Can’t quite put it in a category.
Is your church hosting a Super Bowl party this year? Here is how your church can do it legally: http://www.youtube.com/churchlaw#p/a/u/0/EX1s9iDztQU
Also, here is an article outlining some of the legal process that occurred to get the NFL to agree to these new guidelines.
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.
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.
While this isn’t directly related to media and technology, I do think it is a great reminder for all the church media people out there who, week after week, work hard to help thier church reach lost souls. You play a vital role.
This post from Phil Cook puts a great story to that thought.