<Open Source Software Licensing with Jonathan Zuck of ACT Online/>

Scott and Carl turn to Jonathan Zuck of the Association for Competitive Technology to demystify Software Licensing and the industry's many Open Source Software Licenses.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=104

I just recently found a video online of my Keynote Speech, "What a Long Strange Trip it's Been: Reflections of a VB Developer" from the Tulsa Techfest in 2006. I'm happy someone recorded it. If you're a VB developer who came up through the ranks over the years like I did, you will definitely appreciate it.

 Jan Blomquist on Gaia Ajax Widgets

Jan Blomquist returns to dnrTV to give us more Gaia Ajax Widget demonstrations. Jan also shows you how to integrate Gaia controls into your existing .NET web applications.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=88

I was looking through my camera photos and stumbled across this video I took while at a restaurant in Sofia, Bulgaria a few weeks ago with the Telerik people and some of the speakers at DevReach. See how many people you recognize.

I think that's Latka Gravis dancing in the background.

I couldn't sleep the other night (what's new) so I got up and recorded Steely Dan's "Home at Last" from their amazing 1977 album, Aja (highly recommended in all its forms). I did the vocals and played all the instruments, set up the shots, recorded the audio and video, produced it, and published it using the Microsoft Expression Encoder (SilverLight). The story continues below. 

Click the picture below to watch the video in 1280x720 (Microsoft Silverlight will install quickly if you don't have it).

Click here to watch the low-res Flash version at YouTube.

This was recorded in my studio at Pwop Productions. The studio will be booking (audio and video) soon. Please direct all inquiries to info@pwop.com

Unlike my first experiment with producing hi-def Silverlight videos, this one involved a real multitrack recording and 5 different camera shoots. I used Adobe Audition 2.0 to record the audio, and Adobe On Location to record the video using my latop and an external hard drive. The video was done exactly the same way as in the first experiment.

First I recorded the drum track. My hair was actually dry for that one. What's funny is you can see me getting progressively sweatier as the night went on. The entire recording and initial audio mixdown took only 4 hours, but the lights were hot and I was running a round quite a bit. 

Next I laid down the bass, then the piano, guitar, and finally the vocals. I recorded one main vocal, and two background tracks, and then I doubled each background track and the original vocal on the chorus only.

The drums are a Yamaha Custom Maple kit with Evans heads, which were expertly set up by John Van Ness at Caruso Music in New London, CT. The Bass is a cheap (but awesome) Samick 5-string through a 1000-watt (I know... excessive) GK rig. The guitar is my modified 1983 Gibson Les Paul Standard with EMG pickups through a BOSS effects unit with stereo outs to two amps, a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier and a Lab Series L5. It makes a nice little sound, doesn't it?  The piano is a Yamaha G2 Baby Grand recorded with a Shure C81 and a Rode NT1000. Nuff said.

Once I got a good audio mix, I brought all the video files and the mixed down audio file into Sony Vegas 7.0 to mix the video. One problem: Vegas doesn't have a codec for DVCPRO-HD, the format recorded by my Panasonic HVX100 camera. A little poking around the web and I found the RayLight DVFilm decoder and snagged it for a $195.

Once I got that working, I had to manually line up the videos to each other, one at a time, and then the audio. Then it was just a matter of doing the edit. Well, there was some kind of memory leak or something, because the RayLight codec gave me an error by rendering a text "something bad has happened" message where there should have been video in the preview window. A few seconds later it bluescreened.

I was able to get back into it. The next time I saw the error, I immediately did a save and exit. After coming back into Vegas all was fine, for a while until it happened again. All in all this happened like clockwork about every 10 minutes.

It took about an hour to render a straight uncompressed AVI with Vegas. It then took about 20 more minutes to encode it with the Expression Media Encoder. If you want to know what kind of machine I'm using, check out this post where I introduced "The Beast."

After listening to the mix in the car I had a couple things to tweak so I got back to the studio and did another mix. This time I used VirtualDub to simply replace the audio in the AVI instead of waiting for Vegas to render it again. I love VirtualDub!

If you're new to Silverlight, it's a new browser technology from Microsoft that, in its first incarnation (1.0) does some serious video. The video I published here is 1280x720 at 29 frames per second, and it streams like flash! The next version of Silverlight will bring the power of Microsoft .NET development to the browser, allowing for rich interactive applications that compile in the browser. Expect Silverlight 1.1 next year sometime. In the meantime, we have a serious web video platform to play with!

I'd like to hear your comments, and I'm happy to answer any questions also. Thanks for watching!

OK, I admit it. I'm an audio guy. At least, I used to be. I much prefer to work in the medium of audio. Maybe it's because I'm a musician. Maybe it's because I have a body made for radio. Whatever the reason, it's all changing.

It's not like I'm new to video. I have produced videos, even full-length movies. If you would recall the .NET Rocks! movie, in which Richard Campbell, Rory Blyth, and I recorded a .NET Rocks! episode on video as well as audio. It wasn't the prettiest, but it was a good start. It was done with Mini DV cameras and Adobe Premeire and it took a LONG time to render. Maybe that's why I prefer audio. Rendering goes by pretty quick.

I've also done lots of dnrTV episodes. These are screen video, and not as challenging as live-motion video, but still, I figured out how to do it well. My brother Jay has edited most of the dnrTV episodes. He's actually very talented at putting videos together. He did a wedding video (on DVD no-less) for our cousin that actually made me well up, it was so good.

Well, I've decided to jump head-first into the hi-def video pool by producing two real videos for real customers. The first will be for StrangeLoop Networks, and the second will be for Developer Express. Seeing as how the first shoot is next week in New York, a couple days ago I figured I'd better stop procrastinating and buy the gear so I could get familiar with it. This is the story of what came out of my first tests.

The idea is to start with two cameras, and work my way to three. The cameras have to shoot in hi-def, specifically 720p (1200x720). The reason is that Silverlight video, which I plan to use heavily, can push out 720p streams as easily as Flash pushes out the standard-sized stuff.

The cameras also have to be really good quality. I don't want to use a cheap handheld. Those things might do hi-def, but the optics are crappy, not to mention the fact that one strong gust of wind and it's over. No thanks. I'll pick one with really good optics and a bit of heft to it.

So at the suggestion of my friend, Scott Stanfield, I purchased two Panasonic HVX200 pro camcorders. These will not only do 720p but also 1080p and also the lower-res standard formats. They have built-in audio preamps with phantom power, gobs of I/O options including XLR inputs, and superior optics. They use DV tapes, but also P2 cards, which are these PCMCIA cards that contain flash memory. Scott says they are awesome, but expensive.

The camera itself was also a bit on the expensive side. The best deal I could find was at Fotoconnection.com, but watch out. The page you land on from Google is for the European version, but they don't tell you that until you're on the phone with them verifying your address, etc. "Where in Europe are you going?"  Yeah right. Nice one, guys. The US version is another 600 bucks or so, but still a good deal.

I also got a couple shoulder supports. This is critical for doing any handheld shooting when your camera is of medium heft. You just can't hold it that long without getting the wobblies. To the mix I added three 1000 watt diffusor light boxes. These are basically 1K watt halogen bulbs in a box with a white diffusor over it so the light isn't so harsh.

So I got all that stuff delivered yesterday, minus the P2 cards. I figured I would use DV tapes to start. Except that you can only record in 720p to a P2 card. Looking them up on the web, I see you can get a 16GB card for 900 bucks. That holds about 20 minutes of 720p video. You can get two of them, and that gives you 40 minutes. Hmmm.... kinda expensive.

Next I found this little gem of a box, which records from the firewire port onto an internal hard drive in all the formats supported by the camera. People were swearing by them in the comments, and best of all, a 100GB version is only 1800 bucks and it yields 100 minutes. Getting better.

Trying to understand how it works, it occurred to me that it's just taking the raw video feed and doing all the recording all within the box. Guess what? So does a computer. All I need is a laptop and the right software.... Lawrence Ryan was sitting in the studio with me while I was looking this stuff up online, and he stumbled onto Adobe On Location, a software package that records right to hard disk in a variety of formats, and has a very slick UI. They have a 30-day eval version. Great! I downloaded it and it worked immediately. If I'm going to spend $1800 on storage for the camera, I'll buy a laptop and portable hard drive!

So... that brings us to the test video. I wanted to record myself playing drums. I wanted to record the audio with Adobe Audition using the standard studio multitrack setup, and also record audio with the video camera (so I could sync the nice clean mixed version up to the video later). This didn't work because after installing either On Location or the Expression Encoder (I don't know which!!) Adobe Audition stopped working. It would hang in multitrack mode. This is a bug I've seen before, and the solution is to reinstall. Yep. Something got stomped on.

So, I recorded this video with one camera, using the built in microphone (which doesn't sound bad, actually). I used two of the lights.. one on either side at different angles. The AVI file was over 2GB!

First I used the Windows Media Encoder to turn it into a WMV. This step is necessary, because the camera actually spits out 960x720 (a DVCPRO HD format), and the Media Encoder stretches it out to 1200x720, and it doesn't look bad.

Next I run it through the Microsoft Expression Encoder, which turns the WMV into a streaming Silverlight website. The first time I tried encoding the AVI directly with Expression Encoder it didn't work. I'm going to try it again. It would be great if I didn't have to first make a WMV.

The result of all this (at about 4AM) is the following video:

http://libra.franklins.net/silverlighttest/

So what next after these two videos? Well, I'm toying with the idea of creating a monthly (at first anyway) live music show from Pwop Studios. There is an awesome indy music scene here, and plenty of great bands to showcase. After that, who knows.... so much to do and so little time... I guess I'll have to give up another week of sleep.

<EarthClassMail.com - Moving from LAMP to .NET 3.5/>

Scott chats with Matt Davis, architect at EarthClassMail.com, about their move from a LAMP stack (Linux/Apache/mysql/PHP) to .NET 3.5. What's working, what's not, and what kinds of issues are they running into as their architect their solution.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=103

 Todd Anglin on Telerik WinForms Controls

Todd Anglin is our guest this week on dnrTV. Todd shows us how your .NET application can have the perfect WPF look and feel using Telerik Winforms Devlopment Components.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=87

Karen's Ass

Carl tells of his tales of woe traveling to Amsterdam and his experiences in Bulgaria. Karen talks about how there's no such thing as a guarantee, Richard is forced to use TinyURL for his toys, and Mark is completely obsessed with Karen's ass.

 Jan Blomquist on Gaia Ajax Widgets

Jan Blomquist is on dnrTV this week spot-lighting Gaia Ajax Widgets from Frost Innovation. In this first episode of a multi-part series, Jan introduces us to the Gaia architecture and a few of the amazing controls.

http://dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showID=86

<Interview with Shawn Burke on Microsoft's .NET Source Code Release/>

Scott and Carl talk with Shawn Burke on the culmination of his many-year-old plan to get parts of the source of the .NET Framework released. With Visual Studio 2008, a simple process will allow developers to STEP INTO the .NET Framework Source from the IDE. This'll be a great debugging and learning tool.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=101