Compositing

John Nack made a post about this video and I thought I'd pass it on. I know that a lot of compositing goes into almost everything we see on TV or film, but it's really interesting to see both sides of the shot. Some of the shots are clearly put together, but others could just as easily have been shot …

Christmas Worship Projection Sample

Saturday night I took a little bit of footage with the Flip cam during worship. Here's a sample from a few songs. The audio quality is really bad, the microphone on the flip really picks up the drums above everything else. It's also a bit shaky from being handheld. Next time we do this we'll need to setup a real …

Christmas Music Celebration

This weekend we celebrated Christmas in music. There was an amazing diversity in worship as our traditional services featured the annual choir cantata with an orchestra and the modern services featured our praise band, the story of Christmas told through Isaiah in video, lighting and architectural projection. I'm incredibly impressed with how well all of the teams worked to accomplish …

Texting and Worship

Last night we made our first foray into texting during worship. We had a panel discussion answering questions that focused on how faith impacts life as a college student. I thought the questions were very good and the panel did an excellent job dealing with them. We did have a few issues in the moderation process, which is something we'll …

Theology of Technology Conversations

I'm spending this week in Kentucky at the Asbury campus in a class about the web in ministry. The primary purpose of the class is to familiarize students with the Internet and the web with each of us in the class completing some sort of a final web project. For my project I'm not building a web site, instead I'm …

We Choose The Moon

I'm a huge space buff, and really lament the state of manned space exploration these days, but rest assured, this post isn't really a rant about how we've given up our desire to explore. Forty years ago we accomplished the single greatest exploratory and technological achievement in history, by stepping foot on the moon. I've been fascinated by the We …

Summer Reading 2009

Now that my classes are finished for the spring I've got a bit more time to do some reading for both professional development and fun/relaxation. Several of these books have been on my shelf for months. Several of them I've started, but never finished because other things were a higher priority. I read Story when I was an undergrad, but …

Donated Hardware Rocks

Yesterday I got to drive down to Monett to pick up some server hardware that was donated to the church. None of it is brand-spanking new, but it's going to make for a pretty nice setup. We were given a 42U rack cabinet, and four IBM x346 servers. The servers don't have any drives or a RAID card (just the …

Nearly a day of content every minute on YouTube

I just read this interesting article over at TechCrunch about the amount of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute. In January it was 15 hours/minute, now it's 20 hours/minute. It will soon cross the one day mark. At 20 hours of video it's nearly 50 days of content uploaded every hour and 3.2 years of content every day. If …

NetNewsWire Makes Reading Blogs Fun Again

I've been a long supporter of reading blogs in some sort of aggregator. For a long time I used Bloglines to collect, organize, and read feeds. My main goal for using it had been to have access from any computer in a format that I liked. I tried out a lot of different web-based feed readers, but Bloglines worked best …

ProPresenter Remote

Renewed Vision recently updated ProPresenter and made available a remote application that runs on the iPhone. I got a chance to use the remote in a real environment on Christmas Eve during the runthrough for our 11pm service. I've got to say overall I was very impressed. It let me flip through slides for the band without having to sit …

Mint.com

A few days ago I signed up to use Mint.com for tracking spending and budgeting. We had Quicken in the past, and basically never used it. Even with most stuff importing into Quicken automatically it would take several hours at the end of the month. The result was that we basically went months without doing any real work on tracking …