Fan-made Thundercats Trailer

This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. This guy took existing movie clips, colorized them to make the characters look like the Thundercats and sliced them together - this is really pretty incredible.

By the way, the real Thundercats live action movie will be coming out in Summer of 2011

Happy Birthday dear Ma-ac.......

as someone else said when they saw this commercial today, looks like they invented the Mac before they invented the sportsbra.

ProPresenter

ProPresenter is the presentation software we use on Sundays at R2. Essentially everything that's shown on the screens on stage (and in the cafeteria) and all music you hear (that doesnt come from the band) comes through ProPresenter. ProPresenter is honestly the sole reason I switched to a Mac. I've always liked it, but since a crash we had on Sunday and the resulting tech support experience, I have to admit that now I totally love it. Great service, prompt response, and the right answer the first time - for FREE.

Kudos guys.

Happy EVOLUTION!!!!!

Been a while since my last blog (I mean, c'mon, it was last year!) but here's why... all my free time as been dumped into this project, a video promoting the goals of our Evolution series - a series that will outline all of 2009 at R2.

This vid took me about 40 hours to produce. This is also the first videos that R2 has produced that's made entirely of R2 generated materials. Everything from the car trip background (notice that it's the drive from I-40 at Windover in GSO all the way to the front doors of SW Guilford) to the text, to even the background music was created by us for this video. I think it's by far our most sophisticated production yet. Hope you enjoy, and more importantly, hope you enjoy 2009 - the year of Evolution!

Evernote

Found out about Evernote, a sweet little reminder/note taking / general sting on the finger application from Ken Wilson. Downloading it now, it looks AWESOME. Can't wait to play with it more - I'll update as things go along.

Proud Papa

I blame the convergence of Cyber Monday, Amazon, and fan-girl Sabrina... I've been officially converted to the Mac cult.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 - Master Collection

I installed this big guy last night, and MAN, it's AWESOME. It's got everything I'll ever need to do, well, pretty much anything - all in one box.




Now, can someone tell me how to work it?

Opera

I'm a little behind the times on this one, but I just downloaded Opera today.   It's a free, open-source web-browser that advertises itself as the fastest available.  I don't know about that, but I do know I like it better than IE, Firefox and certainly Safari.  It's even got a mobile version for the iPhone that I will oneday own.  The coolest thing is "Speed Dial" which is a welcome screen that shows you current views of your 9 (or so) favorite sites so you can go directly to them.  Pretty awesome indeedy.

For Future Reference: R2's "Digital Assets"

I just finished organizing all of R2's "digital assets" on a new external hard drive.  By digital assets I mean all the images, videos, music, etc we've either created, assembled or bought to enhance the R2 worship experience.  These things may end up being shown on the screens, printed as signs or worship guides or even end up as t-shirts (shameless plug time: visit the R2Online Merch Table ).  No doubt there are churches out there with servers full of this kind of stuff, but since we're just getting started our assets take up a measly 22.4 GB.  It'll be interesting one day in the future to look back and remember our humble beginnings.

Along those same lines, here's a rundown of the equipment we use to make the Sunday Worship Experiences happen:

To run the screens and the cafe monitor (21", running on the same feed as the main screens), edit video and a few other things we're using a MacBook 3.1 with 2.2 Core Duo Processor and 2GB of RAM.   The software we use is ProPresenter 3 to run screens and sound, Photoshop Elements 4 to create images, iMovie and Final Cut Express to create images, and a little help from Live Type.  I'm sure there's better applications out there, but right now with our budget and skill set, we're making due with these.

Most of our content is assembled/created on my personal Dell desktop running Windows XP with a 3.sGHZ Core Duo processor with 4 GB RAM.  On it I'm running Photoshop Elements 5 (in which I create slide shows with the Organizer function).  Again, I'm sure one day not too far down the road I'll look back and laugh at how unsophisticated and cheesy all the things I'm doing now are, but for the time being, I'm going to enjoy learning on the fly.