Two Shows, Two Happy Audiences

We did two shows of Match Game SF yesterday, which was logistically challenging for various reasons. Although it was a lot of work for us, and there were some glitches along the way for set up, in both cases the shows themselves ran well, and everyone seemed to have a good time. But it's very wearing. It's a good thing that we don't have much booked today until 1 PM, when we're to be recording the first of the two Fannish Inquistions.

Facing the Inquisitions

There were two rounds of Fannish Inquisitions at Westercon today, and we were there recording them all. The first, shorter round were for Westercon: the seated Westercon (Portland) for next year, and the sole announced bids for the 2017 and 2018 Westercons (Tempe and Denver, respectively). Lisa recorded them with the new camera and the old as a backup. The sound didn't work well at all, and unless the old camera picked up the sound better than the new, we won't have video that's usable for those inquisitions.

After a one hour break, it was time for the Worldcon Inquisitions. The tech team here at Westercon 68 were, on virtually no notice when I asked, able to find a way to bridge an unbalanced connection from the amp on the room's sound board to the balanced XLR connection on Lisa's camera. (We had the cable, but they had to do things very quickly to make it so she could plug her cable into their equipment.) The initial results of this look and sound amazingly good, and if we get what we've asked for at Spokane, we should have superb sound quality. OTOH, it does mean that anything not spoken into one of the microphones is unlikely to make it onto the video. (If you're one of the people who were there, this is why we kept saying, "Repeat the questions into the microphones!")

Lisa is also not happy with the quality of the MP4 files coming out of the proxy card. She thinks it's something in her settings, and continues to experiment. I am therefore converting MXF files (the camera's actual native output) and will merge the audio and video files (remember, the camera separates them) into files I can upload when I get a chance. The conversions take quite a while, so I don't know when I'll get them posted, but if I'm lucky it will be before the end of Westercon.