We put a lot of wear and tear on them and they seem to hold up pretty well.  Although recently one of the hard drives started to make a dreaded clicking/ticking type of noise and would not record more than 5 min of footage.  So I immedately thought of replacing the internal Hard Drive. I can’t take credit for this hack but I stumbled across a forum that had a post on how to upgrade your FS-100 from 100GB to 250GB. I tried it and it works like a champ.  Here is the rundown.

1 - Get the 4.0.1.xxxxx BIOS update (for free) from focus enhancements as it supports 250GB drives. otherwise your fs-100 will support only two partitions with 125GB each. flash your fs-100 with the new BIOS.

• link to fs-100 bios 4.0.1: ftp://ftp.focusinfo.com/FS100v4.0.1….eAndReadme.zi

2 - Open the little screws of the firestore case. look which model (IDE or SATA) you have. I have the IDE model. If you have SATA, you can´t use a IDE drive. close the case again until you got the new hdd drive

3 – If you have IDE, buy the WD Scorpio 250GB (WD2500BEVE) with PATA (IDE) interface. it´s around 67 euros or $72 in the us.
technical specs of the WD scorpio (IDE): http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro…sp?DriveID=346

4 - If you have a SATA firestore and a SATA HDD: it isn´t very complicated to mount a SATA drive into a SATA firestore. just plug and play one/two cables.

5 – Once you have your new drive, open the firestore case.

6 – You have to stick tapes to the same places on the new harddisk where the original yellow ones are sitting. but beware of covering the little air hole with the tape!!! otherwise you may damage your harddisk! i made also a little hole in the tape, i used a fine knife for that.

7 - Disconnect the flat cable of the old hdd. then open the little screws of the silver plate below the harddrive. open the 4 screws which fasten the hdd to the silver plate. put the old hdd away. maybe you can get an external case later to use the old 100GB hdd with your computer.

8 - There is a a square of metal (shielding) affixed to the underside of the old drive exactly where the fan lined up with the drive. take that off the old drive and fix it on the new drive on the same place. otherwise you could get problems with the fan.

9 - connect the new hdd with the flat cable. pay attention to the direction the cable is connected to the drive. if you reverse it you will probably kill your hdd and or the fs-100. fix the screws in reverse order so that the new harddisk is fixed in the case.

10 - close the case with the outside screws.

11 - connect your firestore to the power supply. for best security, connect also an accu to the case.

12 - start the engine (press the “ON” button on the fs-100)

13 – maybe your firestore will ask you to partition the new drive. in this case press “NO” (otherwise the fs-100 will make two partitions with 125GB each).

14 - Once the boot screen comes up, use the arrow keys to navigate to the “DD DRIVE” option. Enable the computer connection.

15 - If your on Windows use this program http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/index.html to partition and format a whole 250GB partition with FAT32 (Windows XP or Vista can´t format partitions larger than 32GB with FAT32). If you are on a Mac you can just use the disk utility to format the drive with FAT32.

16 - reboot the device. you should see “278 minutes free” (in DVCPro HD/1080i) or something similar.
congratulations, you have just upgraded your fs-100 to 250 GB!

One key thing to remember is that you don’t want to use the format utility on the drive EVER! If you do it will partition the drive off and you will max out at 125GB. When you want to format just use Disk Utility or another app to format the drive using FAT32. ENJOY!

Being creative is hard work that takes blood, sweat, tears, energy, time, talent and resources. It’s just plain hard! So many times its just easier to put the ship on cruise control and do what you know. You feel like well it worked before so maybe it will work again.  Or maybe it’s never worked. =)  But you just keep doing it. So many times at work I am called on to “whip up” something creative… To design something, produce something, or create something.  Creativity on demand doesn’t always just happen.  Sometimes, some of my most creative ideas come at 11 o’clock at night and not at 1:30 in the afternoon.

But we have to push ourselves if we want to win the right to be heard as a church.  Everything in our culture today is clamoring for the attention of people.  How will the Church gain the attention of the masses in order to spread the Gospel. How will we “Compel them to come in” (Lk 14:23)

So basically we are going to stop everything for one day and shut everything down. (sort of =)  We just want to basically put everything on the table and say, “if we could start over tomorrow and scrap everything we have done, how would we do it?” If you could start fresh… scrap everything that you have done just because you have “always done it that way”… How would you start over?

Basically this is a hard drive cradle for Serial ATA (sata) hard drives. Kind of reminds me of popping in an old Atari cart. =) The beauty of this baby is that it has an eSATA connection. So you can throw files to the drive at basically the same speed as if the drive were physically an internal drive. (3 Gbit/s)

So the dock runs roughly $50 and then you can just load up on 1 terabyte drives from newegg, and back things up to your hearts content.  A 1TB drive is about $220 now.  Not too shabby. So for 1TB of data I am using 2 drives. That way I have 2 copies and then I will sepeate them so they don’t live in the same place. Just in case something happens.

I would encourage everyone to backup anything of importance in some way shape or form. Because it is inevitable that disaster will strike at some point. So use something… Time Machine, Mozy, something.  Also, Mozy Home just went from a beta to a 1.0 for mac users. great for home use!

Link for the Cradle.

Technorati Tags: SATA, eSATA, Backup, Time Machine, Mozy

A few people have asked me how we encode our webcast at theaterchurch.com. So I took a few minutes and threw together a quick how to video. I would recommend using the”full-screen” option in order to see whats going on.

Let me know if there is anything else like this that you would like to see on here.

Hosted by Light Cast Media  (click middle of video for full screen) – View

Technorati Tags: Webcast, theaterchurch.com, FlixPro, On2, Light Cast Media, Flash Video 9

As for the machines: Each location has a dual 2.0GHz processors Mac G5 with 1Gig of memory. They all also have the Blackmagic HD card, the DeckLink HD Pro PCIe. These cards have a component output (Y, Pb, Pr) that we run up to our projector. The external hard drives are connected via Firewire 800 (IEEE 1394b). This is the new firewire protocol which supports data transfer rates of up to 3.2Gbit/s. I’m sure that we’re not going that fast but we are able to run ProPresenter and our videos right off the hard drives.

The audio is a little complicated. The audio comes through the Blackmagic card, but the card only has digital (SPDIF/AES) sound output. This would be great if we were running a 5.1 or 7.1 surround system, but right now we’re not and our sound board does not have a digital input. So we had to get a D/A audio converter that converts our digital signal to analog and allows us to use plain old left and right RCA cables to connect to the sound board. At the theaters we use RME ADI-2, a Hi-Performance 192 kHz/24 Bit 2-channel AD/DA-converter.

These Macs are all housed in individual units that allow for easy portability, set up, and tear down. The G5’s are all rack mounted along with the D/A audio converter. We have the screen, keyboard, mouse, and the cables for the hard drive (power and firewire 800) on a little platform on top. We placed BNC component plugs on the side of the unit along with RCA connectors. So basically all we have to do in the morning is plug in the power cable, the video cable, sound cable, and the hard drive and we’re good to go.

As for projectors, at our Ballston theaters location we have a Christie LX-45 that we fitted with a long throw lens and put in the projection booth in the morning. It has a native resolution of 1024×768 and accepts HD signals. At the Union Station theaters we use Panasonic PT-6600UL projectors. These projectors have a native resolution of 1366×1024 and also accept HD signals. We’re looking to upgrade to true 1080i projectors sometime in the future.

National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

Technorati Tags: National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

It all starts with the camera. We use a Canon XLH1 mounted on the ceiling at Ebenezer’s. The mounting does involve a level of adjustment so we can re-aim the camera for different speakers. Unfortunately, we currently can’t do any camera movements during service and only have the one camera that we use for the video message. The camera has a HD-SDI output that sends out uncompressed HD signal that we run up into Pastor Dave’s office. We’ll probably never use the tape heads in the camera as we get such a high quality signal from the SDI out.

In his office he has a beast of a machine. PD uses a quad 2.5 GHz processors Mac G5 with 8Gig of memory. (It’s where all our HD editing and rendering is done.) His main monitor is a 30in cinema display and he has a Toshiba 27in LCD TV that is connected as a secondary display on which we can preview the shot. We are able to evaluate the camera shot from PD’s office before service so we can adjust the camera shot, light levels, white balance and get a pretty good idea of what the shot looks like.

We use a Blackmagic HD PCIe card, the DeckLink HD Pro PCIe, that has an SDI in and allows us to capture full uncompressed 10bit, 1080i with 4:2:2 chroma sampling. Using Final Cut Pro HD we capture the sermon as it is preached. For audio there is also a mix out from the soundboard that goes up to PD’s office. He has a mini board there that he can use to adjust levels before the sound going into the line-in input on the Mac.

After capture of the video post-production begins. We’ll cut what we’ve captured to include just the sermon (trimming things from the beginning and end), add some fades, and splice in any video clips that happen during the message. (This way when the video is played on Sunday it can run straight through without having to worry about the clips.) We’ll also do any color correction we might think is necessary, although we try and avoid this by getting a good white balance as it takes a bit of time to render 40 minutes of HD video, not something we want to do on a Saturday night. And then we add the audio track. Now, the audio is a little tricky as we’ve discovered that there’s a small delay in the playback of video compared to audio during service. So we have to move the audio about 5-7 frames back in the timeline so that when played on Sunday morning it all matches up. After we’re all done with this we export to a quicktime movie format.

National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

Technorati Tags: National Community Church, High Definition, HD, Cannon XL-H1, DVCPRO HD, Decklink Pro HD, Apple, G5 Quad

Right now we are using 2 Panasonic AG-HVX200. It’s a HD camera that shoots in 1080i, 720p and 480i. If you are shooting in SD, you can record straight to Mini-DV. If you are shooting in HD, you record to either P2 cards (like PCMCIA cards) or a hard drive. The image quality is phenomenal. Link

For our audio set-up, we are using a Sennheiser EW100 set of wireless mics and receivers. They are great because the person that you are filming can hide them nicely so that your audience doesn’t even know that they are there. They also deliver great audio and I have never had problems with static or interference. Link

I hope this gives you a basic overview. If you have any questions, just throw some comments my way and I will try to answer them.

Technorati Tags: High Definition, National Community Church, Washington DC, Buzz Conference, AG-HVX200

If your a code guy and you are curious on how they have achieved what they have you can check out. http://www.leaveitbehind.com/code/

So by now I guess you have figured out that this whole podcasting thing isn’t just some crazy new fishing pole. I will show you how you can create a podcast of your own in three simple steps. If you have digital recordings of your sermons and your computer has an Internet connection, then you are ready to start your journey into the podcastsphere.

Step 1 – Recording your podcast

You need to record your sermon in MP3 format, or in some format that you will convert to MP3 with an audio software program.

There are a bunch of free MP3 recording software solutions available online, such as Audacity, HarddiskOgg, Freecorder, MuvAudio, and Free Audio Recorder 1.0.

Once you have recorded your content, you need to save or export the file in MP3 format. Or if you have an audio file in some other format, you need to open it and then save or export it in MP3 format. Another option with non-MP3 files is to use a software program such as dBpowerAMP (a free, shareware program) to convert audio files to MP3.

When you save, you need to change the settings on the file to keep the size down. That way your podcast subscribers don’t have to wait forever for your podcast to download. The settings that I have chosen are a bit rate (the number of binary digits streamed per second.) of 56 kbps (kilobits per second), quality at medium, a sample rate (the rate at which samples of an analog signal are taken in order to be converted into digital form) of 32.000 Hz, and channels at stereo. The lower the bit rate and sample rate, the lower the quality of the audio. You can tweak these settings to get the quality you want, remembering that you trade off quality for a smaller file. I try to keep the file under 10 MB. For more information on the technical aspects of an MP3, check out http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/MP3

Step 2 – Get a host for your site

Now you need a place online to host your podcast. You need Web space, to which you will upload your MP3 sermon files and your RSS feed (more on this file in step 3).

There are a couple of ways to get an online host for your podcast.

One of the easiest is to use a site like Audioblog.com, which for a small price ($50 a year) will host your MP3s, create your RSS feed, and publish a post to a Blog with the push of a few buttons.

Another way, which requires someone with computer expertise, is to use your current Website or, if you don’t have one, purchase Web space from a host such as DreamHost or DomainPeople.

Step 3 – Creating an RSS feed

Now that you have your MP3 files created and your Web page set up, you need to upload your files to your Web space.

If you go the route of putting your podcast on your own website, your Web host should provide information on how to upload files via FTP (file transfer protocol).

Once you have your MP3 files on your own site, you need to create an RSS feed. An RSS feed is an XML coded file on your site that informs podcast subscribers and podcast directories such as iTunes and iPodder what MP3 sermon files you have available on your site. You update the RSS feed each time you add a new sermon or MP3 to your site.

You can create an RSS feed yourself. You can script it by hand (lots of work; for coaching, see http://audiofeeds.org/tutorial.php), or you can use a tool called Feed Editor or The podcast RSS Buddy (download at http://www.download.com/The-Podcast-RSS-Buddy/3000-7241_4-10417408.html). These tools are easy to use and worth the pennies to register. They will make an XML RSS feed file for you so that all you have to do is stick the file on your site. (I also recommend using Feedburner.com for this method. There are a lot of great tools and informational pages on Feedburner.com that can help you with your podcast. For example, see http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/popup-quickstart-podcast).

That’s it! Once you have your RSS feed, post a link to it on the iTunes directory. To do this, you will need to download free iTunes software at iTunes.com, then in iTunes click on the Music Store, then click on podcasts, then click on “submit a podcast.”

Don’t stop now. Keep posting your feed elsewhere, on your site, your friend’s site, everywhere you can!

Welcome to the podcasting universe!