Kris’s Thoughts

I’ve been having fun with my Cannon A720IS Powershot camera. Thanks to Mr. Melancon reminding me about the CHDK firmware for it.

See other videos on my flickr page.

I think one of the main reasons that people hire me is because of the geek that I am.  I don’t mean geek like a computer nerd but a geek in the true since of the word.  I am geeky about getting things done.  Whether it is production or personal, I like a good challenge.

Now, I would like to take the credit for this geekieness but I can’t.  You see, I have my father to thank.  He like his father, never knew the meaning of not getting something done.  No matter what it is, my father can always find some way of making a situation or piece of equipment work out just the way he wants to.  If you need a left handed widget to fix something, he will either find it or make one.

To that end, here is one of my recent geek moments dedicated to my old man.  It combines my geekiness along with some of his own.  The pieces I designed to hang truss from an air wall track.  The old man machined them for me.  Well, I needed to change the brakes on the truck and these were all that I had in the back.  So, like my father, I improvised

OK, so I violated rule number one. Never argue with someone who is passionate about something. I also went blowing right through rule number two: Never argue with Chris Bloch about recorded music and sample rates. My friend Chris Bloch has a great set of ears on each side of his head and a good personality in between. So when I started the argument that today’s “POP” music wasn’t worth any more then a 128Kb sample rate, things got ugly.

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So the good thing about being a production geek is that you can have some off the wall, crazy problems. Like today for example. I had to stuff a Osiris light personality into a Avolite Diamond III console. Props to Brad from AVO and Darren from Royal for their help. The problem all started when there was some miscommunication about the console that was being used for the show. The Diamond didn’t have the correct settings (known as personalities) to control the lights we were using. No problem, download a file from the Inet. Hum, Inet has no file to download. Avo has some of the best support I have seen from a company. Brad whipped up a file and emailed it over. No dice.

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MONO MP3 160Kb test recordingCame across an interesting problem with the Marantz CDR420 the other day. It seems as though this unit does not like to record mono MP3 streams no matter what the resolution. I have some test audio files if anyone is interested to hear what the issue is.

The units have enough storage capacity that PCM or MP3 Stereo @ 320Kb should be used for recording.

Jumping Jeff Blackwell over at Blackwell Studios recommends:

http://www.samsontech.com/products/productpage.cfm?prodID=1901&brandID=4

I like the fact that it is getting good reviews and you can use it as an external sound card. Might be the next thing for the Big Yellow Box.

Here is the test audio file with the noise: