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Teleprompter isn't that easy, just ask my daughters!

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
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Lava lamps can heat up your career

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.
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Another tutorial, this time for Youtube video

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).
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Who are you?

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
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Gotta Start them young!

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.
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Yeah, that's me

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!
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A tutorial on maintaining synch for collaborating musicians

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
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