 So welcome folks. My name is Andy Rush. I work at the University of North Florida. And this is a presentation that I actually did for something called DS106 back in, I think it was 2011. And it was for Jim's class. He was teaching one of the sections of it. And so I came in and I barfed up everything that I knew about video at the time. And I'm going to do it again ten years later. The first thing I want to do though is because I'm always experimenting. And so what I want to do is capture you folks in a 360 environment. So I'm going to stand over here so it's going to take my picture at the same time that it takes all of your pictures. Now if you don't, and this isn't all seriousness, if you don't want to have your face in this image because I would like to publish it on a website, nothing fancy, just AndyRush.net which gets millions of visitors per year. I'm just going to do a quick picture. If you don't want to be in it, turn your head or cover your face. Five, four, three, two, one. One. Excellent. Thank you for that. I was going to tell people to kind of strike their favorite pose if they wanted to. But I forgot. So anyway, we'll save that for posterity. So fast, cheap, and under control has to do with a film that Gardner Campbell showed the DTLT crew way back when. It's an interesting film. If you're familiar with Errol Morris, he likes to kind of talk to people and see what characters, and the characteristics of people he can bring out. So that's kind of the basis of this. What I want to do is make sure that we're under control. So instead of being out of control. So here's me and a little bit of the stuff that I do on my website. And some of these are kind of old, gold video projects that we did. And then another basis for this site, again, is this idea of being able to control a video production. And what I want to do ultimately is show you just a resource where you can get all this information about codecs, about lots of different pieces. So I'll talk about that and go through these slides and show you what I'm talking about. One of the things that we talked about quite a bit, and again, I was watching videos of Jim talking about Kirby Ferguson. And I think Jim basically said, the only thing I don't like about this is like he sounds like he's on PBS. And he's trying to do a fundraiser for his videos. And I thought it was hilarious, especially in the timeframe of like 10, 11 years ago. But you can watch everything as a remix. What it is is basically it's all those pieces that you put together in a production. And it's just like thinking about all the things like sampling video and how that stuff either gets copyrighted or borrowed or steeled. So it's an interesting video. But some of the concepts that I talked about way back when were these ideas of codecs, if you know what a codec is. And if you don't know what a codec is, I can kind of explain it for you. But also this idea of resolution and compression. So all those things kind of make up a video. And the reason that you see the image in the background, those are like containers from a container ship. So you think about containers. Containers contain the codecs. So you'll have an audio codec and a video codec. And then you also have things like metadata where you've got subtitles or data about the video, that kind of thing. What I've done in each one of these slides is just kind of present what I think is the best existing video on YouTube. So this may change. I might find something even better. But explaining digital video here is a good one. There's one at the very top that says what is digital video, what video is. He talks about what a frame appears 30 times a second and that's what makes up a film. Sometimes it's 24 frames, sometimes it's 60 and all that kind of stuff. But then these other videos are about video compression and what codecs are. And codec is a shorthand for compressor, decompressor or encoder. Four by three aspect ratio, you know, the CRT TVs, those are still hanging on. But we were going to this thing called widescreen TV with these big cathode ray tubes. And it works a lot like VLC does. Back in the day, MPEG StreamClip, anyone? MPEG StreamClip? A few of you. The successor I would say is this thing called lossless cut. And if I have time, I'll do a little demo of it. But if not, you'll really appreciate how it works. And when everybody's talking about DaVinci Resolve, right? That's kind of going to be the free, it's free, but it's a professional video editor. Back then we were talking about CDs and iTunes. Now we're in the modern technology of vinyl and cassette tapes in 2023. Yeah. Wirecast Pro was the program that I used to broadcast live the DS106 class that I was in Jim's class with. And the link to the video of that, if you want to see that nonsense and how bad I was back then, you can watch that video to the bottom of the resource page that I'll show you. OBS in 2013. OBS in 2023. Photoshop, still kind of in existence, but nobody likes paying the subscription fees except universities. Everybody's got it at the universities, now they're paying for that. I like a program called Affinity Pro. Affinity Pro is the program that I use when I'm working with my 360 photos. Because you can go in and you can edit out the tripod. So when you take a picture here, it's also taking a picture of the stuff on the floor and the tripod. So you don't want the tripod in your picture. So you airbrush it out with something like Affinity Pro because it works with what's called Equirectangular. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. Pixelmator Pro is another great program, a much less expensive program than Photoshop. Paying it once, you pay a monthly fee for Photoshop. Pixelmator Pro is about the same price and you own it for life. MacDVD Ripper Pro in the day, MakeMKV is the DVD Ripper or Blu-ray Ripper of the day. And what it uses is a container called an MKV or Matroska and that has the right codecs to use to play the video. Plexback in the day, I found something called Infuse which is a little less kind of fluffy in workflow. So video workflow, one of the things that we always talk about is the process of making video. Planning, shooting, editing, encoding, hosting or publishing is a better word. So I've got a video on Story Border which is a nice little free program, this kind of Hollywood Story Border. A little bit of like the rules of framing. And again, I won't say these are the best videos. This guy's a little bit maybe too happy for me, but he does a good job of explaining kind of the techniques and that kind of thing. When it comes to video editors, there are the professional ones, let's say. So the Adobe Premiere Pros, the Final Cut Pros, DaVinci, there's DaVinci Resolve which is free. There's DaVinci about editing files in QuickTime. So what I do sometimes when I'm filming faculty is even taking QuickTime and chopping off the beginning and end and just saving out that file and it's ready to go. But the lossless cut program that I love so much that replaced MPREG StreamClip is one of those things where you can actually go in and take out chunks and then it will put things together. And it does it in a way that's what we call lossless. It's the idea that you don't have to re-encode and wait-fight files and wait-fight files all separated on one SD card because of the 18-minute limit of the codec within the camcorder. So this program will join those very quickly into one file and then you can put that on a timeline and go from there. So lossless cuts a real cool program that I've discovered. And then something on DaVinci Resolve about kind of what it is and how great it is, all that kind of stuff. I still haven't switched yet from Final Cut. Just if you've got your... I'm good. So you're all set. Live streaming solutions. We've got one over here called YOLOBOX. Right now all these sessions are being streamed by YOLOBOX and basically what it is is a video switcher with a screen built in. So you literally touch the buttons to switch from program to preview or to from shot to shot. And you can bring in things like video screens. You can bring in other audio microphones, that kind of thing. That sort of thing is just becoming more one month. So some of these live streaming solutions are hardware based and this is just back in April we did our inauguration for our president and that's our setup in the background. We use ATEM switches from Blackmagic and a lot of the Blackmagic equipment. We've got the new studio live streaming program. On the Windows side there's something called VMIX. It's not a free program. I think both of them are monthly based subscriptions kind of thing. But if you're doing this with any kind of monetization or whatever you can kind of recoup the costs. The long version of this presentation. So green screens. One of the things that I'm constantly thinking about is like how long are we going to be using green screens in the near future? Because they work really well. If you light them well you can get an excellent key. But we've got Zoom and other programs that are doing these virtual backgrounds. And to my eye they look terrible just because there's all kinds of fringing and they're not necessarily designed for video production quality stuff. But I think we'll get there. I think the object detection and that kind of stuff will get so good that it's like you can put it in a crazy busy background and still be able to pick out the foreground and the background of the person and key them out if you will. On the left hand side this is an example of a program called Runway ML. And the ML is machine language. And it's able to do exactly that. It's basically able to take this busy background and click on this and take it out just like a green screen would. So that's where we're headed with this technology and it's only going to get better as we've seen with Alan Levine and how good his video matched up with his face and all that kind of stuff. We also at University of North Florida are working with something called Frame.io which is an idea that you basically you're filming and you're connected to the network and as soon as you press the stop button on your recording it starts to upload what's called a proxy. Not the big honk and video file that you've recorded but a proxy of that that goes under the cloud and then you start communicating with faculty or whoever else you're collaborating with and you're able to say, hey can you cut this at 5 minutes and 35 seconds in a marker is placed and can you put a title here at 7 minutes and such and such place. And then what you've got is people look through the glass and speak to their students and then we flip it around with another separate box. So I just kind of want to touch a little bit about the future and AI learning or AI video editing and just it's something that's coming of how it's going to kind of manifest itself. I just I think there's both great and scary consequences from some of these technologies. The other thing that I want to do is and hopefully this is something that will be helpful for folks and something that people can use as a reference but also by all means if you want to add to it something that you use. So basically the list is let me just make sure yet. So the list is just a list of equipment that I've used in the past 10 years or so of things that I know work, things that do different things. So there's lots of different types of cameras including standard camcorders or cameras or what we call PTZ cameras or pan tilt zoom cameras like these guys. This is just a list of hardware and software that I've used in the past that I just find are really useful. So this is a separate web page that I'll show you in just a second but this will give you an idea of kind of what's here and what's available and you can ask me about well why did you recommend this and didn't recommend the Sony camera but I'll tell you. I'm happy to answer any kind of question like that. But that's the end of the slide portion of this presentation and this is all done in Elementor by the way so if you're familiar with Elementor this is just on top of WordPress and it's basically like a slideshow mode where it shows a screen at a time. So again it was me experimenting it's not that exciting to you but I was glad that it did ultimately work. So let me just show you the list. So again just all the links there's webcams and microphones light them as well. Here to record John Barker he's another kind of ATEM streaming guy he's written some software to do titling and that kind of thing. Matthew Vendiput is like a time lapse expert so there's kind of just a range of different guide but they also do like other types of cameras and that sort of thing. So let me just switch back to this is the thing that I just showed you in the slideshow. It's all of the stuff about all of the things and this is why I didn't show you this during the presentation but you can go to the very end and see the original Fast, Cheap and Under Controls slideshow video and be entertained. Any time you've done general strategies for when you're thinking through this process I don't know if I should say this but I'm going to say it anyway. Well I'll put it this way there's only one studio that I'm not proud of and I'll just leave it there. What I did in the very beginning when I started getting into this in DTLT and I found my niche of video is I set up a green screen studio over at CGPS the other campus and I don't even know if that's another campus anymore. Is it? Sort of kind of? I mean there's a building. At least it's still standing. So I built a couple of studios over there and by studio I mean something very similar to the one downstairs with a green carpet or a green fabric on stands with lights and I did that a couple of times the first time I used the fabric and the second time I painted the wall and I said oh the wall really works well and so for the most part I've had green walls that I've dealt with in these studios but I built those with my idea that I was under control with I was step by step by step and so at UNF I inherited a green wall room that I used as a studio and learned from that and then I built the next one because we needed to have kind of like a Allah one button studio type thing and I learned that one button is not enough you need to have more than one button to control all that stuff and actually allow faculty to do their own presentations and then took it again lat it was a tiered classroom with tiered seating and then two monitors up front and then a big whiteboard in the center so then they put three PTZ PTZ cameras in the room and they filmed those recordings and it's like wow that's exciting and so I said you know let's get this out of one trick pony realm let's get it into something that's got stations if you will so you've got a green screen station that you can film at and you can do virtual stuff with virtual backgrounds and then you step to the right or your left and you see the light board behind a black background and they're writing on it with different colors and they're filming that and we can include any of those into the production or you know we could do all of it live and go from the light board to the green screen and back again and then we've got if you turn to your right your left you'll see what I call the podcast set so we can either do just a standard audio podcast but we've also got cameras that can be trained on that space so you can have either a single camera or multiple cameras or three PTZ cameras to get every angle you could possibly want so we can also do video podcasts as well and then we clear that table out and we put two ferns down and we have a TV show set with a bookshelf in the background so it's the idea obviously is not just recording classroom lectures and we can set up the classroom for classroom lectures if we want to but the idea is that we just we throw everything possible and we're still figuring out what's possible by adding these different pieces I've got a telestrator that I'm building so they can you know highlight over live video and have that recorded we've got higher quality green screen stuff that sort of thing so it's a flexibility is kind of the name of the game I'm curious like so I imagine what most video people are doing is sitting on zoom calls right and up and like sometimes I see like some people and I'm like well damn like Parker sounded amazing but he had that big microphone and so did Alan they sounded great and then sometimes you'll see people and you're like clearly they're using some fancy camera what would you recommend for somebody who's like my start to video is going to be right in front of my computer to be better than just opening up a really crappy webcam to do something well that's part of my point too is that there's a there's the idea of like the beginner video set and the intermediate video set and the advanced video set so but there's some really high quality stuff that you can do with a beginner set like a beginner webcam insta360 the company that makes these 360 cameras also makes a webcam that's really good and actually as a PTZ webcam so you can set it on your on your computer on your desktop or whatever and it also has like a tie into a whiteboard system so like you tell it where the whiteboard is and it's able to move through that and then I think it even records like it's reads the words and records it and saves it stuff like that to give you a transcript I think I might be mixing technologies but it's it's I mean that idea certainly is possible right so let's imagine it and think that it does it and then there's other ones that that are very similar that that are just really high quality and and the old the the classic webcam is like the Logitech C920 if you google that you'll find it everywhere and you'll find it still popular and it's been in use for like 15 years so that's the kind of thing and then as far as microphones go these things are great the road goes the road wireless goes because they can easily just set in the cold shoe of the camera and be the wireless transmitter and you run the audio cable into the camera and record your your video like that but we saw we've also talked about these either boom poles where you can put the wireless end on the end of the boom pole and then you know the other end the receiver on the next to the camera and use it as a boot wireless boom pole kind of thing or they've got the little hand held road microphone clippy thing it looks like a like a hand held mic with a little foam top but underneath it is the road go microphone so it's cool stuff like that that they're able to kind of you know get these technologies to do and I'm just you know it's a great time to be alive in the video production world because of all the technologies there's there's so many things that I didn't mention that I didn't get to in terms of you know technologies we've switched from HDI HDMI based video production to SDI based and it's basically like a cable almost like the cable that you had in your in your cable system back when cable was a thing and then we've also go into these technologies like NDI which is a network interface where you've got a video feed going out to all the places over a local LAN and you can get video feeds from that so video feeds from a computer where it's doing a screen capture and video feeds from other types of cameras and then you can monitor all that stuff and bring all that stuff into a production just like it was an HDMI or an SDI cable so that's it we're at the end thank you very much oh yeah I think we can do okay so if you if you want to stay for questions or you want to see me afterwards by all means what I do want to make sure that you know is that the digital media cookbook so digitalmediacookbook.com is where you can find the list and you can find the information on the fast cheap and under control website this is a project digitalmediacookbook.com this is a project that I started right before I taught or I was in Jim's class where it was just here's how you do lots of things and it's kind of a recipe that you follow like you get all the ingredients i.e. the camera, the microphones, the lights and then here are the steps that you take to do the thing and it's not up to date in any way except for a few things that I've posted over the last few years but I hope to kind of revive its place in at least a reference place or a resource that folks can use so you might need to tell people about the naked mole rat because he's kind of scared of that who's not scared? it's when you have millions of them where the naked mole rat lives he doesn't need any hair and he doesn't need any eyesight so again this is the fast cheap and out of control video or movie that Errol Morris did but there's a review from Roger Ebert at the time and Roger Ebert it's kind of passed away in 2013 of all years but he talks about this and I do want to show you a quote at the end of this because it's really funny but it's basically about all these kind of crazy people scientists and other people that are doing these unique skills but a lot of the stuff that they do is out of their control they have no idea when it's going to rain with the topiary gardener and things like that so it's just a fascinating video to kind of talk to these people and what they do on a daily basis and how it's like they have no idea what it's going to do today one of the last questions Ebert talks to Morris about is what next film he's doing and he says I'm preparing a film he said about an electric chair repair man and it's just like oh that should be that should be a happy story but an interesting interview and the other thing that I do want to mention is that Errol Morris for this video invented this thing called the enterotron it's the same British it doesn't make a frame it's entirely based on that yeah absolutely yeah it's I think Jim will agree with me and the other, I don't know who else was in the room I think Martha and Jerry were there watching this film back in the day and it had a big impact on me obviously because I went out and made a website about it thanks everybody appreciate it