

Pro Tip Time: Ok, so I have this gig where I need to record a bit of HD footage, but haven’t had the cashflow to get one of those super expensive P2 cards that does more than 4 minutes at the time.

A few months ago, I had the fortune to help work on a commercial for anti-bullying at a local school and solved this problem by live capturing in Final Cut Pro 7. It worked fine enough, but we had issues with it crashing alongside my Panasonic HVX200, so I wondered about finding a more solid solution.

Final Cut Pro X appears to capture, but results in no file. iMovie comes up static, but it never supported the P2 footage, to my knowledge.

In comes Quicktime X to save the day! Go to File > New Movie Recording, pick your video and audio source as your firewire camera, put on Max quality and bam, full HD capture!

So far, it’s looks pretty steady on my late 2009 Macbook Pro. Mission Accomplished. According to iStat, it isn’t pushing more than 25% of my CPU.

Read more updates on my Google+ Thread. 

"I will crush you..."

This was an article I was working on long before Steve’s passing.  I’m glad I waited thanks to reading at least half of the biography for some perspective.

A while back, I found an article from Fast Company on “10 Things Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling“.  This was around the time of the WWDC when Steve Jobs was selling me on iOS 5 several months before the iPhone 4S.  It sort of made sense.

Pyro.  Well, not real pyro.  But those effects are really nice to convey the point.  Using the model that the video looks like your iChat session is great and sets them apart from other presentations.

Master of the Mic. I liken Jobs to Chris Jericho.   One of my favorite times with Jericho was when he was a heel and instead of yelling in the mic like many in pro wrestling, he would whisper to bring you in.  Make you lean in to hear what he has to say and make it seem more important.  Jobs is soft spoken and emotional in his delivery.  The other side of this could be a Steve Ballmer as Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Get me excited.  A parallel I see amongst tech pundits and wrestling smarks is very similar.  Some are into this because of their love for the subject, but haven’t been excited by it over the years.  We just want to get excited over it.  Apple wins the battle for the reveal.  It’s so hard to get excited about wrestling and technology with the internet.  There are so many leaks and rumors that it flattens the response when something is finally executed.  From an Undertaker return to a new phone on Verizon, it’s all moot in the end.  Rarely are we truly surprised.  Apple tends to pull it off more often than not with their features and unveilings.

Well, it's not TIME cover...

The Build.  You typically don’t book your biggest names at the beginning of the card.  The right booker knows how to pace a show that builds to the big finish at the end.  And sometimes, there’s a late run in or post match surprise or return.  Steve’s presentations did this perfectly.  Build.  Show what we’ve done.  Show where we’re going.  And maybe, just maybe, we get the hot Triple H run in of “One more thing” to blow our socks off.

The Final Say.  Some say some of the creative minds that “revolutionized” the business did so because they had Vince McMahon as a filter.  He has the final say so, and those minds and talents have floundered when left to their own devices in other wrestling companies.  Steve’s vision is what drove the company, denying status quo, and sometimes, what the customers thought.  Not everything worked out.  There’s always a Gobble Gooker to a Stone Cold Steve Austin like there’s a G4 Cube to the iPod.  But the views by workers of both men being bears to work for is startlingly similar.

I’ve watched some presentations in the last year from video game companies, Facebook and Google that feel like they are trying so hard.  Flat.  Almost all of them.  They are the WCW’s of the business presentation.  Maybe even the Wrestlicious sometimes…