My first introduction with computers was circa 1975 with mainframes, punch cards and programming simplistic slot machines with random fruits - e.g., cherries, lemons, oranges, and dollar signs - any combination of which would spin and land in three-pane lucky display screen.
It was also a time when I started to begin the journey through boyhood puberty and migrate into the ongoing evolution of manhood, personhood, humanhood, et al.
It was during this boyhood time while programming random numbers that I was first exposed to some fundamental concepts for achieving ongoing success with computers (e.g., managing the three levels of inputs, processing, and outputs). Thus part of my early picture included computer teachers and experts beating into my growing computer-awareness, “Garbage-in is Garbage-out.”
This became obvious, tactical, hand-felt wisdom with the early punch cards as those cards that were less than perfectly punched or less than perfectly flat were promptly spit out and rejected as unusable. Thus no amount of nifty logic or elegant programming referencing random fruits, berries, and/or dollar signs would ever see the light of day, but I digress.
Moving forward and years later - circa 2001 during days of explosive growth with DAWS (Digital Audio Workstations), project studios and technical advances across the digital audio spectrum, I enjoyed a conversation with an audio engineering expert and friend who candidly stated, “You know Chuck, in my business they call it turd polishing - if the client gives you inputs that are turds, no matter how much audio polishing you do, it’s still a turd.”
Yikes - new multimedia information and different take on conventional wisdom of garbage-in and turd-polished outs.
However, I was recently reminded that we can work with less than perfect inputs on creative level through some “happy accidents” and turn out good stuff.
Below is my point - visually. One of my clients handed me material that was 5-Diamond in spirit, nature of story, and content level, but it was a lot less radiant in the areas of digital resolution and digital quality.
This is a sensitive area and let me state that I honor all those on the digital paths. We all start somewhere and the spirit of this piece is to highlight how we can work creatively with things we think might not work, yet continue to work with what we have and move forward in getting better in using what we have to accomplish our mission at hand.
In this case, the client handed me 18 minutes of video footage from single-chip camera that was hand-shot (e.g., no tripods, no external mics, no lighting, no script - more akin to documentary style shooting), highly compressed as mpeg1 320×240, along with a handful of stills that were 1-2meg jpegs each.
Mission from client was, “Here is our story - how best can it be told effectively online?”
The answer is in the proof below with the ending video result.
Knowing neither the video or stills were commanding (digital resolution wise that is), we decided best to split the screen and use both videos and pics at the same time to tell the story, thus in part distract you from overly focusing in on either one at a time and seeing the granular pixations or other blemishes.
In the finished clip below, on one side you see pictures with the Ken Burns effect with panning and cropping. On the other side of the screen you see the video that corresponds to the story in the pics moving along.
Whenever either the stills or the video gets weird (e.g., quality of color, lighting, shakiness, etc) we then dropped an effect on that clip and voila - all of a sudden, things that seemed like mistakes (e.g., pictures out of focus) became awesome transitions that moved the story along with added effects and emotional dimensions.
But happy accidents with effects and visual polishing was only part of it.
The other part was how to sonically pull the viewer thru the story and hence the need to find some fun, offbeat music that could drive yet fit with the various live recordings of volunteers, pastor, and background beats -> Enter the soundtrack, “Gobble Gobble Funk” by you know who!
In the end, I think this piece works really, really well in telling the client’s story.
The last thing I will mention is the title, “Feeding the Angels Among Us.”
This was perhaps the hardest part about scripting and editing this piece. My customer who pays the bills is obvious, but his stakeholders and the constituents they dance with is something that is multilateral, highly diverse and commands respect from all levels.
Some how to say, “feeding the needy” seemed untruthful to those pictured here in this video. After all, these “stars” played a part in the role of life’s give-in-take and somehow there seemed to be a higher truth in naming the title, one that those standing in line, when viewing this clip, would also be proud of.
Which leads me to concept of - is it more blessed to receive or to give?
I don’t know but it seems like sometimes those of us who give can feel entitled to a little moment of self righteous - e.g., “Hey, I just did something for somebody - doesn’t that count for something, somewhere, on somekind of karmic scorecard?” - and I often wonder if the other person who receives isn’t really an Angel in disguise who isn’t silently saying, “Dude, if only you really knew - it is I who is willing to serve as your reminder that God gives us each different talents and skills. Thanks for sharing and best of success with your unfolding generosity of time, gifts, talents, investment in Highest Good, et al.”
Earlier today I posted the Elliott Scheiner audio clips and am now in the process of archiving the project files when I came across a handwritten note to myself -
Mono Wins
The note was written in the middle of the night when the computer was busy rendering the master files and was a reminder to me for the next morning as to where to pick-up and which files would ultimately get published and streamed on this web site.
The original recordings were 44.1khz stereo wave files and I did all the editing at this resolution yet knowing I was ultimately going to kick it down and go to the web with mp3 clips. Thus part of the compression issue became one of stereo vs mono and balancing finished compressed file size with server-bandwidth costs and audio-quality.
Consider the fourth clip - Part 4 of 4 - it was the largest master file weighing in at 212 megs as finished stereo wave cd quality. I knew I wanted FM-radio quality for the mp3 versions (not CD but not AM either) thus rendered all four wave files first to stereo 96kbits 44.1khz for a total file weight of 40.9 megs as compressed mp3s … then I rendered separate versions to mono 64kbits 44.1khz for total weight of 26.9 megs.
While the audio quality is slightly inferior, the mono version was the winner because most of the audio is speech - thus the need for preserving sonic spectrum wasn’t truly necessary except for the killer sonic bug at the beginning of each clip that features me on keys, Jeff Wells on Sax, and Kasha (my 19 month old Labrador Retreiver - or perhpas better stated, “my wife’s Lab …”).
Sonic branding is a term I first heard a couple years back when talking to a staff composer for one of the most successful Soap Opera’s on air. We were talking about his business and skills when he said, “You know Chuck, the best shows on TV have Sonic Brands - that signature ditty that you can hear from another room and know that someone in your house just tuned into Cheers, Seinfeld, Taxi, American Idol…”
He went on to add that from his perspective, not enough American corporate managers are even aware of the importance of this branding let alone using or managing it effectively.
Point noted and ever since our discussion, I’ve been mindful about developing and managing my own sonic brands as well as those for clients for whom I’m retained.
Previous to my discussion with composer friend, I had composed a neat ditty for many of the CoolTea and GoBoardRoom audio clips - one which I referred to internally as “Purple Guy” but when I found myself selling a variation of this mix to a client, I was then at a cross roads for developing a new, more updated, more me, kind of signature for ChuckingIt.com and ChuckScott.com branding.
Hence the ditty, aka Sonic Brand, you hear in the Elliott Scheiner clips.
On February 4th 2008, legendary audio recording engineer Elliott Scheiner (Beck, The Eagles, Steely Dan, Van Morrison, Fleetwood Mac, Natalie Cole, Bruce Hornsby, plus others) spoke at East Coast Music Mall about his record producing experience and take on the music industry today.
I was lucky enough to attend this free recording workshop and had my trusty portable recorder with me hence the following four clips from that evening - enjoy!
Part 1 - The Music Business Industry and Trends
This audio clip is 10 minutes in length and 4.9 meg mp3 file - click here to download the clip … Some of the points Elliott discusses in this clip include: How he got started as New York’s first freelance recording engineer; Where to find the most work; Why The Eagles did not release their album on iTunes but went with Walmart instead; The reality of copy protection; Radio Head’s experience selling albums; and, How our culture has completely failed musicians and artists.
Part 2 - Working with Recording Artists
This audio clip is 12 minutes in length and 5.7 meg mp3 file - click here to download the clip … Some of the points Elliott discusses in this clip include: Common denominator in working with great artists; Getting the unique piano sound for Bruce Hornsby; Tracking vocals for Toto and how technology has made artist lazy; Crazy guitar players and their signature sounds; and, Getting work that is just fine vs good or great.
In my opinion, the story Elliott shares about Bruce Hornsby is really powerful lesson for all business people - it is one about the power of creative-tension, working with people who don’t get along, and the difficulty in selling something new - in this case, a new piano sound - and one that would go on to break the charts!
Part 3 - Mixing, Mastering and Surround Sound
This audio clip is 14 minutes in length and 6.8 meg mp3 file - click here to download the clip … Some of the points Elliott discusses in this clip include: The amount of time it takes to mix a record; Working with samples; Mixing Steely Dan’s Gaucho in surround sound; Mixing with satellite speakers; XM and Sirius codecs changing the surround mix changes the copyright; Monitoring levels and speakers; Kids and bass today; Loudness wars; Getting country music to sound great; Order of mixing instruments; and, the importance of hiring mastering engineers.
Part 4 - Audio Recording Tools, Technology and Techniques
This audio clip is 20 minutes in length and 9.5 meg mp3 file - click here to download the clip … Some of the points Elliott discusses in this clip include: Going digital vs analog; Software effects and EQ vs their hardware equivalents; Being a minimalist and using mics properly; Not depending on compressors and having the artist work the mic; Salvaging old reel-to-reel tape recordings; Consoles; Tips for people running project studios; Watching the levels in a mix; Cost of building analog room vs digital room; and, the cost and risks when working in new rooms.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to do an industrial video shoot - a documentary style video that shows a Connecticut metal fabrication company (50 people on shop floor; 25,000 sq foot facility) plus some really cool footage of the robotic welder I caught from dangling atop a 15 foot ladder overlooking the UV curtains.
As an added fyi, this is one of the first industrial films I’ve done outside of filming my own printing plant back in the late 1980s and early 1990s with VHS and Hi-8 cameras. In this case, I shot just under an hour of footage, and Ethan Winer edited it down to the 10 minute clip you see here on Youtube. Thus I plan to release some of the really cool machine and laser cutting clips as stock footage but to be continued in this dept …
One of the interesting things about this on location recording was that we did not use lav mics on the people speaking nor mics on overhead booms. Instead we used a hand-held direct to smartcard recorder to capture brilliantly clear sound - sound that dominantly captured the voice of people speaking yet also captured the background of their environment with a balance that sounds pleasing.
Note the robotic welder appears around 8 minutes 30 seconds into clip - it is akin to Terminator but better because you can make money with this robot!
For those of you who Santa delivered a Windows Vista machine, be sure to checkout this clip and my recommendation is to return your machine, get your money back, get a new machine with WinXP or maybe jump ship and get a MAC … ho ho ho!
To those who are concerned about a “global big brother” resulting from all our digital and global village connectedness, I say humbug and let the global standards roll forth.
I say this partly in jest as I believe there is already a Universal All-knowing being, one who is loving and graceful but really really smart and ever expanding who already knows everything there is to know about each one of us, and on a more serious grounded earthly level, I was reminded recently of the glory of universal standards that come from collective agreements among men.
This reminder came by way of processing international credit cards for Tele-Vision DVDs. Up to now, most of my e.commerce exposure has been with processing Canadian and US credit cards.
As running start fyi, early on most of CoolTea’s credit card sales were for event tickets, thus we didn’t care too much about what your billing or shipping address was as you had to come to the event to get the deliverable.
But along the way, Mastercard and Visa started charging bill backs for merchants who failed to run AVS (address verification system). One day, six months after a big event where we had charged $5,000 worth of tickets, I was aghast to see an additional charge to our bank account in the way of several hundred dollars.
I called my Merchant bank and said, “What gives - where are these charges coming from?” and as politely and professionally clean as any large institution can do, they did their best to explain that these were billback charges from Mastercard and Visa because CoolTea did not pass the billing address information to the banks during the real-time credit card transactions.
I tried to explain that CoolTea was in the event business, and the likelihood of some hacker buying tickets with a fraudulent card and then showing up at the event was very unlikely, but they just laughed at me and said, “Sorry - take it or leave it. If you want to accept Mastercard and Visa, gotta play by their rules.”
CoolTea had been capturing your address info just-in-case we needed to call you or send mail but had not been passing this info along during the transaction.
Okay, ouch to bill back lesson, and when we started passing the address info to banks, double ouch. Our customer service calls started to climb.
“Hey Chuck, why was my card declined?”
It turned out that most of the cards were valid but did not pass the AVS code verification - e.g., most of the time it was a simple faux pax by a customer in that they were at work using their personal cards but entered their work address; or it was the reverse - people working at home using their corporate cards but entering their home address. Most of this got cleared up when we changed our online forms and improved the language about billing address entered needing to match 100% with what is on file with banks.
I should also mention we were always getting your card’s three digit security code but Mastercard and Visa didn’t give us a break - they still wanted to see matching billing addresses, otherwise they would charge us more points.
There is nothing more frustrating than looking at accounting statements and thinking it was all settled and done, only to find a couple of months later that Mastercard and Visa decided to penalize us.
So fast forward and CoolTea has a wonderful e.commerce system, no more charge backs, almost no customer services calls, and all is good, until we ventured into the international scene.
First it was funny stuff like different characters for other languages - e.g., Norwegians have some funny characters, and no, I’m not talking about people, but literal text characters that are considered “high level ASCII” - you know, the E’s with the funny slants on top, the O’s with double dots, etc.
So these funny characters wrecked some havoc with our banking transactions. We got around this with some data scrubbing before passing the variables to the banks, but then AVS bit us again.
In particular, our German customers started complaining, “Hey I know my card is valid, my address is valid, my 3-digit code is valid, so why are you bouncing my card and transaction?”
This triggered my auto neurosis of “Now what have I done and missed” but alas, I came to find out after much technical digging with gateways and banks that there is no AVS with most of the international banks.
It’s not my fault that most international banking systems cannot confirm their customers billing address in real-time, so now what? Don’t do AVS and pay more points, don’t accept international customers, or ..??..
Suffice it to say we found a solution - some logic under the hood that says, “if US/Canada customer go this way, otherwise process it this way”, and now the international cards from around the world are going through the system without hiccups - at least for now until somebody changes the systems or rules, etc. - a reminder of the golden rule, “those with the gold rule” and since CoolTea is not on par with Mastercard/Visa’s gold, so be it and let’s learn to flow.
Which brings me full circle to standards.
The 1980s IBM PC is a great example of the explosion of growth that can occur when we collectively agree to open standards.
MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) is perhaps the most profound example of benefits from standards, but unless you are musically inclined and want to gig and share your music with other like-minded creative folks, it is perhaps a tad esoteric for the average person who is not musically inclined, so let me jump to open standards we all can relate to.
Without the alphabet (e.g., here are 26 symbols that mean this) and grammar (e.g., here is how we arrange the alphabetic symbols) and other open source frameworks like musical chords, notes and scales, what kind of a planet would we have, and how enriching would our lives be?
Thus I say, standards, especially open source, collectively agreed upon ones, are a good thing - even a beneficial thing and necessary for free, open democracies that win with growing markets.
After all, and looping back to credit card processing, I am grateful for the service that Mastercard and Visa provide. I am mindful of the thieves, scoundrels, and risks that the likes of Mastercard and Visa endure. And yet I am committed to providing our customers with the most efficient shopping experience possible that balances et al.
In summary - viva the open standards enthusiasts - and back to my opening point about already being known by some other intelligence - double bravo to accountability and transparency!
Do you know somebody who would love to learn the principles of mixing audio and video on a computer and produce Hollywood-like films from the comforts of home?
For less than twenty bucks, you can own (or gift) Ethan Winer’s Tele-Vision DVD which is packed with over three hours of audio/video educational content.
Below is a seven-minute promotional trailer on Youtube that Ethan recently created to augment the DVD description on his site and clarify the educational values packed into his DVD.
Essentially the DVD contains two music videos, plus three hours of additional content showing in detail how the videos were made.
The educational content on the DVD ranges from intermediate to advanced, split between on-camera technical explanations and screen-cap videos showing details of EQ, compression, reverb, etc. and other mixing decisions.
The tutorials cover both the audio and video aspects of production including video editing, green screens, lighting, using multiple cameras, and much more.
It’s not a beginner’s how-to guide for connecting a microphone to a sound card, but it will be useful to anyone who wants to see how a sophisticated video production is put together.
I’m thrilled to announce that my good friend Ethan Winer has just gone live with his latest video and DVD release.
Tele-Vision is an orchestral rock video by Ethan Winer that follows on the heels of his wildly acclaimed, “A Cello Rondo” - a video that has received critical acclaim and has exceeded over half-a-million downloads.
Tele-Vision is dedicated to the electric guitar and features original music written and produced by Ethan. His exciting soundtrack is mixed visually with an array of over 40 different Ethan’s on stage (via green screen technology) performing each of the instruments used in the score, timed exactly to the beat.
And would you like to take a guess at who did all the filming - yes, homeboy - some of you might even recognize some of my CoolTea event wardrobe being repurposed, like the multi-colored jacket, hats, glasses, etc.
This was a great summer filming and working with Ethan on his latest release. At 4:30AM this morning we went live with the CoolTea shopping cart, and by 11AM we had already sold several orders from around the country.
Not only is this a very entertaining DVD, but it is also jam-packed with hours of behind the scenes and making of sections that cover the principles behind audio and video editing on today’s PCs, plus interviews with guest performers like Ed Dzubak, three-time Emmy winning composer, who sat in on drums for this production.
Below is a ten minute video clip I produced for Saint Patrick’s Church that features their Bible Camp 2007 - A Quest for Truth. The clip is currently hosted at YouTube and originally I wanted to share this as a heart-warming, intimate look of the children and families who participated with this year’s camp.
It is truly an Americana inspiration and gives hope to the soul - especially when we are bombarded with negative news from so many corners of the globe, this humble clip shows youth from all walks of life singing, playing, building, learning, and sharing in manner that gives me hope for the upcoming generation - a generation I’ve heard referenced as “The Rainbow Generation.”
It is also a great example of Church Marketing and the power of today’s multimedia technology. The Pastor shot the footage with a simple, handheld video camera - nothing fancy - no lighting, no staging, no separate sound team, etc. He handed me approx 6 or 7 mpeg-1 clips, each of which varied in length from 5 minutes to 15 minutes.
The hardest part for me was finding “The Arch of the Story” and how best to present these clips. Knowing I was limited to 100 meg file and 10 minutes max per YouTube, I started with the end in mind. Showing a strong finish, with professionally recorded patriotic music - Thank You Katie - timed to a slide show of higher resolution pictures taken from one of the Religious Ed leaders per the Pastor’s permission, I then worked backwards.
I also knew that the kids signing the Americana medley was also a strong start, even though that section occurred toward the end of the bible camp week, I put it upfront to give a sense of the “stars of the show.” With beginning and ending in place, I then edited the clips for those scenes that reflected the week’s activities - including making their Resurrection Butterflies, FBI Badges (firm believers in Christ), plus sundry other crafts.
Once I had a story board in mind, the next issue was of Sonic Branding - e.g., what kind of opening sound and visual theme could we create to help brand the church and use as opener for the other videos in development? Thus I found some funkee orchestral flute-guitar rock clip that was in my sound library that I had created over seven years ago with Acid Loops, and put this sonic bed to a beat with the lead images from their web site and voila - opening sonic / visual branding bug :>)
Lastly, I had to decide on project settings with Vegas. I started with Square Pixel 640×480 1.0 PAR (pixel aspect ratio) thinking we were just going to distribute the finished clip on the web, but as I got into it, I realized that some of the families might want a VideoCD or DVD version for their family archives, thus backed up and created the Rectangular Pixel (740×480 .909 PAR) version required for TV sets. In the end, I created two versions so that no black bars would appear in either version and both would display correctly - e.g., TV version on TVs and the squared computer version on monitors.
My first introduction with computers was circa 1975 with mainframes, punch cards and programming simplistic slot machines with random fruits - e.g., cherries, lemons, oranges, and dollar signs - any combination of which would spin and land in three-pane lucky display screen.
Earlier today I posted the 
To those who are concerned about a “global big brother” resulting from all our digital and global village connectedness, I say humbug and let the global standards roll forth.
