Sidepodcast

Seeing as there’s a brief lull in the racing action at the moment, we might just be able to squeeze in a quick behind the scenes look at green screen technology. I should declare upfront that this post isn’t remotely related to Formula 1, but a couple of people have expressed an interest in the inner workings of Sidepodcast, so please excuse the self indulgence.

The Early Years

The idea of keying out a single colour from a piece of film has been around since the 1930’s. The principle is simple, pick a solid colour as a backdrop, ensure that it’s not present in the foreground and then replace said colour with other footage during post-production. The techniques for doing this have dramatically improved in the last 70-odd years (while costs have drastically reduced), but the original concept remains the same.

Chroma keying is used in all forms of video production nowadays, the local weather programme is the most commonly seen example, but given its relatively low cost, there’s little reason not to make some use of the technology.

That’s Me in the Spotlight

Although we essentially have no knowledge of television production, when we started making videos it was pretty clear that chroma keying was a great way to turn a very small space into a larger one, and as all we had was a small space, it was worth looking into.

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One of the things that has been consistently changing over the course of the first year at Sidepodcast, is the show notes we refer to when recording.

The first two shows we ever made – my 2006 championship review – were entirely scripted. If you’ve heard them, this will come as no surprise I’m sure. I was not at all confident about talking out loud and to be fair, I wasn’t totally sure I knew what I was saying. I’d read a few other reviews of the season and cobbled together my own.

The co-host was, of course, quite happy just to stand in front of the mic and throw in his comments as and when he felt like it.

After that first show, we realised that it probably wasn’t going to make a great podcast, listening to me reading out a previously written script. It was immediately obvious that it needed to be more of a conversation, but how much we needed to write down and how much would come naturally remains a matter of great consternation between us.

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Quick apology to everyone who’s struggled to access ye olde sidepodcast for the past 12 hours. During the night our hosting company appeared to be playing the twisted, but familiar game - “best of luck getting out of this one”.

Did you miss us?

Luckily it was just the blog affected, podcasts continued to download unabated, although yesterday’s F1 Minute was slightly delayed for anyone using the new shared site version - big apologies to anyone affected there.

As it happens, we’re already deep into the process of building a more reliable Sidepodcast for next season, one that should hopefully withstand irresponsible hosting companies messing with our minds.

Just for kicks, enjoy the following system status notifications, both raised late last night (within an hour of each other), and see if you can’t spot the deliberate lack of joined up thinking here:

21:46: Some customers may find they are experiencing ‘timeouts’ when downloading email.

22:46: Customers may find they are unable to access their databases. All customers affected will be emailed shortly with further information and instructions.

Real tears, let me tell you. Real tears.

This is the first in an occasional series from Sidepodcast, giving you a behind the scenes look at podcasting, specifically in the Formula 1 genre. We want to share the pitfalls, the problems, and the triumphs that go into making the show what it is. As this is a joint effort, to provide you with both sides of the story, I will be writing in plain text, whilst the geeky one will add his two cents in italics.

I’ve always been on the PC side of the Mac vs. PC debate. I appreciate everything that a Mac is and I will gladly stand up and say it is easier to use, has some stunning applications, makes you want to create stuff, and is generally just better than a PC. But, I am a control freak and there’s something about Finder that puts me off. The thought of it makes me anxious. How will I ever find anything? The file structure, it scares me.

I did use a Mac for about six months a few years ago, and I don’t remember it being a problem, but just a simple glimpse of the Finder icon brings me out in cold sweats.

True. As a person sitting on the Mac side of the debate, I’d agree that the worst thing about Apple’s operating system is file navigation. It’s better in the new version, but still geared to finding files rather than organising them correctly in the first place.

I had a PC laptop and life was good. Then, gradually, it wasn’t so good. It was slow, there wasn’t enough hard drive space, and sometimes the screen wouldn’t start when you switched it on. I was getting frustrated, and I needed to upgrade.

I knew about Vista. Trust me. I’d listened to enough TWiT podcasts to know that Vista left a lot to be desired. But I figured that the little annoyances everyone seemed to be talking about were worth the fact that I would be upgrading to better hardware.

Ha.

Very, very silly.

Soon after Vista was my operating software of choice, I started to hear audio glitches whilst creating podcasts. Some of them were simple ‘clicks’ on playback, some were ‘pops’ in the recording. There was the occasional glitch in recording that was much, much worse, almost as though it had skipped a word. If it was a tape, I’d imagine that the tape had folded over on itself and covered up a second of recording. So far, I’ve been using my editing skills to the max to either chop out the damaged audio, or at least minimise the effects.

Can’t say I’ve noticed, so you must’ve done a pretty good job. What I have noticed is the incessant swearing coming from your direction since the upgrade, so I imagine it hasn’t been much fun.

Obviously, we’ve been narrowing down where the problem actually occurs but all the signs point to how Adobe Audition works with Windows Vista. The download trial of Audition 3 was supposed to be my saviour, but the glitches still occur, and there’s another problem to add to the mix.

Load up Audition and it works fine. After five minutes, it gets sticky and slow. You’re moving something, you’re clicking somewhere, and it takes a second or two to catch up. It sounds like nothing when I’m writing it down, but it is not at all practical, and I find myself having to restart the software. Every. Five. Minutes.

Ahh, the Adobe approach to software development strikes again. Release early and patch later sounds familiar. It’s a shame because Audition 2 was a great bit of software, version 3 is sadly worse than useless.

It seems like the only way to work with Microsoft at the moment is to downgrade everything. Audition 3 is bad, so stick with Audition 2. Vista is laughable, better to stick with XP. I just can’t fathom how a company as big as Microsoft could be satisfied to produce something so bad that it’s better not to upgrade.

Personally I blame Bernie, not for any specific reason, but it must be his fault somehow.

I heard PC World’s hardware sales recently dropped so low, that they had to re-introduce XP machines to the shelves. A rather embarrassing affair all round. don’t worry though a new OS will be available in a few years.

Like I said at the start, I’ve always been on the PC side of Mac vs PC. But now…

This is the first in an occasional series from Sidepodcast, giving you a behind the scenes look at podcasting, specifically in the Formula 1 genre. We want to share the pitfalls, the problems, and the triumphs that go into making the show what it is. As this is a joint effort, to provide you with both sides of the story, I will be writing in plain text, whilst the geeky one will add his two cents in italics.

Last Friday, our broadband died. And I almost joined it.

I got home from work, ready to start researching F1 Minute for Friday, and there was nothing. No Google, no BBC, no Sidepodcast. Fair enough, the McLaren appeal result didn’t come through until late at night anyway, and I probably would have waited for that before recording anything anyway, but I’m all about having the choice.

I would never have guessed.

The last time we were without broadband was when we moved house back in June. We managed to engineer a crossover period, but it involved driving back and forth between two homes, sitting on the floor in a cold, empty room, and generally getting a headache the minute anyone mentioned the words Formula and 1.

The cold, empty room was really our fault though - we could’ve made it more hospitable. BT did let us down with management of the switchover. They act with impunity because they have a monopoly in this country, and it’s a major barrier to entry when it comes to doing anything online… at some point you have to deal with them.

All you need to create a podcast is electricity, a fast connection, and a computer. Never mind that silly food and water, those three things are the essentials in life. And I really mean that. Broadband providers seem to believe that the internet is some kind of luxury, that you can wait a fortnight for, even if you tell them that it isn’t. There’s no option to pay more to get it quicker, there’s no way to speed things up even if your job depends on access. Sidepodcast doesn’t provide us with revenue, but that doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously.

A fair point. If you move house, you’re guaranteed to have basic amenities like gas, electricity and running water from the moment you arrive. Internet access sadly isn’t part of the deal. Usually connections don’t take more than a couple of days, but in our case it was over a month.

Anyway, back to the present. We’ve had pretty much flawless coverage since we moved in, but the other night there was nothing happening. I had to rely on my new internet capable mobile to keep refreshing the news sites, until we could dig out the lead we needed.

Ahh, lest you forget dial-up, young lady. We still had a working phone line, and the opportunity to hear the heart wrenching bleeps of an obsolete modem kicking into life is a moment to savour.

Dial up? Yeugh.

Oh.

It’s an option, yes, but it’s hardly ideal. Today we have been looking at alternative backup solutions, like a portable 3G modem for example.

An external 3G modem makes a lot of sense. They run as fast (and in some cases faster) than broadband. They work pretty much anywhere in the UK and will fall back to GPRS mode should you fall out of range. However, data rates are extremely expensive compared to broadband and contracts are usually longer.

Whilst we haven’t invested yet, we will be doing so as soon as we’ve researched the package that suits us best. The ability to have broadband wherever we go (dependent on coverage, of course), is actually more useful than just a backup. Imagine if we had the ability to blog directly from GPlive, you’d be getting all the updates of what we’re seeing as we’re witnessing it first hand. This is something we’ve always been interested in doing, it’s why we invested in the portable recording device. As we go out and about more, we want to be able to bring you closer to the action as soon as we can. So whilst our broadband crisis this weekend was a pain, it has brought some more new technology to our attention. Every cloud has a silver lining, they say.

Bloomin’ optimists, I say.