>> I took some time earlier this week and upgraded my Wordpress installation to version 2.2.  I was expecting a possibly a small face lift and some more features, but there really isn’t much to note aside from my theme getting whacked and RSS icons getting plastered all over the top of the header.  I upgraded to the latest version of the theme and that seems to have fixed it, and all my plugins seem to be working as well.  Just for good measure, I added Digg icons at the bottom of the posts.

>> Has anyone else ever dealt with credit card readers on their network?  We’ve got one set up in our cafe area at the moment, and we are getting quite a few read errors during transactions.  It’s a pain because any read error totally voids the transaction and it has to be restarted.  We’ve tested this reader on various locations in our network with the same results (which actually makes me breathe easier).  The only thing I haven’t tried at this point is putting the reader on a separate VLAN, but I haven’t had time to get that far yet.  If anyone has any experience with credit card readers, I’d love to hear any advice you have.

>>  This Thursday the Video Department received some much-needed help!  Mr. Jeff Conn has come aboard for a summer internship and will be working mainly in video post-production.  Jeff has already lent quite a bit to the video team with his editing skills.  It’s going to be a tremendous blessing to have him around!

>>  On Friday I entered into some new territory (for me, anyway):  SSL certificates.  Though it’s a little embarrassing to admit, SSL implementation has been on my to-do list for some time now but had never made it to the front burner.  Between Friday and Saturday, I managed (with some how-to advice from John Dolan) to get a CA set up and get a certificate set up on our Exchange server for OWA and OMA.  OMA wasn’t a huge deal, because we only have 2 Windows Mobile devices checking mail on our server, but it’s still nice to know that it works.  Thanks for your help, John!

Next week my primary goal will be getting SSL-Explorer up and running for our non-notebook-toting staff.  I’ve been having some issues with the community edition, such as the WebDAV URLs not opening correcting on the client end.  Hopefully by the end of the week things can get smoothed out.

Last night was another work night at NewPointe.  Here’s what went down.

–> Data/phone lines were run to the kitchen.  This is funny, because I remember doing the wiring plan thinking When will we ever need phones and data in there?  Well here we are, 6 months into the building and they’re being installed.  It just goes to show you, never say “never” and don’t lay down too many absolutes when planning a network.

–> A 12-drive eSATA array made its way to our Final Cut desk.  Since mid-March, we’ve been making it a point to archive video from our services from the weekend…at least one of them.  The problem comes with the fact that our video system is HD (it looks great, but it’s a double-edged sword).  Recording HD video will stretch your hard drives to the limit.  Compressed HD runs about 60 or so GB per hour (which is great compared to uncompressed HD, which is upwards of about 650GB per hour).

Enter the Norco DS-1220.  It’s got some pretty good reviews on it and so far I’ve really liked what I’ve seen.  We loaded ours up with 12 750GB drives; 10 for the array and 2 for hot spares.  The only drawback I’ve seen with this board is that it comes with a PCI-X eSATA controller, and since our MacPros don’t have PCI-X on them, I ended up buying a HighPoint RR2314 eSATA controller to work with our Mac’s PCI-express.  Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it thus far.

Next Work Night:  It’s gonna be a cable-pulling extravaganza.  We’re putting some much-needed data and phone drops into the control and editing rooms, and also taking care of some AV lines in the process.

I’ve recently started listening to the Creative Synergy Podcast, hosted by Greg Atkinson and Anthony Coppedge.  In their latest episode (Ep. 5 when this was posted), they talk about copyright laws and how they affect churches.  VERY interesting stuff to me, mainly because I’m working in video and media as well as IT.  Any church that is working with video, purchased audio, or streaming should give this a listen.

You can get to the podcast notes and the download link by going here.

There are some days when I come in to the office and get so into a project that I don’t pull myself away from it until I’m near exhaustion.  It doesn’t happen often, but it happened on Wednesday night.

When we put our control room together back in November, we didn’t really have much structure as far as file sharing between the Macs (we run an Apple control room, y’all).  There was no set location for incoming media files to go, and every machine was wide open, always logged on as Admin.  After taking some time to plan out what computers needed access to what, I headed upstairs on Wednesday afternoon to start re-tooling things.  Somewhere between 3:30 and 4:00am Thursday morning, I finally had things working how they needed to be… shares are being auto-mounted at login, the machines automatically log into accounts that don’t have admin privileges, and all the software (Final Cut, Pro Presenter, Keynote) all seem to be working fine.

On Thursday afternoon, we were able to put the new setup to the test.  Cindy and Jane headed to the control room to assemble song lyrics and message graphics.  So far, everything seems to work great!

This is probably the most important thing that happened for me this week.  The more I learn about systems and how they need to function (and I’ve got so much to learn), the more I realize that these systems need to work their best when I’m NOT around!  The Macs in the control room are a huge part of what we do on the weekend, and I’m feeling pretty good that Wednesday night’s project turned out as well as it did.  It was worth every ounce of lost sleep (which I didn’t start to regain until late Thursday afternoon).

Anyone that works in video production knows that sometimes the pace can be maddening… looming deadlines, crazy shoot appointments, and endless editing tasks can add up to a lot of stressful times.

Seriously…I really enjoy what I do, but there are times when the workload is crazy.  And when the workload is heavy, it’s just hard to grow.  Face it, it’s just HARD to look ahead and think of growth when you’re in a constant struggle just to keep your head above the water.

There have been a few things happening around here that are worth celebrating.

-  I’ve gone off-staff as Media Director.  OK, so this wasn’t so recent (mid-March, I believe), but was the first in this string of events.  After a re-organization of the staff, my job changed from IT and video production to solely IT.  This doesn’t mean that I’ve quit video, but it really allows for more clarity as far as job responsibilities and priorities are concerned.  Most of all though, this is freeing me up to think more on terms of growth and the future, which I’ve missed out on for some time now.

-  God has brought some incredible volunteers into the video ministry — behind the camera, in the control room, and in post-production as well.  These people are passionate about what they do and are constantly stepping up their game.  You guys ROCK!!  NewPointe would NOT be the same without you!

-  Most recently, uber volunteer Shannon Bailey has signed on as Media Director.  He will be coordinating non-live productions, from live shoots to the re-scaling an existing video for the weekend.  This is huge, as the amount of productions we’re taking on is ever-increasing.

-  Coming down the pike, Jeff Conn is going to be coming on-board as an intern for the summer.  Jeff will be doing a majority of his work on Final Cut Pro, and will also be filling in some gaps in the IT department.

Needless to say, I am extremely STOKED about what’s going on here!  It’s pretty apparent that God is stepping us up so that He can do some awesome things here in Tusc./Holmes County.  I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Have you ever had a period of time go by that you were so into your work that you can’t really remember what’s been going on?  That’s where I’ve been lately.  I’m going to attempt to recap some of that stuff here.

We had a training day for our Service Programming teams (video, worship, audio, etc.) this past Sunday.  I had the chance to sit down and talk to our control room volunteers in a non-production setting.  Our video volunteers are AWESOME.  I love being able to work with them and watch them get better at what they do.  Just a few months ago, we had no video people besides myself.  God has blessed us IMMENSELY with a complete control room staff, camera operators, editors for our offline stuff.  It’s been awesome to see His hand at work through everything. 

On Monday we started a trial run on Service Desk Plus.  I must say, I am really impressed with the software thus far.  It’s a huge step up from what we’ve been working on to this point.  We’re going to demo the software for 2 weeks and then make a decision on it.  So far, it looks like a win to me, but we’ll see..

Tuesday and Wednesday, along with messing with Service Desk, I’ve been tinkering with SSL Explorer.  This is something I tried out earlier this year when we were looking for a VPN solution.  It got moved to the back burner to make room for other things, and because at the time we really didn’t have the bandwidth to support it.  I installed it on one of our servers and got it connected to Active Directory.  Once everything is tuned in, K and I will start training on it.  We’ve had some users asking about it (we sent out a poll to guage how much VPN would be used if we installed it), so I’m pretty anxious to get it cranked up so those same users can take it for a test drive.  Much thanks to Andrew Mitry for talking me through what I really needed and helping us save some ca$h.

Tomorrow I was planning on simply getting ready for the simulcast and prepping for the weekend.  Late this afternoon though, Danny’s laptop began giving him fits, so it looks like I’ll be hitting that up first thing tomorrow morning.

We didn’t start doing any live video until we moved into our new facility last December, and the volunteers that help make that happen (on the control room and cameras) are nothing short of awesome!  They are here early for every service and do a fantastic job of enhancing the experience of everyone that shows up on the weekend.

Tonight our control room operators had a tough night.  Not quality-wise, but temperature-wise.  One of our rooftop A/C units failed last night, and the problem wasn’t discovered until it was too late.  Nine volunteers stuck it out in a VERY warm control room and did an AWESOME job (as always!) with song lyrics, message notes, switching, prompting, and everything else.  Great job tonight, gang!

So, the next time you’re at NewPointe for the weekend and you have to sit in the back half of the room, remember to give some love to the camera and control room crews.

One of the highlights of this past week was the installation of a new piece of gear for our video system.  Since we’ve moved into the new control room,  we haven’t had a way to record our productions straight off the switcher (which runs un 1080i), and instead have had to resort to loading tapes into the cameras when we wanted to capture something on tape.

Enter the Blackmagic Design Multibridge Extreme.  When it’s connected to your Mac or PC (via a 4-lane PCI-e connector disguised as a DVI cable), it serves as a capture/playback device that can take in just about any signal you throw at it.  We set this unit up in the editing room alongside a Mac Pro with a fat RAID 0 array in it, and were able to record this past weekend’s services straight off our production switcher in 8-bit uncompressed HD with no dropped frames.  As much as I like the idea of recording uncompressed, there’s no way we can use 1.3 TB of disk space every week, so next weekend we will definitely be moving to a compressed format.

Another cool thing about the MBE is that if you disconnect the PCI-e cable, it becomes an conversion tool and will up/down-convert just about any signal between NTSC and HD-SDI.  If you’ve got an audio source and are upconverting to HD-SDI, the system will also embed the audio signal for you if you choose.  This is EXTREMELY handy for when you need to route a signal with audio to another location in the building.  The only drawback regarding the upconversion process is that the unit will not up-scale to HD, you will need a separate piece for that.  (We’re using AJA’s HDP to convert HD-SDI to DVI and extract the audio)

The only other thing I would caution would-be buyers on this unit (specifically Mac users) is that while it CAN act as another monitor on OS X, it does NOT support Core Image, so don’t think you’re going to get Keynote to work in HD without turning on software rendering (which, I might add, is PAINFUL at 1920×1080).  This rules out using software like ProPresenter 3 as well.  However, we ARE using an earlier version of Pro Presenter in a very similar setup with no issues (we’re using a DeckLink HD instead of a Multibridge for that machine).

On a side-note, the only way I’ve found so far to get a DVI output into our HD-SDI switcher is to use Gefen’s DVI to HD-SDI scaler and then run it through an HD-SDI frame sync.  Has anyone found a cheaper solution?  I’d love to know about it.

I’m very excited about the opportunities that this is going to open up for us.  With the right people, we would be able to offer a whole message series on DVD with some kickin’ menus and packaging.  We’ll also be able to provide podcasts of the service as well.  Cool stuff!  I’m already thinking about snagging another one of these units so that we can downconvert to NTSC on the fly and offer it as a live stream.  We’ll see how that goes.

If any week could be described as the “perfect storm,” this past week was it.  Between video projects, 3 different events, and rolling DST updates out to all of our PCs and Macs, this past week was absolutely nuts.  When you see the end result though, and when you see the stuff that took all week to do affect other people and cause change in their lives, that makes up for all all the time that had to be spent on it.

This week we had First Wednesday, which is always amazing.  The theme of this month was ‘Deal or No Deal.’  You can read John’s scoop on FW here. 

On Friday we had a night set up especially for our volunteers.  Tim Hawkins was on the scene and had everyone there in absolute stitches.  I must admit, it’s been a long long time since I’ve laughed that hard.  The BEST thing about this evening though?  EVERY volunteer was able to enjoy the evening with no obligations whatsoever.  We trained a few staff on using cameras and some of the control room equipment so that we didn’t even need to use our volunteers for IMAG.  All the food was cooked and served by staff.  All-in-all, a great night.

On to Sunday!  The Elements series has been amazing so far.  This weekend was no different.  Danny gives an excellent account of what went down, and he’s much more eloquent than me anyway. :)  Our live production teams did an AWESOME job, both in the control room and on the floor.

Was this week crazy?  You bet.  But the end result was life change for everyone involved.  That makes up for it, ten-fold.

Man, I’ve been slacking already on the blog…

Actually, this last week has been very crazy.  Most of it was spent up in the auditorium control room doing a complete rebuild of our video system.  Because our control room was built so quickly, there was a lot of excess wire hanging around (nothing was cut to length when we built the system, because it was 2 days before opening day).  We knew we needed to get our wires cleaned up, but we also took the week to look at the positioning of some of our gear and how everything flowed.  By the end of the week, the wiring crew had everything patched back together, and on Saturday, all of the cameras were hooked up and tested.  With the exception of one genlock issue with our Sony BRC camera, everything went off without a hitch.

Yeah, there are still a few wires peeking out of places, but trust me, it’s much better than it looked.  And yes, if you’re looking close, you see that we’ve got Macs in there.  People ask me if I’m a Mac or a PC guy, and the answer is ”yes.”  I spend a good amount of time on both platforms, so I try to make them play nice with each other as much as I can.

Even better than than the rebuild, this week we officially signed on our first volunteer video director!  This is something I didn’t think would happen so fast, but it’s amazing (and quite cool) how God provides in your need.  Hopefully we can get a couple more people on the roster for directing our live productions.  I know there’s at least that many hiding out in the congregation somewhere. :-)