Iv’e heard a few people talking about Vimeo’s HD service, and I’ve actually seen people use it a time or two. So I thought I would give it a look under the hood and see what’s up. It turns out it’s actually a very cool free service and overall I am very impressed and happy with the quality.
Vimeo offers its HD service in 720p. Sure its not 1080, but how many people can handle 1920×1080 on their home computers? I would say at this point its still the minority. So 720p does the job and is a nice jump up from the 480 stuff that we are used to.
Vimeo is using On6VP flash for video playback on its site. much like YouTube is doing. YouTube however also offers an h.264 version. (mp4 version) You can add &fmt=18 at the end of any YouTube URL and it will play you the higher quality h.264 version. (stereo audio too) This is how you are able to watch YouTube clips on many devices like the PS3. There is talk on a couple of the Vimeo forums about the possibility of moving to an h.264 format in the future especially when Flash 9 gets a full roll-out as it will natively support playback of h.264 video. The problem with this is that playing an h.264 720p streaming video over a browser on an older machine is probably not going to go well. So Flash for now is the best course.
Once you have uploaded your 720p video, Vimeo keeps the original resolution of 1280×720. During playback you can press the full screen button. Once in full screen mode, on the right there is a toggle for scaling. Which is nice because scaling up from 720p on a hi res monitor looks less than acceptable. Turning scaling off lets you watch the 720p video in its true resolution of 1280×720.
Overall… It’s a nice service. Would love to see some church’s start to stream their webcasts in 720p too.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 10:39 pm. 1 comment
I just finished reading “Making Vision Stick” by Andy Stanley. I have read it before, but am giving it a re-read for some upcoming meetings. It’s a great book and a must read for anyone in church leadership. It’s a quick read too. You should be able to cruise through it in about an hour.
Here are some of my notes from reading.
- It is the leaders responsibility to make sure that people understand and embrace the vision.
- 5 ways to increase the stickiness of your vision
1. State the vision simply
-When people complain about what you do and don’t do. Simply state your vision.
-Get a vision statement that can be remembered and repeated
-Don’t over complicate it. If its too complicated it won’t stick. People/church will just keep doing what we’ve always done
2. Cast the vision convincingly
-State the Problem
-Every vision is a solution to a problem
-Explain what is at stake, What will happen if the problem isn’t addressed?
-Offer a solution
-Present a reason
3. Repeat the vision regularly
-Twice a year from the platform
-within the rhythm of your organization
-What other available forms of communication can you use?
4. Celebrate the vision systematically
-Celebrating a win incarnates the vision
-If vision doesn’t align with celebrations, then what’s celebrated will overpower the vision and determine the course of the organization
-What’s celebrated is repeated (for better or worse)
-If you intentionally or unintentionally celebrate something that conflicts with your vision, your vision won’t stick.
5. Embrace the vision personally
-More than just a job… a calling
-If you believe in something you live it out (mac users =)
-leaders loose sight over time of original vision
-If your not feeling like living out the vision (discouraged), don’t fake it. Admit it to safe people with your organization.
Vision slippage indicatiors
- New Projects, Products and Programs
If there are new ones they must be vision-centric
“Think steps, not programs.”
If it provides a step… consider it. If not nix it.
This is where most churches loose focus
Vision, and not peoples random ideas should determine programming
- Requests, Stories and Complaints
Some tell if people have the vision and tell if your doing your job
Listen to staff wins to see if they are relevant to the vision
If there are no wins being shared you have a problem
If the only prayer requests are for the sick and none for the lost, then your vision is slipping
Live out the vision that God has given you for your organization and pray that he gives you the strength stick to it even when times are tough.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 11:01 am. 0 comments
Today I am helping out with tech at The Whiteboard Sessions. It’s been a lot of fun thus far. We are running a fully interactive website at http://conferencechannel.org. Very cool things going on. You might even see me running around once in a while.
Posted 1 month, 2 weeks ago at 12:42 pm. 0 comments
So this Friday the team here at NCC is getting away for what is being called a “Day Dream” day. Basically were taking time out to dream big dreams about where God wants to take us. “God sized dreams.” A big questions that Pastor Mark has posed is… “Are you doing ministry out of memory or imagination?” That’s a tough one, isn’t it.
Being creative is hard work that takes blood, sweat, tears, energy, time, talent and resources. It’s just plain hard! So many times its just easier to put the ship on cruise control and do what you know. You feel like well it worked before so maybe it will work again. Or maybe it’s never worked. =) But you just keep doing it. So many times at work I am called on to “whip up” something creative… To design something, produce something, or create something. Creativity on demand doesn’t always just happen. Sometimes, some of my most creative ideas come at 11 o’clock at night and not at 1:30 in the afternoon.
But we have to push ourselves if we want to win the right to be heard as a church. Everything in our culture today is clamoring for the attention of people. How will the Church gain the attention of the masses in order to spread the Gospel. How will we “Compel them to come in” (Lk 14:23)
So basically we are going to stop everything for one day and shut everything down. (sort of =) We just want to basically put everything on the table and say, “if we could start over tomorrow and scrap everything we have done, how would we do it?” If you could start fresh… scrap everything that you have done just because you have “always done it that way”… How would you start over?
Just got a new backup solution for storing and archiving old videos and media. Our RAID array is filling up pretty fast and we had to do something. This is sort of a short term solution until we can afford more of an enterprise solution. But, I think its pretty cool none the less.
Basically this is a hard drive cradle for Serial ATA (sata) hard drives. Kind of reminds me of popping in an old Atari cart. =) The beauty of this baby is that it has an eSATA connection. So you can throw files to the drive at basically the same speed as if the drive were physically an internal drive. (3 Gbit/s)
So the dock runs roughly $50 and then you can just load up on 1 terabyte drives from newegg, and back things up to your hearts content. A 1TB drive is about $220 now. Not too shabby. So for 1TB of data I am using 2 drives. That way I have 2 copies and then I will sepeate them so they don’t live in the same place. Just in case something happens.
I would encourage everyone to backup anything of importance in some way shape or form. Because it is inevitable that disaster will strike at some point. So use something… Time Machine, Mozy, something. Also, Mozy Home just went from a beta to a 1.0 for mac users. great for home use!
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