This is the page wherein I shall be publishing the little tips and tricks I use to handle technology. Eventually I’d like to implement a discussion forum to answer direct questions, and hopefully get some of my own questions answered. I’m always looking for new ways to make media a cut above, it must be excellent.
Media Production Explained
See, media production isn’t about making things better. Its quite simply reducing the levels of suck and cheese.
Suck – That which detracts from the technical quality of the program material itself. This is anything technical about the production, signal to noise ratio, clipping, improper color adjustment for a camera, poor equalization, the misapplication of compression and/or limiting to an audio track, grainy or blurry photographs… you get the idea.
Cheese – Cheese refers to the program material itself, the quality of the writing and the delivery by the talent. Something with a lot of cheese in it would generally be referred to as cheesy or childish (ooooh, a genius wrote that sentence!).
So if you have a production that has little suck, that is, the production quality is very high and the creative use of the medium is well executed, and has no cheese, meanin gthe content is well written. Then you’ve got yourself a GOOD production!
Audio Processing example
Podcast: Play in new window
Here’s an example of a recent mix that I “mastered” to bring a little life into it. I was given a mono single-track with 2 instruments and vocals on it recorded with a single USB microphone, and though I don’t claim to be the worlds best audio technician, I was happy with the result. In this audio clip I explain a little bit about what I did to put some pizzaz into the clip.
The “You” I’m talking about in this clip is my cousin who did the actual recording, just FYI.
Laptop hard drive failure point.
Models that I’m referring to: Dell e1505 circa 2006, Gateway TA6 and like models, also from 2006.
The Dell, Gateway, and HP brands of computers that have been popular amongst my college friends and acquaintances seem to have a very specific harddrive lifetime of around 3 years service. This lifetime drops drastically with the installation of Vista and/or any Symantec products due to their tendency to produce constant drive operation (swapping/thrashing or scanning). Symantec antivirus products have a tendency to run a number of scans by default, including a start-up scan each time the computer is booted. This results in a LOT of hard drive activity after the desktop screen has seemingly loaded and is ready for use. Sluggish performance continues for anywhere between a few minutes to an hour or more depending on the size of your hard drive. If your hard drive light is constantly on while the computer is idling, something is wrong.
Vista was designed with really heavy duty operating specifications for an operating system, when the computer is not provided with enough RAM, it uses the hard drive to temporarily store files that its working with. Since there are a LOT of files that vista tends to work with fairly often, it ’swaps’ the idle ones to the disk, reads some fresh files off the disk, crunches those, and then swaps them back to the disk. Hard drives are significantly slower than RAM, thus sometimes there is a backlog of files that need to be swapped and crunched. This is known as thrashing because the computer is spending all its time moving stuff around on the disk, crunching it through RAM and the processor, and then spitting it back to disk. What you see is severely degraded performance.
I replaced my XP drive right around the 3 year mark (a little earlier actually) due to space concerns, not for reliability reasons. The drive had no errors on it at the time I replaced it, however, it was put into continued service in another machine, and within a short period of time began showing signs of its age at >5000 running hours. Therefore I must recommend that even if your drive is operating just fine, be extra aware of any issues or errors as it approaches the 3 year mark – assuming you’ve used it a good deal. If and when it starts having errors on it, especially SMART errors, it should be replaced ASAP to avoid data loss. As always it is a good idea to backup your data on a regular basis, even if that means simply saving your important documents such as papers and presentations to a flash drive or two as well as the hard drive.
Understanding Graphic Elements
Powerpoint Tutorial
This video is not quite complete yet, the audio is having trouble staying synced to the video, especially towards the end, I’ll fix it when I have time.
After you have your content put together, with a specific message or goal in mind for your presentation, the next step is to make it aesthetically pleasing. It helps to remember that the final image is often made up of many parts and pieces. Breaking it down mentally into its individual pieces is half the battle. Notice the header on this website for example. How many elements make up that header? Would the number 7 surprise you?
Figure 1
Another piece is having a good graphics editor outside of the Office suite. By nature the graphics effects native to Powerpoint are pretty weak, still if you have a few ideas they can be used quite successfully. For the purposes of the text tutorial I’ll be referencing only things you can do within Powerpoint itself.
I’m going to assume you can create a slide such as the one shown in Figure 1. Now, to take this slide and make it into something great, we need a background. I’d suggest staying away from images as backgrounds UNLESS they are very subtle and non-distracting or they are built for the purpose, more about how to do that later.
I chose a gradient for my background, just because it’s less boring than a solid color. Notice if you watch the Apple keynote product introductions and other presentations, you see a black to light grey/silver background behind Steve Jobs’ images.
I highly recommend watching a few presentations by Steve Jobs, he has much more skill at content and graphic production than I do.
Figure 2
Figure 3
The gradient settings page can be seen in Figure 2. Apply the gradient and we have “Ye Slightly Less Boring Olde Powerpoint.” Next you’re going to want to make that title stand out. Black on grey or silver isn’t terribly high contrast, so one could either change the color, or use this next method to insert a border box around the title. You’re going to need the “Drawing” toolbar enabled for this, which you’ll see at the bottom of my screenshot in Figure 3. Simply draw a rectangle right over the text on your page, then right-click on it and find the “Sent to Back” option.
Then, to make it “pop” off the page, you’re going to need to insert a shadow of some kind, see figure 4 for how to create the shadow, and notice that it’s already been inserted behind the rectangle. This is where Powerpoint 2003 really runs out of gas, it looks truely awful. Again I’d recommend an external graphics editor, create a rectangle and its shadowwith NO text, then simply import the image and send it behind your text.
Figure 4
Less Boring Slide
When I use an external graphics editor, I can create smooth shadows, rounded rectangles, transparent or semitransparent elements, etc. So here’s what a slide could look like with about 30 seconds of inginuity and a blurred picture as a background. This is what I was talking about when I said you must be cautious with images. As long as they’re not distracting to the message, it’s ok to use them.
Now, count the elements in the image to the left. Background, grey rectangle, text, blue rectangle, text. You can even make the picture appear to ‘unblur’ after you’re done with the content of the slide just by importing an unblurred full-screen image right over the top and giving it a “fade” entrance animation. You’ll be able to see this in the video version.
For now that’s all I have time for, your next presentation had better not put people to sleep.
Rectangle Images for text backgrounds.
Images»
Powerpoint
The ten commandments of Powerpoint
- Thou shalt not use a template – templates are cheesy and make your presentation look exactly like every other abysmally boring presentation you sat through in high school.
- Thou shalt avoid bullet points – try pictures instead, reinforce what you’re saying but don’t outline it.
- Thou shalt be creative, but not cheesy - there is a fine line between “oh that’s creative” and “wow, that looks REALLY BAD”
- Thou shalt not EVER link to youtube, or anything else outside the presentation. -with the exception of a technical demo, if you’re demonstrating how to use a piece of software, then demos outside the presentation are ok.
- Thou shalt not EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER use “sound effects” – ‘nough said
- Thou shalt not use distracting backgrounds – pictures are nice, but they distract from your information – more about how to use pictures to create GREAT backgrounds later.
- Thou shalt not use plain backgrounds – black is great if you’re just slopping something together, but a plain background of any other color (including white) is tiring to look at.
- Thou shalt develop a separate “Presentation outline” to speak off of – put together a quick document that outlines what you plan to say, then integrate it with your powerpoint. More about this later.
- Thou shalt not show thy presentation on any computer except the one that it was developed on. - This may sound counterintuitive since most modern computers have powerpoint on them. The trick is that if you use any animations or effects, they can and will run differently on different machines. On the other hand it is good to have backups with you, on cd, on a flash drive, and I even upload it to my webserver as another backup option.
- THOU SHALT NOT UNNECESSARILY TURN OFF THE PROJECTOR!! – Modern projectors use metal-halide bulbs which operate as arc-lights. These bulbs have a warm-up and cool-down period during which your projector will be useless. Also each time the bulb is started it reduces its operating lifespan by a few hours, meaning it’s better to just leave it cooking ’till you’re done for the day. This doesn’t sound like such a big deal until I tell you that the average projector bulb is between $200-$400 to replace!
The next question is how exactly to put this all together into a presentation. Stay tuned!
