Qik, Snowfall
Here, some qik snowfall, on the last day of the year
Whilst some people are perfectly happy sitting at a desk chatting to others via webcams I prefer to be out and about streaming daily life. Today was one example of what I like to do. I went up to La Dole for a walk with the n95 and streamed a few landscapes for people following me on twitter to see.
We finally got caught out by some hail and thunder but my phone survived.
I want more people to do this type of thing. Come out and have fun, stream life as it happens. Show us what’s outside your living room or home office.
The right side of the Transmission Chain is at the event itself. Transmission chain is a term used to describe the route that a signal takes from an event venue to the device on which you are watching an event. As a camera operator the right side of the transmission chain for me is at the event itself.
For the IFSC World Cup in Villars this year I was both a camera operator and a belayer. Belaying at a world cup event is an interesting experience because it’s rare to clip and unclip from so many climbers in such a short amount of time. Climbers have a limited time to get up the route. They have six minutes. This means that every 12 minutes or so you’re belaying a new climber as they progress up the wall. It’s a great task for introverts. You observe what the person is doing. When they need rope you’re ready to give it. If they’re struggling you make sure to amortise their fall. When they make it to the top or come back down you help them untie the rope and then you start again.
Aside from this task I was camera operator during the semi-final and final of the climbing competition. This means that whilst most people were standing in the crowd watching the competition I was on a podium in the middle of the crowd filming the climbers as they progress up the wall.
From here you see the crowd and you see the climbers from a privileged point of view. You can see the climbers and what they are doing comfortably. You’re also more attentive. You’re following their every move, watching as they clip and progress. You see them progress and you hear the commentator and hear the crowd cheering.
When you’re on the “wrong” side of the transmission you’re hearing the international sound and you’re seeing what the vision mixer is seeing but you’re not seeing the event in context. The image below illustrates this.
In television broadcasting you usually have the cameras, an OB van and an SNG truck or fibre connections. These go from the venue to the Network Operating centre. The signal is encoded either for web streaming and sent to the content distribution network or it is sent on to national broadcasters. On that side of the transmission chain you are in an air conditioned office as a passive observer ready to react if there is an issue and waiting for the event to end.
Waiting for the iPhone4 to come out in the hope to do mobile video editing is not necessary. Vericorder have come out with an app for that.
The app is a simple to use video, recording and voice over recording app that allows for video editing and distribution to be possible on the move.
There are three modes, record video, take photographs and record voice. Each of these modes allows you to gather material, name the clip and then record the next shot.
The project tab allows you to add video clips to the sequence, shortening and sorting the videos in the order you want.
After that is done go to the voice ovee app, record the audio, transcribe what you have said before adding the audio track to the timeline. Once that is done save the project.
Export the video, chose send as video and you will have a finished edited news item.
It is intuitive to use. Within ten minutes of use I understood how it works and simplz need to find events furring which to test the applicAtion.
Over the past month I have seen an increase of 7000 views in relation to the videos I have posted on youtube. The two events that helped make this a reality are the Geneva Lake Parade and the Paleo Festival. For the Paleo Festival scantily clad girls were an attractive proposition.
As to the paleo it was taking video I had streamed live on qik and sharing it via a number of video sharing websites of which youtube was one.
To give an idea of the audience peaks we saw over 900 views for the Lake Parade footage and over 1300 views for Manu Chao. That’s a respectable audience.
The question is whether there are any events you would like me to cover (via live streaming from a mobile phone) and whether that would attract a big enough audience.
My first thoughts on Pokemon Go are that we can level up fast. They have taken all of the Ingress Portals that Ingress players and I have created and turned them in to whatever the locations are called in Pokemon Go. I could research the names and terms but I am not that obsessive. Pokemon geeks can let me know in the comments. Is this why they stopped accepting new portals a year ago, to make porting the data from one server to the next easier?
This morning I walked and went from a beginner to level four and a half. I was able to collect many pokeballs and pokemon creatures. Levelling up is easy. You get 100 points per pokecreature and 500 points for every new creature. You can upgrade or evolve individual creatures as you collect the required resources.
One of my favourite features so far is that you can incubate eggs by walking. So far I have eggs that require 2-5km of walking to spawn. This means that you can go for a hike and keep your phone active. Every two to five kilometres a creature will hatch and you can start incubating the next one. This is a nice feature because it implies that we will not be stuck in a city. Walking in the countryside will have the same effect.
The second pleasant aspect is that although there are “portals” as I would call them as an ingress player creatures also spawn all over the place. This means that as a person who spends a lot of time in the countryside I am free to play in a rural setting. One of the reasons for which I stopped playing Ingress was because of the time it took to farm and the need to spend time in towns. With Pokemon Go these challenges are now neutralised.
According to the Tribune de Genève this game is only available in the US and New Zealand for now. As I am part of an early adopter community in this part of Switzerland we have been able to access and test the game ahead of its official European release. The software still has a few bugs, at least on the Sony Xperia Z5 compact that I use.
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Wow, looks really heavy.. you going out in it? Looks like there is a strange red UFO hovering over the roof there.. 😉
For the first few seconds, then I opened the windows and everything was fine once more :-). There’s a chance I’m going out in it a little later today.
Want to get some video of a flash mob in Lausanne.