Archive for December, 2011

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.