Well, I’ve been playing around with Garageband - side note: now I know where some of the music in my fav podcasts come from! Was flicking thru the sample loops and going “OMG, that’s blahblahblah show!” every so often >.<
Anyway, main reason for this is to solve the problem of there being very little music in my show. Though, I do have a friend of my GF making some 8bit music for me, I thought I’d fill the gap until then and give Garageband a try.
First, a little disclosure: I’m shit with music. I enjoy listening to it, but I’m totally buggered when it comes to making it - not a damn clue. Which means whatever I make out of this app will likely be pure dross.
After about a couple of hours I finally end up with a 3min track that I will be using in the “Gadget Show Live” footage episode that I’ll be uploading a little bit later today.
If you want a little sneak peek or if you even want to use it in your own shows, just grab a copy here as you’re free to use this in whatever way you want, just as long as you slip a credit to me and/or a link to this site.
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The money finally came in… and quickly went out as I splurged on some much needed hardware and software.
First up was the single most needed item - a real camera!
Bye bye lil’ webcam at last!
In the end, instead of the 200 to 300 quid I wanted to spend; it turned into 450 as I stumped up for a Canon HF100 flash based HD camera. What made me break the limit? A mic input! This means I’ll be spending on a tie-clip mic tomorrow and hopefully retiring my samson c03u mic from general use in the shows.
In the most recent show I used the onboard mic from the camera in order to gauge the capabilities (sucky!) which is why I’ll be looking for some mics to plug into it and didn’t sync up separate audio from my samson because of the next purchase…
A macbook and a copy of final cut express 4.
Yes, Vertical Slice has gone dirty and is no longer produced 100% on windows.
And because I had a whole new video editing app to contend with, I didn’t lump syncing audio onto my shoulders too - as it turns out, the only things to give me trouble were the differences in chroma keying and garbage matte between Premiere and Final Cut. That and a little flap about where the videos were hiding on the memory card - it wasn’t an outright video file, imovie nabbed them easily tho after Final Cut claimed there wasn’t any devices to capture from >.<
Still, the result of a brand new camera and editing platform can be seen here below… well worth it I think!
Oh, and I’ll post pictures of the latest edition uber shiny to my network. (the screen is the only thing I find annoying about this macbook!)
Well, at the suggestion of my GF I put together a makeshift green screen out of some green material and a 4×4 slab of plywood. Total of £15 spent on materials… not bad
A few pins down the sides and those creases cleared up nicely. However, the crappyness of my webcam is beginning to really show up now. I had to use the zoom since the board was just a little too small, this has lead to some pixellation on the video.
When messing about with the chromakey effect in Premiere, I had to use 4 of them at some points and I still couldn’t get rid of the green halo without causing my neck to vanish too (and it does in some clips).
It is becoming clearer every video I do that I really need to be investing in a new camera that can keep pace with the meddling I am getting up to. I also have a bit of news that cheered me up no end.
Next week I’ll be announcing just what that news was… Until then, please enjoy the first vertical slice using a green screen!
Tuesdays video is to show the random side - I hope to produce more random stuff, sometimes ingame footage; sometimes in meatspace.
It’s more of a whimsical kinda thing to break up the flow and to provide me with a stash of vids I can call up should it be needed. For this video it was more of a “wow, there’s some odd names tonight” and then one game a guy started playing the A-Team theme tune and then the Flight of the Valkyries. I just had to grab them!
Wednesdays I hope will become “Buttonmasher Test Day” (people will be looking for stuff to watch while they wait for the Zero Punctuation rush to die down!) and will be the time slot for the weekly videos. I really, really wish to use this episode as a means for getting interaction between viewers and the show. So, with that in mind I’d like for you guys to try making the intro, the think-time clips and the outro. Those used will be added to the credits.
I would love to be able to give prizes away for this, so if any of you know someone in a position to give me crap to give away please send them my way!
Oh, and when I said I was doing Vertical Slice on a budget of zero, I wasn’t kidding.. have a look at the “studio”!
The mic, mouse and webcam trail off to a half-deck Toshiba L20 hooked up to an old 15″ tft of mine - also known as my TV PC for the bedroom.
Well, I’ve decided to not wait any longer for people to take interest in the show and begin producing it.
Hopefully I’ll be able to string it out to 5 days a week, if I fail to do that it’ll be 3 a week. This is ’cause it’s difficult to juggle script writing, shooting, editing and a fulltime job all on my own, so if you fancy helping out with script writing lemmie know.
And no, it won’t be a paid position since I’m not getting paid for it either
This is the typical news format show that I hope will make up the majority of the episodes, the other two types I have in the can are my buttonmasher test number 14 which I’ll release on wednesdays and Tuesday will see a very strange “timeless” item.
I’m hoping to build up plenty of the timeless ones and they’ll not always be limited to the confines of the output of a game I’m playing.
Anyway, you can check out all of the vertical slice stuff on its own site over at verticalslice.tumblr.com.
Oh, and the “hoo-fuckin-ray” outburst was after I finally finished reading out my lines after I took almost 3 painful hours to read a page and a half of them… I hope it’s only practice I need and that this won’t be the norm!
This is more of a mental ramble, so be prepared for a bit of stupidity and incoherent paths. You have been warned.
When I look out onto the net, I see many American tech blogs, podcasts and streamers all showcasing the latest gadgets and software. You have things such as TWiT, Robert Scoble, DL.TV, GeekBrief, Chris Pirillo and on and on.
They evangelise the tech scenes in the US and get to play with many cool toys before they’re released to the wider world by their American parent companies. They even run competitions that are only open to people in the US.
A quick look towards the European side of things and we begin to see a struggle. Partly down to how fragmented the market is, with so many languages, and so many individual nations making it very difficult to run to the sheer scale of our American counterparts.
Speaking for the English speaking side of things, sure we have sites like Coolest Gadgets, TechDigest, Tech Radar and British versions of some the popular US blogs like Gizmodo, teases of UK Engadget and TechCrunch as well as a large showing for the mainstream media. The gaming side of things improves a lot with a vibrant blogging scene such as my fav Rock, Paper, Shotgun and others like Eurogamer, XLeague (currenly on death watch tho), ChannelFlip etc.
But so many of them cover an alarming amount of American news, having to settle for whistful sighs of “when will this be coming out in the EU, if ever.” and the perpetual issue of the European markets paying substantially more for our tech than pretty much any other western market.
While the American markets get to launch and play with things such as the Drobo and the Chumby (of which only the Drobo is out in Europe, at a vastly higher price), I notice Europe simply doesn’t have anything similar.
So, as a clarrion call to rally the European tech scene and to highlight many of the innovative services and gadgets that have to be developing out there, I’m calling on anyone who has a product or service they’re working on and need some promotion or reviewing and competition give aways to get in touch with me.
We need to start evangelising our own market and get an internal buzz going that can support our companies in much the same way as the American scene does for itself.
Starting this coming weekend I’m going to be producing a podcast in a mixture of video and audio depending on what I’m doing where I’ll be highlighting European tech developments only.
Send your messages to alphaxion or leave a comment in this post if you work for a European tech company or if you know of some really good European tech blogs and podcasts that showcase a substantial amount of European tech companies.
