Bill Mecca

My two older daughters volunteered to help me out at work today. One running the scroll control on the prompter the other as camera operator. I do an on-camera anchor man part for an annual test video. I introduce each scenarion and then give the test takers the questions. I usually do it all myself, but since they offered to help, who am I to argue. Well Beth was first on running prompter. She found it difficult to keep pace, falling behind or getting ahead. Katie then gave it a shot. She did pretty well at first then had problems. So dad decided to go to the fall back plan and do it himself, just to get through the lengthy narrations. Once I had finished they got a shot at being in front of the camera. (I will try to post some clips next week) they found that wasn't all that easy to do either. They say it was harder than they thought, especially when trying to follow the copy. It's a skill that is learned thru repetition and practice. Much like reading copy and making it soun

Lavalamps seem to have been around forever, but are seeing a resurgence in popularity. (2 of my kids bugged us to buy them for them, and they succeeded). They have popped up in photos of recording studios. I guess they add that much needed "warmth" to the sound. But I recently found that being close to a lavalamp can heat up your career. Just watch this guy. Recognize Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame? or maybe as the voice of The Deadliest Catch, or now Ford's truck and car commercials? Lavalamps can help your career, myth or truth? you decide.

this time for getting the best video quality when uploading to youtube. It's pretty self explanatory. Screen captures don't show up that well, I need to re-edit and zoom in on the specific spots, but here it is. You may notice an audio totorial down the page is no longer available. Well I mistakenly deleted it from youtube, and since I have been having DSL issues in the evening (when I get chance to upload) I have been unable to replace it. I hope to have the issue worked out (its' been nearly 2 months) this weekend if the tech is on the ball (its a phone line issue, apparently the gremlins only come out after dark).

Can you be all things to all people? Well, if you can you are better than me. I'm a former TV and radio news guy who now produces video and does some freelance voiceover work. There are myriad voiceover people out there. Some talented in character voices, others have talent for cartoon voices, anime and such. There are few like Don LaFontaine who are synonymous with a genre like he is with movie trailers. I will never be the next Don LaFontaine. All I want to be is the best Bill Mecca I can be. That means focus. Focusing on my strengths and trying to improve my weakenesses. Sure I can do a goofy voice, heck I was even hired to do an impression of Steve Irwin (the late Crocodile Hunter) but is that a strenghth? Not really. I've done a stereotypical Italian mobster type for a friends CD, but is that a strength? Not really. My strength is corporate, industrial, training and e-learning type projects. With my background I have done on-camera pieces for training videos, voice overs f

My 10 year old daughter needed an extra credit project on a Biome. With her dad having a bit of knowledge of one biome with his award-winning Lost Towns of the Pine Barrens, Vol. I he suggested she use some of that footage and create a video. She wrote the script, shot most of the local video, and performed the voice over. I helped her with the edit, and took a few shots myself (most of which wound up on the cutting room floor). so here it is.

still shot grabbed from one of my first attempts at green screen. I will get a better shot one of these days. I haven't gotten to another tutorial yet, as I have been monkeying around with this blog, and just installed Wordpress on my voiceover site. GoDaddy, my host, has added an easy install, so I figured I would try it out. It's gotten good reviews, and I like the idea of having it on my own site, and building (I hope) traffic there, but the Admin area is so slow to respond. I could brew coffee in the time it takes to publish a post, or make a change. I will play with it a bit more as I focus in on just what I want to do, so we will have to see how it all turns out. Stay tuned!

I play saxophone and sing. I collaborate with musicians around the world, and recnetly some have been talking about having synchronization issues when trying to incorporate others tracks into their projects. I created this little tutorial using Camstudio2.0 a free screen recorder, that seems to do much of what the pricey other software does. here's the video, more comments below. I learned a couple things doing this tutorial. One: I need to be better prepared. Audacity threw me a curve. I usually use Sonar or Audition for music, but opted for Audacity for this since is free and widely used. It handles things a bit differently at times. Second: after I did this I found that camstudio has it's own video codec that does a better job than the microsoft dv1 that I used. Third: I am not that well versed in Vegas yet, and need to learn more, like whey this came out letterboxed, and you do not see the entire screen, although that is what I recorded. and lastly, while I do voiceover

I'm cheap, there I said it. It's true. I try to find the most inexpensive way to do what I need. And what is cheaper than FREE? Not much. So from time to time I will be posting links to some software that I find useful and is free. I will also be creating some video tutorials that will be posted here as well. I'm a video guy first, so when I decided to try to put some videos up on the internet I found I needed to convert them to flash, or Quicktime, or whatever format I wanted. I tried several trial versions of converter software, some of which were quite good, but then I found Super from www.erightsoft.com Super is a GUI to codecs that already exist. You can convert to nearly every format from nearly every format. And it's free! check out the website www.erightsoft.com you will have to go through about four pages until you can acutally download it. (just keep clicking the download link) Since I've been using this for a several months, it has been updated seve

Tonight I came home from picking up my oldest daughter from her volunteer work at the library, when my 10 yer old Katie, handed me a poem she wrote while I was gone. This Man This man spoke the words of his heart and his mind . He spoke the words of his life. He thought of me as what I am and what I could be. He loved me as I was. This wonderful person said that I'm perfect just the way I am. He said I could do anything if I truly wanted to. He taught me to think of everyone and not just me. Do you know who this man is? He is my grandfather. Katherine Mecca 2007 My Dad will be gone three years this Father's Day

I regularly peruse the forums at www.dvinfo.net and came across a post about Steven Dempsey. He is a filmmaker based in Seattle, WA, who specializes in nature videography. There are some samples on his site http://www.pinelakefilms.com and he is starting to list some tutorials. One of his first videos called Something Fishy,

Figure I should at least post something about this at the start. I produced a 45 minute documentary entitled " Lost Towns of the Pine Barrens, Vol. I" that won a 2006 Aegis Award in its category. It's "cross-curricular" meaning that if a school were to use it, it would work for both science and social studies/history classes. I produced a short trailer as well. It's been said there are more ghost towns in the New Jersey Pine Barrens than in all of the old west. This video recounts the unique ecology of the area, the iron industry it supported and how it met its demise. More information is available at www.losttownsvideo.com

Let's see, where to start? It all began at a local cable television, no, that's not it, it really began in a hospital many years ago putting my mother through 27 hours of pain, but let's focus on the positive. I'm a former television and radio news reporter/anchor, now an in-house video producer, freelance voice over guy, produce videos of my own, hlep my lovely wife raise our 4 kids, and find time to play tenor sax and write some music, besides homeowner type stuff. there I think that's enough. This place will be where I can share my thoughts, and new projects, and maybe even ramble on a bit about myriad items.