Wayne D's Blog

It's been a while but my latest Howcast video, How to Make Face Paint went live just in time for Halloween. You might notice that is uses the snazzy new Howcast graphics. I tried somethign new on this video and it came back to haunt me. I used a couple of the new LED video lights and though they are nice and bright and cool the gave me a terrible time with the colour rendition. The lights were very cool and blue and even though I didn't notice it when filming it was obvious in editing. I have included an image below that illustrates the issue, the top is uncorrected the bottom is corrected. The corrected side isn't perfect but does look more nautral. Additionally the bathroom footage which was originally shot with the same lighting suffered from shakey cam which meant I had to reshoot it on a different day with different lighting. This meant fiddling during the editing phase to try to fix up the lighting. I have come to realize that light is the biggest technical issue I have to deal with and I now understand why Flolight's new version of their LED video lights are advertised as Daylight with a colour temperature of 5600K.

Now I am off to make my next video How to Make a Spectroscope, who knew you could have so much fun with an old CD or DVD and a couple of razor blades.

When Gmail informed me that Google was offering free phone calls to the U.S. and Canada with Google Talk I decided to give it a try and install the google talk Firefox plugin on my EEEPC. Unfortunately after I downloaded and attempted to install google-talkplugin_current_i386.deb the plugin failed to install because of some library dependencies. Even worse after it failed to install Firefox wouldn't start. Double clicking the Firefox icon produced nothing. Running Firefox in a command windows resulted in the following error message:

Inconsistency detected by ld.so: dl-open.c: 611: _dl_open: Assertion `_dl_debug_initialize (0, args.nsid)->r_state == RT_CONSISTENT' failed!

Luckily uninstalling the plugin with the following command got things working again. Well actually I took the long way using dselect but trust me, using dpkg is quicker and much easier to explain.

sudo dpkg -r google-talkplugin

TSN has published their live streaming schedule for the 2010 PGA Championship from Whistling Straits and the good news for Canadian golf fans is that TSN offering online live streaming coverage of the marquee groups staring at 9 a.m. on Friday and 11 am on Saturday and Sunday. Coverage of the Par 3 holes starts at 1 pm on Friday, and 11 am on Saturday and Sunday. All times are Eastern. It's a shame that the only major golf tournament we didn't get live streaming of was the Canadian Open. Streams can be accessed at http://www2.tsn.ca/live/golf/PGAChampionship2010/

Come on TSN next year we want live streaming of the Canadian Open in addition to your coverage of the Masters, British Open and US Open. Not everyone cane get to a TV especially during the Thursday and Friday rounds. We Canadians deserve live streaming of our national golf championship. Still no update on whether those suspicious live golf streaming sites are legitimate or not.

Live streaming information and links for the 2012 Canadian Open can be found at http://wdawe.com/index.php/live-sports-streaming-in-canada?blog=1

(updated July 22nd 4:20) http://www.veetle.com/index.php/channel/view#489e78e9b8936 is offering free live streaming of the Golf Channels coverage of the 2010 Canadian Open. Thanks to the guys at http://www.torontogolfnuts.com/showthread.php?p=636106 for pointing the way.

It looked like Canadian golf fans are out of luck when it comes to live streaming of the 2010 RBC Canadian Open from St. Georges in Toronto.

I checked TSN's broadcast schedule and there in no mention of live streaming of this year's Canadian Open. That really sucks, come on TSN, why no live streaming of our own tournament? A quick Google search and all I found was ads for Watchlivegolf.com which I mentioned in http://wdawe.com/index.php/british-open-live-streaming-in-canada?blog=1 and other suspicious looking live golf streaming sites. No one has provided my with any information that would reduce my suspicion that Watchlivegolf.com may be a scam. There is also no mention of live streaming on http://www.pgatour.com/.

I couldn't find any mention of live streaming outside Canada so my usual advice to use a service like http://hotspotshield.com/ (free) or www.witopia.net (paid) to access foreign golf streams doesn't even apply.

If I find out any new information I'll update this post so check back tomorrow and Saturday.

After showing this completed video to people I know the most common response has been "My furnace filter doesn't look like your furnace filter". The hardest part of shooting this video was cleaning up the basement so that I had a nice clean background for the shooting. My film makers creed is "If it isn't in the shot it isn't there". Shooting angles and positions were carefully selected to prevent you from seeing how messy my basement is around the furnace. Luckily the furnace area of my basement is alrge enough that I could get back far enough to get a nicely composed shot.

It has been my custom that after I completed a video for www.howcast.com I write a blog post about the trials and tribulations of my latest shot. In the past that has included missing footage, lighting problems and various software issues. I am happy to report that the technical production process on my latest video other than one minor editing misstep that was caught by the able producers at Howcast. Now that I have mastered the mechanical shooting and editing process I want to work on the artistic side of the process, making the video more dynamic and interesting, mixing up the shots and angles. In this video I am particularly happy with how the water shots turned out. I'm still trying to decide what my next video will be, unfortunately my star actor fractured his arm in a schoolyard water balloon battle and is unavailable for the next 6 weeks,