Jan 7
2016
Yesterday I took delivery on my new Canon Rebel T5i / 700D w/ 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM kit thanks to my mom and grandparents for providing me with incredibly generous cash gifts for Christmas and some mild saving on my own. With it, I’m hoping to begin producing some quality video podcasts as well as begin shooting stills again outdoors (when it warms up again here in Connecticut). I pretty much immediately began shooting test footage to begin getting the look and setup dialed in. Unfortunately I have 2 issues that prevent me from getting professional results in my test footage.
- The lack of a lighting kit:
I’m going to need to invest in 2-3 light stands and lights (probably soft boxes) as I have crummy warm Compact Florescent bulbs in my home office / lab / work space that are in a ceiling fan fixture with very little diffusion which looks terrible on video in the test footage I shot. I was able to correct the color issues via a custom camera light balance, but the position and quality of the light is terrible which can’t really be corrected in post.
- Audio:
I have access to 2 omnidirectional compressor vocal microphones and a monodirectional “shotgun” microphone that can be mounted either on camera or on a mic stand via shock mount as well as the microphone that is onboard the camera (which is typically only good for sync audio). ordinarily the camera mounted shotgun microphone or one of the omnidirectional vocal mics placed very close to the speaker’s mouth *should* yield good results, however, in my tests, the fan noise from my computer’s graphics card was rather annoying and I would prefer to not subject my viewers (listeners) to garbage audio – which means at the end of the day that I’m probably going to have to invest in a shirt-collar-mounted lavalier microphone.
So unfortunately it looks like it might be a little while before I can actually get into the swing of production with this new camera. However, that doesn’t stop me from continuing to test and figure out what works and start blocking segments and such, so look forward to all of that soon. Also for what it’s worth, none of this is making me any money and I don’t really have any more to invest at the moment, so the audio and lights will just have to wait until I can save up just a little more disposable income. Meanwhile, please stay tuned!
Dec 21
2015
No, I have not abandoned this project! It has, however, been a very long time since I posted last. Between marriage, 2 children, and a reasonably demanding professional career that takes quite a bit of my creative energies, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to create content for this site, which I’m incredibly saddened about (not that I get much feedback here, but I do enjoy putting myself out there…).
between my last post (which was made while on vacation with a bunch of awesome people in Vermont), and now (the first day of my week-long holiday-season vacation), I have learned quite a bit about Audio/Video production (a skillset that I haven’t used “professionally” since my high school days some 15 or so years ago) with plans to switch out some of my still camera gear for a newer DSLR body and some more video-oriented gear and the acquisition of some audio gear, as well as making some additional space in my house to have a mostly separate technology/AV lab (I moved my gear out of a cramped bedroom and into a mostly dedicated room) look for more podcast-y style posts in the near future.
Jun 24
2015
After a short hiatus while I took some time to rebuild my VPS and the software stack that runs on it, cpgeek.org is back online! I’ve also taken some time to do quite a few website loading optimizations from re-compressing theme elements to setting up a minify and caching system. The cpgeek.org homepage should now load super fast! Now that I have everything tuned again, I’m hoping to make more posts on a regular basis.
Stay tuned for tutorials as to how to set up a LEMP stack, wordpress optimization, as well as mundane things such as my ranting about how you can’t get a decent fountain pen at a brick and mortar shop on the same day if you’ve misplaced yours…
Apr 28
2015
I know this is a bit of a slow-ball compared to my usual discussion topics of more advanced things, but it’s something that should be at the back of everyone’s mind who uses a windows computer. The first version of this was a response to a question I was asked at work from someone who was being prompted to purchase a subscription to McAfee antivirus on her new laptop and wanted to know if she needed antivirus software (because the use case only required internet access to transmit data that was created on it back to the office), and whether she should purchase the antivirus her computer was prompting her to buy.
My response to her is as follows: Read More >>
