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hopefully the technical quirks didn’t take too much out of it. I started out in a little bit of a rut, but the format throws things off a little bit more anyway.
Maybe we need practice.
The next show should be ya’ll doing a commentary track for this show.
My essence still senses Bucho's women.
The 15 minutes I caught were nifty as heck. Just what the doctor ordered to work out the kinks of the new system for the new bi-monthly version of the show.
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
I felt a little rusty and stupid-tired, but overall I feel like it was a success. Thank you all for watching.
Oh, it was definitely a success, Mister Rob. You and The Capt. were on it.
That other guy with his mouth words and his funny stories? Jeery? With his “I’m an intellectual” glasses?
Yeah, he was pretty okay, too.
My essence still senses Bucho's women.
No, you were good Robby.
“Take the dildo out of the cat, wouldya please?”
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
I just got up to Newman’s video with the sound all effed up. Did you post that on YouTube Newman? If yes, can you post the link. If no, can you put it up and then post the link?
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
For a first shot at a new format this worked great I thought, I bet if you give more warning next time the chat will be populated for longer too. I’m sure this was something you guys didn’t decide on until very recently but if I had more notice I wouldn’ve cleared my dumb old calendar.
Anyway, loved seeing Newman and Ben and Lark and hearing from Digi too. After I recorded that first video I thought up a proper question for Rob and recorded a second, shorter one but I guess it got lost in the fabled Bermuda Triangle on its way to the fabled Seattle.
- Women sense my power and they seek the life essence.
I had a busy rest of the weekend entertaining my family and shit… so this is the first time I’ve been able to get on here to really share my thoughts.
What worked
For me… very little. I think that’s because I have a different view than a listener, but I’ll focus on what DID work before I bitch a lot about what didn’t. We did a show, something we haven’t found time to do in a long time. This worked. We’ve always had shows that were less ‘funny’ –sometimes we call these ‘off’ shows, but they just have a different feel. This was one of those, but it wasn’t bad because of it. The need to use multiple cameras and have them “visible”. Google Hangouts has the default behavior of switching to the camera with the highest audio level. For the most part, this works okay, but for us it worked really well by avoiding me being distracted by my need to do it manually myself, and often. This was a problem the last 2 times we tried to do these (though it’s been forever since), and I’d call this successful. The amount of time worked pretty well for me as well. Long enough show, without being extra tiring and all that.Something else that worked well is YouTube Live. All of my below list aside, it was available everywhere, offloaded all of the work to someone else… for FREE. It allowed us to record remotely, worked on pretty much any device, time shift, promote and best of all schedule it to automatically start. It was only the technical limitations that led to changing the stream out 10-minutes into our start time. The system worked, if not the execution.
What didn’t work
A long list for me. Let me start with the technical issues on my side.1. My audio. I’ve long been able to both hear and ‘play’ whatever I want on my machine. For past shows, this has been a product of hardware. Specifically, Jerry’s FireWire mixer has given me the ability to both monitor everything, and be heard. In the past I’d had some limited success doing this via software (SoundFlower) to some extent, and although I had this sorta working several days before, once I had the “real” setup involving an external mic, it never actually worked correctly. This means I spent the nearly 4 hours leading up to “showtime” screwing around with the setup. It didn’t work that well, pissed me off, and resulted in the distracted guy you all saw for much of the show.
2. My location changed. I don’t mean Seattle, I mean in my house. I had setup the night before in another room. Jessica didn’t like the idea that I was going to eject my kiddos from this room to do the show, so I had to move everything. This was a disaster and cut into my time to jack with the broken setup, and made me a little more irritated in general.
3. Rob’s audio. This isn’t something he should have changed but I definitely see it as a bit of an issue. Because of the use of Bluetooth headset, he heard things like a phone call. The wider bandwidth being used for audio didn’t sound the ‘same’ for him and I think this caused an issue in one instance in particular: talking while others were talking. When someone else said something at the same time, Rob couldn’t hear it. The limited bandwidth, and one-ear are my best guess for it. Many times he could tell something was said, but not what. I point this out, because typically he is the only one that hears those little one-word comments made when someone else was talking. When you add in the delay that comes long with a remote show like this.. it resulted in not being heard at first. Asking “what did you say” after, then repeating it when the momentum or point was lost. Also, it was harder to just “jump” in during the middle of things being said due to…
4. Lag. It wasn’t that bad actually. It was just bad enough to make quick comments lose all of their momentum and timing. You’d have to do the format for a while to discover what really works with this. We used to experience this a lot during our Skype calls with others, or just when one of us (Jerry typically) was away elsewhere. It was just more noticeable with all three of us remote.
5. My connection. This made #4 worse, and here’s what I didn’t know. While doing the show, the family started out playing a video file directly from the computer I was using rather than the media center downstairs which is ethernet connected. This ate up some bandwidth resources. Later, they switched over to streaming some short video bits, and playing videos from the network for the rest. On top of that, one of my kids started streaming video to his iPad while playing Minecraft via Xbox Live with his friends. There was WAY too much shit going on with my network to have a reliable high-speed connection. This confused me, as my tests (done of course without all of this shit) showed I had enough headroom to stream two of theses shows. I’d plan better next time (shut other people down).
6. Setup. I was supposed to setup all of the audio/video files sent in for those 4 hours (see item #1) ahead of the show, and have them all edited sweet-like for play before. So much for that shit. This resulted in another hacky way to try to play these… something I’ve since solved/identified, but little good that does now.
7. (aka 1b). The setup for video had all of the same problems as audio. Though I solved the ability to “play” from CamTwist, it’s in Beta and has it’s own issues (which you saw when my video started to screw up).
8. Our lives. This was super hard to schedule. Without a very hard date associated with it, it wouldn’t have happened. I know this is true, because it’s been 2 years since we’ve recorded, and every single one of us has said we needed to.
9. Washington. I’ve already covered remote, but I’m convinced that being here affects things in a very negative way. Our show isn’t associated with Orca whales, awesome mountains or cold Atlantic seafood, so there is a 0% chance it could have a positive effect. However, since almost all of the other things about the Pacific Northwest suck, I’m reasonably sure that between only being able to choose shitty Comcast or CenturyLink and everyone just being a uselessly selfish asshat, that it affected the show in some measurable way. Also, I hate the hipster region just enough that I felt it was required to include it in a list of negative things.
All that said, I enjoyed being able to do this. It was really awesome for me, just a let down at the execution level. I’d definitely do it again if it were to work out, and would love to see something somewhat regular come of it. That doesn’t mean that it’s become any less challenging. I have some ideas of things to suggest though, we’ll see what happens with it, give us TONS of time to see what possibilities there are.
What’s Next?
Well, I have an old audio show to release, and I’m going to edit the videos and audio sent to us back into the live video and re-upload to solve those issues. I’m also going to push an audio-only version of it into the feed. Other than that… nothing yet.IF we had another video show, I would:
1. Plan my bandwidth. It would be great to introduce a backup stream, but we get into not only a more complicated setup, but one with newly introduced problems (camera switching for instance would go away in the form you just saw it in). But eliminated (or offloading actually) my family’s ability to screw it up for me is a good start. Also ethernet (as originally planned).2. Plan all content except the “live” very, very far ahead.
3. Thoroughly test the entire setup for optimal settings that can be saved, duplicated and recalled. It took a while, but once we did this for the classic show, it was pretty predictable. I imagine I could get there faster with a new setup.
4. Have a pre-planned, very basic “backup” setup that just consists of turning shit on and starting.
5. Getting this to the point that I’m not preoccupied with problem-solving live. This takes a huge toll on my attitude, and my focus; always has. I’d like it to not be apparent I was jacking with stuff, or am dissatisfied with the setup when recording a show.
Oh, and hidden in that long list of shit, is the answer to a few other things here.
The messed up video clips. I’m going to re-upload the whole show with the “right ones” cut back in. I should be able to do this very soon (likely tomorrow).
What I’ve always loved about the show is how you give it to us ugly warts and all. It was great just seeing you guys hanging out.
Not to get all weird stalkery-ish but it was like watching three of my good friends I haven’t seen in a while.
My essence still senses Bucho's women.
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