Came across this resource today from Elevation Church. They are offering some of their graphic designs for free. They also provide you with the photoshop .psd files, so you can customize the graphics for your needs. Check it out: http://resources.elevationchurch.org/
All posts by BallastMedia
Managing Installed Codecs
Have you ever wanted to know what codecs you have installed on your system? Have you ever wanted to disable a codec? I came across a great little utility recently that will let you do this. It’s called InstalledCodec and you can download it free here.
I’ve been having lots of problems recently in Premiere Pro with the program crashing as soon as I attempt to import or export anything. As soon as I would select either option from the menu, I would instantly be presented with the desktop. PP was just gone. This only happened in projects where I was using HDV mpeg files so I began to suspect a codec issue. I could reproduce this crash consistantly every time.
Using InstalledCodec I found LOTS of mpeg codecs hanging around on my system from other software, even lots of software that I’ve since un-installed. For instance, I’d installed a trial version of Avid and subsequently un-installed it, but I still had over 20 codecs that were listed as being from Avid.
Since most software, and your computer decide to use one codec over another based on something called “merit” many of these additional codecs that had been installed more recently then Adobe or even Microsoft’s codecs may be being utilized now instead of the original codecs that PP configured/verified when it was installed.
I used InstalledCodec to disable LOTS of codecs on my system and magically PP no longer crashes. I completed the project I was working on without any further crashing issues. In the image at the beginning of this post you can see the user interface with a bunch of the Avid codecs disabled. Disabling a codec is as simple as selecting any codec you want from the list and selecting disable.
OrganCam – Security Camera Lens Field of View
Kind of a random post, but I’ve been putting together a simple video system so that our organist can see the choir director on a monitor located at the organ. Due to the size of our organ and the angles involved it’s hard for the organist to see much more then the head of the choir director. In doing this, I needed to figure out what type of lens to use on the camera given the physical constrains of where we can locate the camera on stage
I came across this chart on ebay of all places. I’ve copied the pertinent information here. 3.6mm seems to be a very common lens, and in our case a 92 degree field of view will work just fine.
1.2mm lens has approximate 185 degree field of view
1.7mm lens has approximate 170 degree field of view
2.1mm lens has approximate 158 degree field of view
2.5mm lens has approximate 147 degree field of view
2.8mm lens has approximate 130 degree field of view
NATURAL HUMAN EYE 2.97 MM
3.0mm lens has approximate 127 degree field of view
3.6mm lens has approximate 92 degree field of view
4.0mm lens has approximate 88 degree field of view
6/0mm lens has approximate 78 degree field of view
8.0mm lens has approximate 58 degree field of view
12 mm lens has approximate 28 degree field of view
16 mm lens has approximate 19 degree field of view
25 mm lens has approximate 13 degree field of view
50 mm lens has approximate 8 degree field of view
The system I came up with will consist of a “board” type security camera mounted on the choir director’s music stand, or a mic stand directly infront of the choir director. A BNC cable will connect the camera to an 8″ LCD monitor that will be located at the organ.
Making Backups of your Media – Cobian a free backup utility
Have you backed up your media lately? If you haven’t, let this blog post serve as a reminder that you need to go back up your data. You should be regularly backing up your work and media. Crashing hard drives and lost data are a fact of life, and you can save yourself a lot of time and potentially money if you spend a little time and money upfront and setup a system to regularly backup your data.
Cobian is a great free program that is easy to use and takes up little resources. It creates backups at any interval you want (nightly, weekly, etc) of any source folder you specify to a location you specify. I set it up to make an incremental back up of my ‘My Documents’ folder every night – any file that is new or modified gets backed up, and a full backup every week – the entire folder copied. I use an external hard drive as the destination for the backup.
Yesterday I saw a 1TB western digital external hard drive on sale at Sams for $117. That is cheap peace of mind for all of your hard work and archive of media files.