In ep 101,

Q+A 0:28
This week, a quick follow up on btp100.
I received some really nice e-mails and comments (on the blog)… thanks one and all.
Winners in the btp100 prize giveaway will be announced next week.

KBSCOTW 5:06
F11 – convert sample type
(don’t confuse with adjust sample rate)

WITE 10:27
effects/amplitude/stereo field rotate
(similar to “centre channel pan” of the stereo expander
and
effects/amplitude/stereo field rotate (process)

INTERFACE 17:48
Track properties area
4 views – inputs,fx,sends,eq

BTW, if you click on those images, you’ll (hopefully) get this really funky darkening of your screen, and the images will load in a slidehow over the top of the website.
If it works, you can use your left and right arrow keys to navigate back and forth through the slideshow, and you can use the ‘x’ key to close the slideshow.
Pretty neat, huh?

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Just a reminder… these are the prizes for episode 100 of BTP.

Peter Baker at Beatbox Music

has been kind enough to donate a copy of the Podcasting Production Toolkit CD.

And to keep the CD theme going, I have 3 more copies of the Adobe Audition 2.0 Essential Training Guide from Lynda.com to give away as 2nd, 3rd and 4th prizes.

OK, so what do you have to do to win one of these great prizes?

A little bit of investigative work is required from you. You have to come up with 2 answers.

Number 1.
In which episode of BTP did I mention doing “CSI-type forensic audio restoration”? (Hint: It was after episode 85)

Number 2.
In episode 100, how many component files were included in Rem’s promo session? (Hint: You’ve got to look at the ‘open session’ dialogue box)

The first person to send both correct answers via e-mail will win the Podcasting Production Toolkit CD from Beatbox Music,
and the next 3 correct respondants will pick up a copy of the Audition 2.0 Essential Training Guide from Lynda.com.

Go forth and slueth!

OK, it turns out that even though I THOUGHT putting the download links into the blog post would be a better idea than putting the video files into the feed, WordPress in all its wisdom decided to interpret the links and include them as enclosures in the feed anyway!

Oh, ye Gods!

If you don’t understand all that, don’t worry about it. It’s not that important.

But, what I have down though, is move the download links to a static page, and include a link to THAT page in the btp100 shownotes/blog post.

Of course, if you’ve already got the file, then you could care less.

If you’re still waiting to download it, it’s just one extra mouse click.

But at least now, the files SHOULDN’T (fingers crossed) be in the RSS feed.

As Phil said in his e-mail to me at 3am this morning, “Oops.”

Seems all you BTP fans put a bit of a strain on the servers!

I’ve been in touch with my hosting providers, and it seems it’s all ok now that the peak load has been and gone…. just have to hope there isn’t another peak hit overnight tonight.
May I suggest that if you’re still waiting to get btp100, grab the smaller mpeg4 version, or better still, grab the torrent file and get the mpeg2 version that way.

And in case you’re wondering, I actually think the mpeg2 version is the better one to look at. There’s less compression artefacts mucking up the on-screen text.

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I’ve had Phil Massyn (my webmaster “go-to” guy) install a WordPress plugin called Lightbox.

This is one really sweet plugin, and it functions as a live slideshow for a series of posted images.

As an example, click on one of these thumbnails.
The screen will go almost black, and the image will load in full size over the top of the page.
You will then be able to use your right arrow or the “n” key to go to the next image, and the left arrow or the “p” key to go to the previous image.
And the “x” key will close the lightbox. As will clicking on the “close” button, obviously.

Now, personally, I love this! It just looks so good.

However, here on my machine, it doesn’t appear to be working on IE, but it DOES work on Firefox. I’d be keen to hear other user’s experiences with it. If you’re running IE and it works as I’ve described, let me know. Actually, you could also let me know if it DOESN’T work, too.

At last!
Just when you thought it was never gonna get here… the big one ton is here!

*** EDIT ***

To download the movie, go to
“BTP100 downloads“.

*** END EDIT ***

So, what’s in store for episode 100?
A promo remix in real time, for Rem Lavictoire.

Yeah yeah yeah, but what about the damned prizes, man? That’s all we’re here for!

Oh yeah, right…. ok.

Well, Peter Baker at Beatbox Music

has been kind enough to donate a copy of the Podcasting Production Toolkit CD.
This is a CD of royalty free music AND sound effects that you can use for polishing up your podcast!

While I will confess to not having heard the CD yet, I have dealt with Peter professionally for over 20 years, and he has always represented some of the finest music production companies around… and I have no reason to suspect that this won’t be an AWESOME collection of sounds to have at your disposal.

And to keep the CD theme going, I have 3 more copies of the Adobe Audition 2.0 Essential Training Guide from Lynda.com to give away as 2nd, 3rd and 4th prizes.

OK, so what do you have to do to win one of these great prizes?

Well, this is where you’re gonna hate me. I’m not going to tell you… just yet.
In order to make this fair, I’m going to hold off posting the details of the competition for 72 hours.
The reason for that is, it will give those on slower internet connections a chance to be involved too.
So, at around midday GMT on Wednesday (25th July 2007), I’ll post the details right here.

Nasty, aren’t I?

In the meantime, enjoy the video!

I just got word from Phil Massyn, who has had the opportunity this afternoon to watch btp100.

In his words:

By the way – your video is AWESOME!
Man! I’ve learnt more in this one ep than the entire series!!

Well, looks like my work here is done.

OK, at the risk of turning this whole exercise into an epic to rival “War and Peace”, I have (with great assistance from Andrew “Ozz” Clarke… thanks mate!) managed to encode btp100 into an mpeg4 file at close to 500MB.

Still huge, I know, but quite an improvement on 838MB, I’m sure you’d agree.

Now, because of my not-so-ballistic upload speeds, I will commence uploading this file now, but it will probably take all night before it reaches the server.
Which means, I’ll put a link to it on audio2u.com tomorrow morning when I wake up.

Ozz commented on my last post about the file size being indicitive of an mpeg2 encoding.

And he was right!

I DID say I was new to all this video stuff!

So, I’ve spent the afternoon trying to find an encoder that will crank out an mpeg4 file instead, but I really don’t know much about this stuff. I’m learning as I go.
So, what I’ll do tonight is release the link (and the torrent file) for the mpeg2 version.
Those who can’t wait (and don’t mind the huge download) can go straight ahead and download it.

For those who want to wait, I’ll keep hunting for a way to encode an mpeg4 version, which hopefully, will result in a smaller file size.
If, or when, I succeed in producing a smaller version of the video file, I’ll upload that, too.

Sorry for the lack of experience with this stuff, people. I’m an AUDIO enigneer, ok? Gimme a break.

Cheers.

Hi all,
As promised, btp100 will be a video podcast… well, techincally, not really a “podcast”.
I’ve recorded it, and I’ve edited it, and I’ve rendered it.

And quite frankly people… I’m scared!

This is going to be one huge mother of a download!
Are you ready for this?
It’s 838 MB!

I kid you not.

And that’s why I say that technically, this won’t be a “podcast” because I’m NOT going to put an 838MB item into an RSS feed. That would just not be cool at all. In fact, I’m sure a whole bunch of people would be pretty upset if I DID put it in the feed.

So, how do you get it?

2 ways.

It will be available as a manual download from audio2u (as you’d expect).

And, I’m going to seed it as a bit torrent file. The torrent file will be available in the show notes, but probably NOT tomorrow night.

It will seed from my machine, and Phil Massyn has offered to seed it from his machine as well. So, that’s at least 2 seeds. Only problem is, my cable ISP only allows me to UPLOAD at 30KB/sec! Woohoo! Hold me down, I can’t stand the excitement!

So, if anyone else would be prepared to seed the file as well (this requires having your machine switched on and open to the internet), please drop me an e-mail ASAP and I’ll get you to download the file before the rest of the planet has access to it.

Once I’ve got about 5 people seeding the file, I’ll then make the torrent file available for download for everyone else.
I hope that all makes sense!

I received an e-mail from Walt Kippenhuck today with another panning shot that I felt just had to be shared.

This is what Walt wrote:

Hey Shelton and Bruce!
First off, still loving the podcast. Listening to them at the gym 5:30 in the morning really helps me have more fun and forget that (a) I’m at the gym and (b) for God’s sake it’s 5:30 am!!
Anyway, after listing to Shelton talking about the panning technique I remembered a picture I took a couple months back. It’s of two ducks in flight, shot from above (my 16th floor balcony). I thought I would send it your way and you can post it if it is at all applicable (even if you wish to use it as an example of what NOT to do, Shelton (ha!).
Cheers,
Walt

And here’s Walt’s pic:

Looking to record “in the field”? You might want to check out the latest offering from Zoom… the H2.

Looks pretty neat!

On our way back from the wedding, we stopped at Port Macquarie for the night. There’s this quaint little lighthouse at Tacking Point, which we went out to. Not to look at the lighthouse, but to see if we could see any whales migrating north. It’s the time of year for it, and they can quite often be seen with the naked eye from the coast.

But when I saw the lighthouse (and no whales), I couldn’t resist grabbing the 7D and ripping off a few frames. Here’s some of the best:

Hi all.

I know… you were all waiting to see what episode 100 would bring.

Well, believe it or not, it’s going to have to wait a week. I completely forgot last week that this week, I was coming to the Gold Coast to attend a wedding, and that meant that I didn’t have time through the week to record BTP.

Sorry.

I’ve been kicking around in my head the question of whether I should link to listener’s pictures on new browser pages (a la the post for episode 81 where every picture is linked), or display them inline (a la the pics from Michael Baxley in ep 80, or the panning shots from Bob Fischer).

I’m actually leaning toward displaying them inline.

I think it’s more immediate. You don’t have to click the links to see the pictures. They’re just… THERE! And given the high quality of images sent in by SI listeners, it makes for a visually interesting page.

So, with all that in mind… one small request.

When you submit shots to either Shelton or myself via e-mail,  would you be so good as to resize your images so that they are no more than 700 pixels wide (height isn’t an issue, but width is), and set the resolution to 72dpi?

If you don’t or can’t, that’s ok. I’ll do it for you. But it would just save me a little bit of time if any listener-submitted images were already scaled accordingly.

Thanks heaps!