Rocksmith’s new game is like Guitar Hero but uses a real guitar rather than a plastic one. Might be time to Learn To Play The Guitar. There is even talk of Ubisoft negotiating with Gibson and others to bundle the game with a $200 guitar – cool. Anyway, enjoy the 1 minute video and smile for the rest of the day

I set up my camera (Canon 60D) using the stock 18-55mm lens on my sturdy Vinten tripod in the garage doorway and aimed it at the sky. All very technical here and very thorough. I set all the camera's controls to manual and took a few test shots to see how they looked. Everything appeared to look okay, so I set my intervalometer to take a snap every 5 seconds with 6 second intervals between shots.

With the sun about to cross the path of my camera, I checked back in on the camera every 30 to 60 mins or so to make sure I was still capturing decent looking images. I made a few adjustments along the way to improve colour and contrast, but pretty much left it alone every hour or so. The camera captured about 90 to 100 mins before the battery had to be charged and I only have one for this camera, so I had to get a little creative when putting all the images together to try and make it appear seemless. I decided to speed up a previous part of the time lapse and this covered quite nicely.

See if you can spot the strange single-frame red streak of light the zipped across the screen – freaky!

I decided to use the Vimeo video embed as the playback quality is far better than youtube or facebook.

Life Begins At 40, or so they used to say. I turned 40 the other day (8th Sept 2010) and a couple of people asked me what it's like now I've turned 40. It always makes me smile when people ask that on your birthday, as if you must feel so different from yesterday when you were 39 and about 364 days old

Apparently 50 is the new 40 anyway and some say 60 is the new 40. I'm not bothered either way as turning 40 isn't such a big deal – sure I'm going to celebrate turning 40 with a party next month, but that's just an excuse to socialize with so many friends I don't see that often. Turning 40 was no different to turning 30 or 39, it's just a number and I'm actually really enjoying it.

But turning 40 did make me take a close look at where I am right now in life and ask myself if I'm happy.

The answer is yes. Both kids are happy at school, Eva is in a new year growing up fast, she's 8 going on 18 and Oscar is loving his new venture at his new Grammar school. Katrina's at home helping me with articles and transcriptions of my guitar videos and now has a little extra time now to work on her books in hope of one day being published. So, yes I'm happy, because I realised that everything I do in life has one main goal – and that's to be happy. When my family are happy, I'm happy and regardless of workload, health and finances, we're happy and we cherish every minute we get to spend with each other – and to me, that is priceless.

So from this 40 year old fart, I encourage you to take a look around you and see if those who are important to you are happy. Times maybe a little tough right now for most of us and you may not be exactly where you want to be at the moment but, with the love and support of those you hold so dear, anything seems possible and business success and financial freedom (whilst both really nice) seem to pale in comparison to happiness.

Make sure you're striving for your goals for the right reasons and not just to please others, your happiness is extremely infectious, so make sure you get plenty of it and share it out the best you can. I hope to be saying exactly the same thing in another 40 years, so look out for my next post in 2050.

Other folks who celebrate the 8th of September.

Peter Sellers	Martin Freeman	Ann Diamond	Pink	Brook Burke

Wow, can you believe that The Challenge (formerly The thirty Day Challenge) has come round again? Another year has flown by and the super-challenge-team have come up with an amazing new approach this year. You can check it out here – http://www.challenge.co/

If you've have ever wondered how to make money online and would like to set up a business working from home, then you'll need some guidance, top mentors and a plan. The challenge is now by far the best free training available anywhere on the planet and its run by some of the most wonderful people you could ever wish to meet. Do yourself a favour and check it out.

Of course a new challenge for me was to come up with a brand new theme song for this years challenge. With the help of family and few friends the music video to "Take My Hand" was born and the challenge had a new theme song. You can see what the song is all about in the synopsis below.

Song Synopsis:
As ever, the lyrics and sentiment are based around the whole ethos of what a challenge means to different people and how we all face different challenges of varying levels.

The video has a very show/theatre/Glee-style feel to it, starting off very sombre with a black and white visual. The opening shot is of the girl (Annie Larkin) see's her sharing her problems and how she's confused and unsure where to go and what to do from here. The manly hero (Josh Fish) comes to her rescue with "the challenge" being the solution to her problems – only to then reveal that he has similar problems too! They both unite and take the challenge together and the whole track ends with an upbeat crescendo which I hope will give people a positive attitude to get on with the challenge.

The whole "Take My Hand" theme runs throughout the song to let people know that they can achieve anything with the right guidance (the challenge course) and with other people behind them with the same goals and dreams as them.
End Of Synopsis

N.B: You might want to pause the video and let it stream down for a while if playback is a little choppy.

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Let me know if you're facing any challenges getting started online and I'll do my best to help. I'd also love to hear what you think about the music video and please click the "Like" box if you dig the tune. Please leave your comments below and I'll chat with you soon.
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Credit to the stars of the show.

A huge thank you to everyone who featured in the video from the College of West Anglia- Isle Campus. Your dedication and ability to learn a routine so fast was very impressive – Cheers. Those wonderful people are;

In Alphabetical Order
Jenna Allen, Lisa Arbon, Justyna Bartosevic, Becky Best, Hannah Boast, Katie Brown, Luke Burridge, Josh Fish, Lucy Groves, Allison Harley, Bryony Hewitt, Annie Larkin, Poppie Mason, Kayleigh Moss, Alistair Penman, Ellie Pettet, Victoria Rixon, Vicky Taylor, Richard Thompson and Toni Townsend.

The choreography was quickly put together by Michele Larkin and it was amazing to watch how quickly Michele whipped the students into shape, pulling off dance sequences in time with the track they'd just heard, for the first time only minutes before. Top-shelf Michele, your professionalism is always admired, thanks.

Thank you to my super lead stars – Annie Larkin & Josh Fish for your extra dedication during filming in the studio. You're both stars in the making.

Thank you to my super hand-holders – Delia Basuc, Eva Mason, Oscar Mason and Tony Twitchett.

A big thanks to Jack & Jo Griggs for letting me borrow Ross Griggs and stuffing him in a silver wig and blue dress. He has the best figure out of the 3 of us.

A Massive Super-Spangley (with glitter on top) thank you from the bottom of my heart to my beautiful wife and kids for putting up with me over the last few weeks. This definitely would not happen without your continued support. I Love You All – Thanks.

Music by Phill Mason
Lyrics by Katrina Mason
All Instruments by Phill Mason
All Vocals by Katrina Mason, Ross Griggs and Phill Mason

The final thanks goes to the lovely Silver – Blue beauties. Not sure who they are or where they came from, but they did sing the most wonderful backing vocals and they definitely have absolutely nothing to do with me what-so-ever, honestly, eerrrmm yup for sure, to be sure.

Following much extensive research, I took all the essential ingredients required to be able to play guitar and boiled them down into 30 high definition video guitar lessons.

You can join for free and check out the "Free Muso" guitar lessons to see if you like it. This is a great way to see if we're compatible. Do you like the way I teach and can you actually get something from it? I'm pretty confident I can have you playing within the first couple of minutes into the very first free lesson, so there's absolutely no risk on your part. Give it a go, I think you'll like it.

There is a monthly membership option an annual option and then there's the Crash Course which is called the "Course Muso" membership. This is the most intense and also the fastest learning course available.

Short and easy to digest was top of the list when I created this course, as I'm very aware of the limited time people have these days and the ability to consume short bursts of information is far easier than hour long videos that you'll most likely forget. Short and sweet visual media consumption is the order of the day and plenty of it across 30 days. Everything comes with a full 60 day money back guarantee, so you've got nothing to lose and everything to gain by giving it a try.

If you're looking for something new in 2010 and you really do want to learn to play guitar, then try Crash Course Muso because it will take you from a complete beginner to an accomplished guitarist in next to no time.

Click below to see what others are saying about the course.
http://crashcoursemuso.com/

How To Get The Best Video Format For The Web

In part one of "How To Get The Best Video Format For The Web" I spoke mainly about testing various renders from my NLE as this was goal number 1, get the best, sharpest, most colour rich render I possibly could, regardless of video format or size. For me this was an m2t file right out of Sony Vegas Pro. The colours really popped and the contrast saw the blacks looking like proper deep, dense blacks not washy greys. The m2t file was a great combination of colour saturation similar to a WMV file and the sharpness of an MP4 or M4v video, neither of which looked as good as the m2t, so decision made.

Incidentally, you can simply change the extension of an m2t file to mp4 and it'll play beautifully in your chosen MP4 player – VLC Media Player being one of my favourites.

Once a successful render had been achieved, the next phase was transcoding these mega files into a decent web size and format. The m2t files were usually somewhere between 1GB – 2GB for a 10 minute video) at 1280 x 720 x 25p and this is clearly unusable online, so time to open every transcoder/converter I had and heat up those cpu and graphics cores!

It would be easy to explain every tiny adjustment I made to each and every conversion, but you'd drop down dead of complete boredom and I'd be typing for the next couple of months. Afterall, you're reading this because you want the meat and potatoes, not the scraps, so I'm going to cut out all that crap out and give you the results first.

So Here They Are………..

The best format conversion was to an MP4 using the H.264 codec and the software that performed this miracle was – VisualHub. Sad thing is, it's Mac only and is no longer available, so if you see a copy anywhere, do yourself a favour and grab it, it'll be well worth it. Now I'm generally a PC user, but, (Ed Dale's gonna love me for this) since using a Mac I can hands down say that if they do one thing well and one thing only, its how brilliantly  they handle images. Whether they're still or moving, Mac's can toss your footage around, bend it, stretch it, mash it up and put it all back together again and still pop out a render thats far superior to anything I've experienced before.

So there you have it, an m2t to mp4 conversion via Visualhub using the H.264 codec and I have a web-ready file of around 50MB for a 720 x 400 px video.

Okay, here's what you should go and do now:-

1.   Master and render out your video to the best possible quality achievable. Disregard file size at this point, just do some tests to get the best possible colour, contrast and motion smoothness you can. You can worry about file size and web-format – see the video converters section below.

2.   When performing your tests, pick around 5 – 10 seconds of footage to test with. Don't render a 12 minute video only to find it's not what you want.

3.   If you're still unsure how others will see your videos, then view them on other devices. My Mac, PC, laptop and Plasma or LCD TV's all look different, so test and do a visual check on several screens if you can. I usually do about 5 or so different colour and sharpness renders and then burn them to a DVD so I can go to all the other screens and test. This works well for me and also allows me to see the same size video on different sized screens.

** Video Rendering Tip **: For the best quality renders, always try and keep your video aspect ratio's to multiples of 16. You can use 8 and indeed 4, but I'd recommend 16 for the best quality results. I've played around and edited video with odd screen sizes like 705 x 405px and 640 x 270px and they just have so many unwanted artifacts around the edges, especially white text, that seems to suffer quite a lot, but there was marked visual improvement when I changed the resolution to a size that was divisable by 16 like 720 x 400 or a smaller 640 x 272px (I like that uber-widescreen look on smaller videos sizes) even though 640 x 320 is more common – Pah! who likes common?

Alrighty then, techie video nerds, continue if you do so desire:

Now an mp4 video file is still not the most web-friendly format, but it was the right size and quality I was after, so I then looked at converting this into something the web would prefer like a SWF or an FLV video or similar. Here's a list of the software I tested – used – bought – borrowed – demo’d – stole – pillaged – abused – used on a mates machine etc.

I've placed them in a "converter/transcoder I found most useful" order:

1: VisualHub
2: Handbrake
3: Super ©
4: AVS Video Converter
5: Allok MPEG4 Converter
6: Prism Video Converter
7: Ultra Video Converter
8: Xilisoft FLV Converter 3

At time of writing, there was a new version 0.9.4 of Handbrake available, I used version 0.9.3 in this test, so I have not tested the new one yet, but if it stacks up to the release notes, then more improvements can be expected – Yo Mamma!

What I really like about all the software above, is the ability to change a wealth of parameters. Being able to setup up my own presets is something I really like, because it enables me to have exactly what I want for a particular project and not what someone else thinks I may want. With that said, I always try the presets first if there are any, because afterall, the creators of these software titles know what they're doing and I'm pretty certain they've tested all the options to death in order to find the best results and then made those into presets, well, that's at least what we're hoping they've done.

It was soon obvious that not all presets did what they said on the tin. The only real way to find out was to test all the ones that came close to my desired outcome. This would also be an easy way for me to tweak some settings afterwards and save my own presets based on the originals. I've found this to be the best practice throughout most of my tests.

After choosing my desired video resolution and frame rate, video kbps and audio sample rate and bitrate, it was then a case of finding out which video rendering engine performed the best with my large m2t file. Now the footage I used for most of my testing was my video guitar course, which is a tuition based video course that teaches you how to learn to play guitar. Now 99% of the footage is fairly static, single shot, straight on to camera, so there's no great movement involved which is great as this really tests the rendering engine because when you're testing with both high and low level motion within a video, it's more difficult to be subjective to the quality of the render as you always have the added variable of the amount of motion within the video. With this taken away from the equation, I was able to achieve more accurate results in my low-motion tutorial video.

I began testing to see how many kilobits I could get away with, ie, what's the lowest kbps (kilobits per second) I can use and still achieve excellent quality, no pixelation, smooth transitions all with a small file size. Most of us know that video compressed for online use is always a bit of a trade off between 2 main factors – quality verses file size. Once again this is where the amount of motion and transitions in your footage come into play, if there's less visual data in a scene, then the bitrate can be lower – another decision to make when choosing between variable or constant bitrate.

Anyhow, I found, (as with most types on online video), 768kbps to be an ideal bitrate for streaming video from a server to the client. On Crash Course Muso (my online guitar course) I chose to display a 720 x 400 MP4 video size via EZS3.com who convert my MP4 into flash video and wrap it up in a nice video player. You will need an Amazon S3 account if you want to use this facility, but given that it's dirt cheap and a great secure video host, I'd recommend you do that anyway if you're considering distributing any amount of media across the world wide web. Another option is new-comer "Easy Video Player" who offer a similar video content management interface but with a one-time payment only as apposed to EZS3's monthly plan. They both look pretty similar so although I haven't yet checked out Easy Video Player I will do so within the next few weeks and most likely write about it at some point.

Soooooo, there's a couple of possible distribution ideas for you, now all you need to do is convert your video the best format for the web you possibly can and to upload it. Well you already know that my huge m2t video was way too big to consider uploading, which is why I made my master video – an MP4 with a 768kbps cap limit in Visualhub. This gave me something usable to use as a master to upload to the net.

Youtube likes 720p MP4's, so does Facebook and pretty much all other video sharing sites, so using an MP4 as your master gets pretty good results all round. It's also worth mentioning that Youtube converts better with a 30 frames per second video. I've done a couple of test on this and I think it's less relevant these days, perhaps a couple of years ago when their conversion were terrible, but to be honest, now they're pretty good and with the introduction of 1080p, its only going to get better – at last. Anyway, that's all fine and dandy for video sharing sites as they are converting/hosting for you, but what if you are wanting to put that wonderful MP4 on your own website?

Which Format To Put On Your Own Website
Well, that's where the converters come in. I love using "Super" for that. It can chuck out just about all the likely formats you'll ever need for the web and I'm currently using it to make some nice video banners for my Crash Course Muso affiliates and it's converting either my m2t or MP4 files nicely into SWF (Flash) video files to easily use across the web.

PC Users – Use Super or Handbrake
Mac Users – Use – Handbrake (MP4 & MKV Containers only) – (if you can't find VisualHub)

With the above said, if you do use a service like EZS3.com then there's no need to convert your MP4, you can simply just upload it and they'll do that for you behind the scenes. All you need to do is upload it and choose a few player options and you'll be given some neatly packaged code you can drop right into your website, blog or anything els you can drop code into!!

So To Summarize:
** Just as a quick note. If you can render directly to a decent MP4 from your NLE and you're happy with the results, great, do that. There's no need to go through all this converting jazz if your MP4's sparkle right from the outset, but mine didn't, they looked washed out, hence the slightly long post.

• Render out the shinest, squeakiest,  video file you can – with lots of rich colours and contrast from your NLE.
  
• Convert to an MP4 for your master video.
  
• Upload it to a sharing site and let them transcode it.
  
• Convert yourself using your preferred software or one of the above software converters listed above – (with a sensible kbps limit for streaming)
  

Don't forget to save or write down your settings. After a laborious testing session you don't want to go through all that again next time you're making a movie masterpiece

The above should give you a decent looking quality video at a reasonable file size for use across the web. I hope you managed to find something useful in this post and please let me know your video transcoding and encoding results in the comments – thanks.

Encoding or Transcoding – what do they mean and which is best?

It's a question that's been asked many, many time before – What's the best video encoding format that provides the best results for the web? This is something I've spent countless hours of research on and continue to develop over time. As the internet changes so indeed do the steps required to ensure decent encoding results online.

For ages the battle of file size vs quality has always caused issues when streaming high definition video online. For many, watching such a high bit rate video online is still not possible due to the extremely poor bandwidth so many people still experience from their so called 2mb, 4mb or even 8mb and 16mb broadband connections. I'm one of those people who live in sticks and my broadband connection is rubbish. (Personal Gripe Coming Up). It annoys me why I have pay the same monthly tarrif as someone who lives in town whos getting a cracking 8mb connection, whilst I'm just a measly 4 miles from the local phone exchange, yet I rarely crack 1mb download speed. My phone call quality is the same as it is in town, so why shouldn't my broadband be? Should be based on a pay per bandwidth-quality type thingy, I'd gladly pay top dollar for a 16Mbit connection any day of the week, but I do seriously grudge paying for something I'm not getting! (Ok, rant over – sorry about that).

Anyway, back to encoding video. I wont bore you to death with results and figures of every single render I've done over the last 6 months, but I will try to share with you what I found to be a winning workflow combination and I hope you can take something from it and save yourself a headache and a shed-load of time! During my tests I reckon I've rendered close to 300  videos, in 7 various formats and transcoded them testing around 10 or so different pieces of software, so some serious painful testing time Here goes…..

I use a Panasonic HVX200 camera for most of my shoots and usually capture in 720pn with a frame rate of 24fps. This combination works really well for me as it allows for sensible recording times across my P2 cards and reasonable HD size image for DVD and or web distribution. Dropping the Panasonic MXF files into Vegas via the DVFilm codec is a nice, quick and easy workflow. I can dump 32 GB of HD video into my NLE and be ready to edit inside around 8 to 10 minutes. I couldn't go back to DV tape now – a 1hour tape meant 1 hour to get it into your computer. Ouch!

I tried so many different output renders from my NLE (Sony Vegas) that it was sending me round the twist trying to come up with the ideal solution for each format. I found my best result was to render out the best looking, most colourful, high contrast version I could possibly achieve and then use a video converter to transcode the video file into the formats I required depending on the videos final destination.

I rendered out some test videos from Vegas as MP4, MPEG 1, MPEG 2, WMV, AVI, M2t and MOV. They all produced vastly different results depending on several video content factors. Movement and transitions in my guitar tutorial videos were minimal, but I still experienced some choppy pixelation across large blocks of a single colour when rendering to the likes of MPEG 1, MPEG 2 and MOV. I wanted to test as many formats as possible to try and find a happy medium between file size and quality. I also filmed in front of a green screen for my teaching videos, so I had edge artifacts, lighting and colour correction to deal with throughout the video.

Here's a screen grab of a before and after the chroma key. There is quite a bit of colour correction and contrast adjustment applied to enable rich, deep blacks and a smooth keying out the screen.
Below is the Original Raw Image

Below is the finished image with Chroma Keying, Colour Correction and increased Contrast with a smidge of Sharpening.

I'm really pleased with the results I'm seeing on my screen and I hope it looks okay for you guys too? You can clearly see an increased contrast between the two images as the black t-shirt pops nicely in the rendered image, but what is interesting is that the skin tone has barely changed between the two images, yet it looks bucket-loads richer in the bottom image. I reduced a little of the red highlights from the face and that was about it . This is because when the blacks are truly black and not a washed-out grey/black like in the raw image, the colours really pop ten-fold and a perceived saturation in all other colours start to appear.

I could continue for another 10 or 20 paragraphs or so, but this post is already long enough. I'll post Part 2 very soon and discuss the final format  I mastered to, what software I used and how I converted the mastered videos into top quality and sensibly sized formats for web distribution.

Bye for now!

Can you believe another year has breezed past and here we are again at the beginning of August 2009 and that means only one thing, it's Thirty Day Challenge time!

UPDATE! The Thirty Day Challenge is now know as "The Challenge".

This years Theme Song Music Video sees a collaboration of people from all over the globe and we are honoured to be graced with a brief appearance of the talents of Karen Kramer and her wacky creation of the Chip-Ed-Dale dancers, check out the video. So, to celebrate this, I have made a High definition version available for download. Now as many of you may know, the 30DC and all it stands for is Free and the training is absolutely amazing this year – best ever.

So why the paid download? Well, to keep in keeping with the 30DC's preferred charity, we want to give a little back and help those less fortunate than us, so all proceeds from the Video and Audio downloads will be donated to the Kiva charity and this is how you can help.

We're keeping it really simple – $2 for the HD Video and $1 for the MP3 Audio.

Simple click the "Buy Now" button and you can securely pay with your credit card via Paypal. It's been suggested that I include a "Donate" button for those who can afford it and would like do donate additional contributions to the Kiva charity. There's no download attached to the "Donate" button, it's simply that a donation. If you want the Video or Audio, please click the relevant "Buy Now" button for each, thanks.

Donations Only	30DC HD MP4 Video	30 DC MP3 Audio

As soon as you've paid for your item, click on "Return To Merchant" on the successful payment page and your download window will automatically popup and begin. I hope you enjoy watching the video as much as I did making it and if we can make a small difference in someone's life, then it's been well worth while, thank you.

The new Canon EOS Rebel T1i is set to excite several new Indie film makers with its HD video capture facility. I personally use a Canon 350D for image capture and a Panasonic HVX200 for HD video capture and the prospect of being able to bolt on a wide spectrum of primes onto a 1080p and 720p capture device is quite exciting. Apparently Canon have crammed the $1500 50D’s sensor and 5D-Mark-II-like 1080p video capture into an $899 entry-level Rebel. 1080p is sadly only available at 20fps, yet a full 30fps is achievable with the 720p setting and should suit most people at this price range.

Canon T1i Specification:

• H.264 video capture @ 1080p/20fps and 720p/30fps with mono sound
• DIGIC 4 processor
• Nine-point autofocusing
• 3.4fps burst shooting for 170 JPEGs or 9 RAW files
• The 50D’s lens peripheral illumination correction
• Three-inch, 920,000-dot LCD (same as the 5D Mark II’s)
• Built-in sensor dust removal system
• Live view
• Canon’s "Creative Auto" mode for light exposure tweaks on full-auto
• Saves to SD/SDHC cards (class 6 or higher recommended)
• $899 with kit lens, $799 body only, available early May

No sign of UK prices at time of press.

A special thanks goes out to Gizmodo who have had the chance to play around with this camera and grabbed some footage in both 20fps and 30fps. You can see the original footage on their website. The footage below has been re-captured and compressed into an FLV file, but it gives you an idea of what the camera is capable of. You can see the original footage on the Gizmodo website.

After a couple of hours filming at the local Kung Fu Club, it was time to offload the P2 card into the PC. I thought I’d stick up a couple of screen grabs whilst I get stuck into the editing. I wanted to take some footage as my kids are learning Kung Fu here and it seemed like a good opportunity to add some interesting shapes for my showreel. I managed to grab some great slow motion combat footage right at the end which I’m looking forward to going through.

I’ll be doing a complete production on this video, whilst its most likely a bit rough in places, I only want to edit it down to something in region of 2 minutes. I’ll be writing an original  music score and maybe applying some sound effects, I have to play around to see what works well, but I’ll stick a clip up as soon as I have something I like.

For now, here’s a couple of sized down screen grabs from this evenings filming.