The NapierTV Production Blog

For this week’s show we’ve done something we’ve never done before, it’s small but it’s significant.

We’ve recorded our own sound effect.

Yeah, sounds pretty lame, I’m sure. The point is that in the past, on the odd occasion we needed one, we’d try to get them off the ‘net. Usually what we’d end up with would be either only barely usable and in other cases whole bits were re-written or scrapped to avoid the use of the sound effect.

We needed the sound of a camera shutter and the ones I could find for free sounded utterly dreadful. Tinny or muffled, flat and lifeless. This is the effect we ended up with:

All it required was a camera and an SM58. I draped my duvet cover over the camera to dampen surrounding noise and hit record whilst pressing the shutter button a few times. Hardly taxing.
I’m hoping this will set a precedent for producing our own clips in future. We’re going to be licensing them under Creative Commons licenses, much like our shows. Maybe someone out there will use them, but my interest is in building an internal library of these sorts of resources for use in future by other Napier TV society members.

You can download the clip here:
MP3 192kbps stereo (26kb)

It's licensed under a Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 UK: Scotland license - details here.

-Ben
Executive Producer

Well, as already announced, there won’t be a full episode this week. We had most of one filmed but there was still one more channel (Napier News) to film. Unfortunately, that couldn’t happen as both Chris and I are ill. It may well be swine flu, or “piggy sniffles” as we like to think of it.

We’re going to upload all the stuff we’ve filmed though, so you’ll get to see that stuff. It should be going up over the next day or so, depending on encoding issues.

We apologise for this and wish it wasn’t the case, but to be honest, there’s not much we can do about it.

Hopefully we’ll see you all at Morning Coffee on Thursday!

Not sure how many of you know, but we used to go under the name Napier Subculture Society, when we were filming in our first few years. Back then we would almost religiously use open source software for video editing, and we'd also be sure to export in open source formats in addition to the other formats we provided. Ben, our Executive Producer (and regular writer to this blog) is quite an advocate of open source, and that's carried across to the rest of our team. As an advance warning, this features techy content - beware!

We believe it's important that computing, and more specifically video editing, should be available and open to everyone. 20 years ago, video was the exclusive realm of the content distributors - they decided what we watched, and whilst you could film your own video, there was no way to get it out there, so to speak.
Fast forward to the last 5 years, and the market has changed immensely. With the launch of youtube and other internet video sites, there's now an easy way to share your work with the rest of the world, and you don't need to go through a middleman to get your content across. You don't even have to worry about whether your viewers will have the right software to watch your video, as these sites mostly take care of that for you.
Even in terms of equipment, for a relatively small financial outlay it's possible to film, as we do, in full High Definition (we film in 1080, higher resolution than most TV sets show), whereas before you'd have to put away money for quite some time to be able to afford even the most basic of models. Video has truly come to the masses.

So what does this have to do with open source you ask? Well it's all about the accessibility of video editing. Rather than have to pay for a full video editing suite, and then being locked into that for the rest of your career, we like the idea of being able to use a free one that works in open formats, that anyone can use or build upon. As Napier Subculture we edited almost exclusively using open software (Kino & Open Movie Editor), only using proprietary software when we had to, basically.

Currently with NapierTV, we're editing using Apple's Final Cut Suite, and Adobe Premiere under Windows. We've had to move to using these simply because the open source community options simply don't seem to be up to scratch (yet) for editing HD footage. Stressing the word "seem" there - if you're using open software to edit HD footage, please let us know. We'd genuinely like to be proven wrong here!

Similarly, with open formats we've had to have another look at them. We used to upload a full resolution copy of everything in Ogg Theora format. Not only was it good to be able to provide an open source format, but it offered us an archive of our episodes, for when we inevitably lost the original DV files. Currently though, exporting full 1080 footage to Ogg Theora to upload just isn't viable. We're still committed to supporting open formats though, so we're going to offer them at some point - albeit maybe at a lower resolution like 720p or 576.

It's important to try and support these we feel - though we can't offer funds to them, we can try and make open formats a little more prolific. After all, the more accessible video editing is to people, the better. We don't want to be the only guys doing this!

Peace out.
-Chris
NapierTV President

When we’re filming we often have a problem with editing. The problem is that we have too much footage.

We’ve got all sorts of footage in the past and people frequently ask us for copies of what we’ve got. We try to provide it when possible but the truth is that it’s a pretty big hassle for us. We don’t always have the time to sit through and chop together three hours of footage only to be told that we then have to burn it to DVD for them too.

We still endure and provide the footage, but I don’t think many people appreciate quite how difficult this can be. A single hour of our standard definition footage weighs in at about 15GB. So if there’s two hours, that’s 30GB of footage we have to store, chop up into 4.4GB chunks and burn to seven separate DVDRs. The burning of the discs themselves takes hours, but chopping up the footage to deliver just the stuff the person or group wants takes even longer!

Now that I’ve finished whining, I’d like to explain the point of this blog entry – when we’re filming, we’re trying to learn to film less. We need to get the material we need, obviously, but anything extra is rarely of that much use. Sure, we use snippets of it in montages, but that’s a few seconds out of half an hour of material.

The reason I’m talking about this is because we’re looking for more camera people for our filming teams. We always need someone who knows how to point a camera at things and is willing to learn the few bits of wisdom we’ve got to share. If you’re interested, there’ll be a blog entry and a video going up over on the Getting Involved channel blog in a bit detailing what our camera people get up to and how you can become one of them!

-Ben
Executive Producer

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working hard at getting the technology in place for the launch of our site and channels. In order to do that several things are required – an understanding of which channels we currently have the resources to launch, blogs over on Blogger for each, and hashtags for each on Twitter.

Basically, the structure of NapierTV’s production system is as follows:

Each channel has a hashtag on Twitter, a blog on Blogger and then has videos which can appear on the podcast.

Working from the bottom to the top, I’ll try to explain a little about each technology and how we’re bolting them together to form something that’s (hopefully) greater than the sum of its parts.

Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to post short (140 character) messages. These can be public messages to the world in general, messages directed at specific other users, or messages about a given topic.

The third option is what we’re interested in. By creating a tag word for a channel we allow users to post messages about that channel or directed to others interested in the channel. These tag words are called “hashtags” and are identified by the hash symbol (#) that precedes them. For example, the tag for the ENTV production channel (and ENTV stuff in general) is simply #entv.

Next up – Blogger. It’s a blogging service owned by Google. What’s a blog? Let’s ask Wikipedia:

A blog (a contraction of the term "weblog") is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.

Hopefully that answers that adequately.

So, each channel has its own blog which updates as frequently as is feasible and covers a variety of things related to the subject matter of the channel.

Lastly, there’s the videos released by NapierTV. Our show is a video podcast and will be released weekly if all goes to plan. Some of you may not know what a podcast is, or might only have a vague idea, so let’s see if Wikipedia can help us out again:

Video podcast is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures.

Each week our podcast will consist of different videos released by our channels, cut together to form a whole show.

That’s the individual components covered, now to explain a little bit about how they’re used together. If you’re not interested in a bit of techy stuff, now would be the time to skip to the last section!

Warning – Techy content below!

Twitter

Twitter updates are very immediate and through the magic of RSS and a server that updates very frequently it’s possible to update a site rather more frequently than we would be able to otherwise. It also allows us to push the envelope in terms of any university society that we know of as we allow immediate involvement by anyone, member or not, with our activities.

Unfortunately the tech to easily aggregate hashtagged tweets simply didn’t exist in any usable form that we could find. Perhaps it is out there somewhere but despite much searching we couldn’t find any scripts or widgets to do what we wanted. With the help of Michael Maclean (mgdm on #lugradio) for the PHP and an old friend of mine, Anthony Sennett, for the javascript, I was able to get two working widgets together.

The first is the PHP aggregator on our main site which supports the output of any number of tweets and has caching support. If you’re on the site right now, you’ll see it to the right of this blog post and as you can see it outputs the tweet’s description, author (with a link to their Twitter page) and the number of minutes since the last post.

The second is the javascript version, which should be in the sidebar on the right if you’re reading this on Blogger. It needs a bit of work but is in a working condition. It currently creates a cache but is unable to read from it and fails if a tweet contains linebreaks. We’re/I’m still working on that one although any help is very much appreciated.

Blogger

Our blogs are on Blogger but are aggregated on our main site using FeedBurner’s Buzzboost technology. We also use several of their other syndication options to attempt to make our content as easy for you to reach as possible. I don’t know about you, but I’m lazy and like to have content delivered on my terms. Hopefully the setup we’ve created allows for that.

Video

Our video content has traditionally been published online on BlipTV and YouTube. We intend to continue this way, although we may choose a replacement for BlipTV in the long run if a better (free) alternative presents itself.

The planned formats for release are pretty much the same as they were for the Napier Subculture Podcast:

1. A medium quality flash version
2. A high quality version in something like Xvid or H264
3. A high quality version in Ogg Theora
4. A medium quality version for iPods released on iTunes

There may be some tweaks and we may start releasing HD content, depending on our budget allocation for the coming year. If there’s a format you’d like us to release in, let us know and I’ll see what I can arrange.

That’s the techy stuff out of the way – You can look now!

So, how does our new site affect you ?

Well, firstly it means you can get involved with the society and the show just by posting a message on twitter.
Listening to a new album that you really like? Post a tweet with the #rocktv tag!

Blogging whilst listening to "Manso Manso" by Sara Tavares. Very chilled. Nice.#rocktv
via Flamekebab moments ago

There we go, I just added that to The Rock’s channel page – it’s that easy.

Secondly, it means that if you see something on the show and want to know more you can head over to the channel and see a bit more detail. There’s plenty that goes on when we film, at least most of the time, so we try to make sure we record it. It also means that if you like a channel, you can see some of the other content we put up. The channels aren’t just about the podcast!

Finally, it means if you liked what you saw on the show you can see more footage on the channel. We always have to cut down what we film to get it to fit on the show. This way you can see more of the good stuff if it catches your interest!

 

That’s all from me for now! It’s worth bearing in mind that most blog entries won’t be anywhere near this long, so you won’t have to worry about information overload – this was an exception!

-Ben
Executive Producer

Ahoy thar!

This is the first of the posts about our equipment, in this case our camera handle, which we built a little while ago.

Constructed primarily from steel brackets, bolts, plastic zip ties and electrical tape, it’s actually considerably more sturdy than you’d expect.

Why build such a thing? Well, the answer is very simple – cameras these days are a lot smaller than those built just a few years ago. They’re also a lot lighter. This combination means that when we’re holding a camera in our hands, a LOT more of the shakiness from our hands is translated into the camera.

By adding the handle the shakiness is further away from the camera and allows for much smoother shots. It also means we can hold the camera in a variety of ways previously impossible. We also added a strap as the contraption gets a little tiring to hold after a while!

As for what it looks like, well check this test footage out:

We got the idea after watching this video over on YouTube, for any of you interested in building your own.

Hello and welcome, dear reader, to the NapierTV production blog!

I’m Ben, NapierTV’s executive producer and will become a familiar face on this blog. You might also find posts from the rest of our exec, members or even a few guest posts, depending how things go.

In the meantime I'd like to fill you in on how this blog works and what you can expect to find on here. The main focus of this blog is to serve as a slice of “behind the scenes” at NapierTV. We do lots of things that our members never find out about, either because to them it “just happens” or because it’s something that’s not related directly to them.

So, for example, we may build a new bit of kit for filming (we have!), perhaps we’re planning something for a future episode and want to share the production process or maybe we just want to talk about what we’ve been up to recently.
That’s all I’m here to say for now and I hope we have plenty of interesting things to say in the near future, wish us luck!

-Ben
NapierTV Executive Producer