PBHD

Playback Harddrive Review

May 11, 2010 — 3 Comments

Disclaimer: I personally know Luke McElroy (Orange Thread Media), Stephen Proctor (WorshipVJ) and Camron Ware (VisualWorshiper). I don’t know that that really changes anything about this review, but I just wanted to get that out there. In fact, I had dinner with Luke earlier tonight and had my PBHD hand-delivered by him.

So here we go! A quick review about the PBHD, but first, a short video featuring the unboxing of my PBHD:

PBHD unboxing from chris_rouse on Vimeo.

The song is “Orange Blossom Special” by the Charlie Daniels Band. It’s the only song I have with “orange” in the name. Pictures show on my Nikon D-100 and edited with iMovie ’09, featuring outdated Ken Burns affect and bad transitions.

The song is “Orange Blossom Special” by the Charlie Daniels Band. It’s the only song I have with “orange” in the name. Pictures shot with my Nikon D-100 and edited with iMovie ’09, featuring outdated Ken Burns effect and bad transitions.

Yes, that was “Orange Blossom Special” by Charlie Daniels. I thought it was rather fitting. And yes, I tried to make the transitions as cheesy as possible.

On with the review…

The Playback Hard Drive (PBDH) is an OWC Mercury-Elite AL hard drive. You can pick one up with several configurations of hard drive sizes and connection types. If you plan on growing your media library I’d recommend picking up the 1TB or 2TB hard drive. For my purposes, the PBHD is a secondary hard drive for me since I already own a 1TB OWC drive. I currently don’t have enough content to even fill up the 500GB PBHD that I bought. (Or the 1TB I have, or the 250GB Western-Digital hard drive, or my 500GB LaCie hard drive, although that one isn’t working right anyway.)

As promised, the PBHD comes with 75 HD videos, 79 SD (that’s 4 bonus clips) clips, 50 triple-wide clips, and 120 still images (some of which are triple-wide). Here’s the best part, these guys have included over 500 additional videos and still images from four other producers. The bonus set is already available for free from those producers, but the guys behind PBHD have gathered the resources into one location for you and included them on the PBHD at no extra cost or effort to you.

The PBHD has several purposes. One of the ideas behind it is to provide a starting point for churches that are just getting into visual worship. This is the church that has either just added a projection system into the worship area or is upgrading from basic backgrounds and PowerPoint. At just over the cost of the hard drive users are getting a couple thousand dollars (purchased individually) worth of media. $249 (plus tax if you live in TN) for a 500GB hard drive is a great value for a church just getting started in this exciting visual worship world.

On the other hand, the PBHD is a great product for churches that already have a good collection of media but are always interested in adding new content and adding a backup hard drive to their collection. With the exception of the bonus content and a small number of the other graphics and videos on the PBHD, none of this content is available anywhere else. It also includes Camron Wares’s world-famous “Names of God” videos that I once ripped off in Spanish for an event before he created the official Español version.

The PBHD is also a great collection of media for the VJ (aspiring or established). Every clip has been encoded with H.264 using high-quality settings (explanation here and here) that will allow for greater efficiency with programs like ProVideoPlayer that allow for speed controls and cross fading on-the-fly. H.265 has also become a fairly ubiquitous industry standard despite some of its limitations. Again, all that is explained in the links above. H.265 also plays nicely with Windows and Mac (although some tweaking may be needed for playback in Windows).

Here’s the one drawback. The PBHD is formatted to work on a Mac. I connected it to my Compaq laptop that’s running Windows7 and while it detected a new USB device it didn’t actually mount the drive. This is a limitation with Windows. However, there are some programs that will mount Mac-formatted drives in Windows. Luke and I discussed this issue over dinner tonight and talked about some of the possible solutions. So if you’re in the market for a PBHD, but you only have PCs, stay tuned for more information on this topic. UPDATE: I just got a call from Luke and he has updated the PBHD store to include a Mac or Windows formatted option. The Windows format will come pre-formatted in FAT32. This does limit you to file transfers of under 8GB per single file. However, I doubt many of you will be using backgrounds that are that large so it shouldn’t be a problem. So if you use a Windows computer make sure you select the correction option on the store page when you go to purchase your PBHD.

Overall the PBHD is a great product. The actual hard drive itself is one of the most stable hard drives available and MacSales (the company that sells the actual drive) provides great customer services for their products. Even though you’re buying the hard drive through Orange Thread Media, MacSales still provides direct customer service on the drive if you have any issues. There is a lot of great content on the drive, although not all of it is for everyone. It’s like I told Luke, I don’t like using candle loops very often, but plenty of people do. Unfortunately for all of you waterfall-, bubbling river- or bucolic scenery-loving types out there there aren’t any of those clips on the PBHD. But the good news is that once you buy the PBHD you can download all the nature scenes you want and add them to the hard drive.

And there’s one more thing…for everyone who purchases the PBHD you will receive one free clip or image EVERY month from here on out. You can get all the details and more on the Playback Hard Drive here.

In Technology, Video Post
box

Is it dangerous outside the box?

December 8, 2009 — 8 Comments

Earlier tonight I tweeted the following:

Do churches try to “think outside the box” because they are dissatisfied with the box God gave them?

This thought was sparked during a conversation with Stephen Proctor (@worshipVJ, WorshipVJ blog) over dinner. We got around to this question after talking about using technology in church, what does “excellence” mean, and a variety of other topics. Before I put this question in context, here are the Twitter replies that were sparked by my question:

(via @glohiatt) do you think God put us in a box?

(via @brianfalexander) @glohiatt what I think @chrisrouse is referring to is the life that God has given them, not sure though. God does give us restrictions..

(via @glohiatt) well if we are in a box, then so is the whole world. we were sent out to all corners of the earth, right?

Here is the context: a couple of months ago Church Production Magazine published an article on Elevation Church in Charlotte, NC. In the article, Wes Watson, Elevation’s lead producer, is quoted as saying:

“Pastor [Furtick] leads us to think inside the box vs. outside the box. We’ve learned that as we think inside the box, it forces the box to get bigger. Let’s be honest, the box is there (nothing is free), so quit thinking outside the box and get creative on what the inside of your box looks like.

So now you have the context of my tweet. It has nothing to do with the life we as Christians live or anything like that. It has to do with how the church responds creatively to technology and physical things. Sure, there may be a church down the street that is bigger and has fancy lights and concert-quality production, and your church may have some conventional light fixtures and a single projector.

We’re trained out whole lives to “think outside the box”. To do something no one else has thought of. In marketing, it’s referred to as “guerrilla marketing.” In the church, thinking outside the box tends to mean doing something that your individual church hasn’t done, but that has been done by other churches. Many churches defer to Willow Creek, North Point, LifeChurch.tv, Saddleback, etc for their ideas.

(I’m struggling to keep this topic focused already. I want to go some many directions with it, but I don’t have time.)

When we think inside the box, inside the restrictive budgets we’ve been given, inside the style of worship our church has, inside the spiritual and emotional space our church members are living in, we learn to do more with less. And as we learn to do more with less, we realize how to expand what we can do.

Think about it, Jesus fed a lot of people on some fish and bread. Small box, big results. Granted, He did have a bit of a bonus on His side being God and all, but still, the lesson exhibited in that story is to trust God to do more with what we have. He didn’t have any doubt that the small ration he had would go a long way. He knew it would.

The same goes for the church. Proctor expanded on my initial thought by asking if the reason we try to think outside the box so often is because we are dissatisfied with the box God has given us to work in. But I think if we constantly strive to think outside the box, we’ll never get there. We’ll always want bigger and better and shinier. If we think INSIDE the box, we find creative ways to use our limited resources to create environments and experiences far greater than we imagined. If we simply trust God to do more with what He has given us, our box will grow. If we try to force the box to grow by thinking outside of it all the time, the box will eventually catch up to our great ideas and suddenly be inside the box again.

Don’t be so concerned about being better than “that” church. Focus on being the best church for your members and guests. Church is not a competition. We’re all in this together. God never called us to do more than we can. He called us to do more with what He has given us. And what He has given us fits into a pretty spectacular box.

The box is a test of faith. Trust God inside the box and He’ll provide you with the resources to have a bigger box when you need it. Just don’t put God in the box.

Image source

In Church and Worship, Ponderings, Technology
tweet-for-food

getting a job in 140 characters or less

November 13, 2009 — 2 Comments

On January 1 2010, I signed up for Twitter. If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now, there’s a good chance you have never heard of the Internet, Facebook, cable TV or people. I lurked on Twitter for a while before I actually posted something–I wanted to see if I could determine a value of this new medium before jumping on board. Now, I’ve passed the 2000 tweets mark recently.

Since my first tweet, I’ve covered a mission trip, birthday wishes, musical selections, food options, random updates, replies to people, re-tweets of others, made general observations, promoted things, attacked things, and recently started looking for a job.

The beauty of Twitter is that it allows networking to happen with virtually no effort on ones part. I attended a conference a couple weeks ago for church tech people and I met a couple dozen new people and added many of them as followers/people I follow on Twitter. Since then I have had a national network of people keeping their ears and eyes open helping me job hunt.

While at the conference I got to meet someone that I connected with during the summer over wireless RF issues while in San Diego (@rfninja). He works for Shure Microphones. He also recommended me for a job opening at a pretty well known company in the church production world. As I write this, I’m currently “It” in a game of phone tag with the president of that company.

Twitter also helped me get some temporary work at a local church here in Nashville so that I can make a little extra money and help them out where I can.

Tonight I opened up TweetDeck and I had an @reply from someone that is connected to me on Twitter via a few other connections with a job offer for a part-time sound tech position at his church.

Before I give too much credit to Twitter, I haven’t officially gotten a “real” job out of any of this yet, just a couple of offers. However, I haven’t received any offers via Facebook or LinkedIn, nor are either of those are easy to network on.

I prefer to network via Twitter because it allows for rapid communication with people and instant connections and there is minimal personal information involved. Granted, anyone following me, or who looks me up on Twitter, can see my 2000+ posts, they are only able to see one side of the conversation (unless they follow the people I follow or do a general search for my name) which allows for some privacy in a very public forum.

I’ve also made a few real-life connections with people I’ve met via Twitter, and there are still several more that I look forward to getting to meet one day.

All in all, for as narcissistic as Twitter can be, it can be an incredibly practical networking tool. Here’s hoping to landing a job via @twitter connections.

—-

Update:  Since posting this, I have started working at a church in Nashville, Long Hollow Baptist Church, part time. While I didn’t get this job directly thanks to being on Twitter and talking about needing a job, it didn’t hurt.  I was able to stay connected to a guy I knew there and talked about a possible future job opening there. Then I connected with the FOH guy via email, then Facebook, then Twitter, and filled in a couple of times mixing monitors at the main campus and FOH at one of the satellite campuses. And after a few dozen tweets about looking for work, I finally got offered a part-time job at the church.

In Ponderings, Technology

iTunes Genius and connected lyrics

October 24, 2008 — 0 Comments

I won’t worry my life away
I won’t worry my life away

The Remedy, Jazon Mraz

Could you look me in the eye
And tell me that you’re happy now, oh

Are You Happy Now?, Michele Branch

I’m sorry for the person I became.
I’m sorry that it took so long for me to change.
I’m ready to try never become that way again
‘Cause who I am hates who I’ve been.
Who I am hates who I’ve been.

Who I Am Hates Who I Am, Relient K

‘Cuz we lost it all
Nothing last forever
I’m sorry I can’t be perfect
Now it’s just too late and we can’t go back
I’m sorry I can’t be perfect

Perfect, Simple Plan

When you’re dreaming with a broken heart
The waking up is the hardest part

Dreaming With a Broken Heart, John Mayer

And here we go there’s nothing left to choose
And here we go there’s nothing left to lose

Nothing Left to Lose, Mat Kearney

You have so many relationships in this life
Only one or two will last
You go through all the pain and strife
Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast, oh yeah
And they’re gone so fast, yeah

So hold on to the ones who really care
In the end they’ll be the only ones there
When you get old and start losing you hair
Can you tell me who will still care…
Can you tell me who will still care?
Well can ya?

MMMBop, Hanson

We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No we didn’t light it
But we tried to fight it

We Didn’t Start the Fire, Billy Joel

This is my life
Its not what it was before
All these feelings I’ve shared
And these are my dreams
That I’d never lived before
Somebody shake me
Cause I, I must be sleeping

So Far Away, Staind

In Ponderings, Technology

Move over Hef, here comes Tom and Mark

September 23, 2008 — 1 Comment

(Insert urgent news bulletin sounds…blip blip blippity blip)  This just in.  It appears internet searches for Tom’s Myspace and Mark’s Facebook have surpassed Hef’s Playboy and the rest of the online skin industry.  According to the Reuter’s online version of the story

“As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased,” said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

“My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don’t have time to look at adult sites.”

Bill Tancer is the general manager of Hitwise, a company that specializes in tracking online search habits of over 10 million users.

But what does this mean for the online porn industry?  Surely this spells disaster for what was once the fastest growing industry in the world.  There are roughly 4.2 million internet porn sites grossing well over $2 billion (yes, that’s a ten-digit number) annually with over 72 million new visitors every year.  And sites like Myspace and Facebook have taken over?

Continue Reading…

In Ponderings, Technology
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