Episode 2 in the can, tech move, and new people

  Episode 2 of World of Gamer Zone has been taped – this time, it was shot outside in the parking lot, since it was “Final Friday”. Basically an attempt to gain extra attention to the show and to GamerZone  This one went MUCH better in a lot of ways – we still have more tweaking, etc. to do. But this one was MUCH more solid – Meredith sounded much more relaxed (her and I setting up in the “office” having a couple of beers while we were going through the scripts helped that a lot. I do not recommend Holy Grail Ale – I coulda brewed something involving dirty socks that would have had a smoother taste.) 

The news portion of the show changed considerably – no more “talking heads” type stuff, it’s discussion and opinion on it. It sounds much better, and much more interesting.

With every show comes a new challenge – this one had two. I was using iMovie to do World of Gamer Zone, and was going to slowy transition to Final Cut Pro – expensive as hell, but, lots of power. So much for slow transition – iMovie ate episode 1 (thankfully it had already been transfered to the station at that point!) , and I decided it wasn’t worth the risk, so I moved us to Final Cut Pro. Oh man, Sooooooo much better. Cuts between cameras works so much smoother – I just set both camera feeds side by side, cut the “tape”, and disable which ever camera tape I don’t want at the moment, just swaping back and forth. It took me forever to do an episode with iMovie, primary editing is already done with Final Cut Pro – huge difference in productivity!

The second challeng – last episode we were short by quite a bit (10 minutes initally, until I shot some more footage and added 

Our new camera people also started this episode – Massaker and XenoGenesis. Which also means that KTQW no longer needs to provide a cameraperson for our shoots – They appear to run on a rather tight budget, so, I like to make sure we’re using as few of thier resources for this as possible. Of course new people means new mistakes – things are going to go wrong from time to time, bad pans, bad shots, etc. It happens, and hopefully they both keep relaxed about things – it’s not rocket science, and a mistake isn’t the end of the world. Just means you use the footage from the other camera  This one had a few camera mistakes on the close up camera – only once was there something on screen that just plain couldn’t be edited out without loosing content. Not bad considering this is thier first episode.

Episode 3 will end up using some of the footage from episode 2 – we ran SO long that there’s no way we can edit it all down. Even without “Breaking Into Games Part 2 – the Indie Advantages” the show is 30 minutes long, and we haven’t handled commercial breaks, intro, and credit rolls yet. Ouch. So, BIG Part 2 moves to episode 3, and we’ll just shoot a little less content for episode 3 – also gives us a chance to handle some of the things I wanted to see get done with some background footage, etc.

Episode 3 is also going to have our Guitar Hero review. Man that thing is gonna be a lot of work, but it’s also gonna be a whole lotta fun!

Oh, and Episode 1’s webcast will probably be delayed until 11:30 PM on Friday because of the iMovie issue – I’ve got to re-compress and re-export it for the ‘net again, which is a PITA, and takes quite a while, but I won’t have access to the cameras and the tape for it again until Friday evening. Damn. No biggie – it’s the first episode, and it’s not like 10,000 people are waiting for me to upload that sucker online.

Davis, 

Gamer Zone

World of Gamer Zone