It has almost been a week since I released episode one, and I have a few things to share.

I got mostly warm reviews for the show, here are some of my favorites:

From Shinmaryuu via Twitter: Really is the shot of new tech blood in the arm IPTV needed.

From ionfarmer via Twitter: Obsoleet TV, a 2 word review: Fuck Yeah!!

Shinmaryuu also made a blog post about the release which can be seen here Having said that, I also got a bit of constructive criticism, and I am going to be playing with the intro a little bit, and hopefully sharpen it. I also absolutely hate how Sony Vegas does credits by default, so I am going to look into some more options for that as well.

From a filming perspective, I actually found my favorite part to shoot was the intro scene. So, you can probably expect some more moving around in future segments instead of just a static shot. I seem to like the act of cutting a sequence together all Dr. Frankenstein-like. I also am going to play with lighting, and might make a dedicated little filming area, but I need to clean up a lot of my stuff and decide how I am going to orient the current space.

Releasing the episode was also an interesting process. I output the episode from Vegas, and it gave me a 5gb DV formatted avi file. I then tried to run this through Avidemux (a great video program by the way) to get an XviD. I thought it would create a file too large (it looked like it was going to be around 700mb for a 25 minute video) and I wanted something a bit less than 300mb. I tried using AutoGK, but it kept messing up the aspect ratio even though I was specifying to keep it unchanged. I ended up just fixing the bitrate in Avidemux and outputting accordingly. This was after around five hours of battling AutoGK. So now I know what settings to use for future episodes. I am now getting into the habit of preserving my episodes as well. I am saving one tape of all my raw footage, and one tape of the finished episode. This allows me to keep a lossless copy of everything I shoot by sticking with the miniDV tape.

Right now, the XviD is the only format for this episode. Vimeo, my preferred uploading host, will convert to some MP4 format, so I am probably going to snag that file and put it on archive.org for people to have a choice. Blip.tv is awful at converting to Flash, so I have to do that myself, and it does not look pretty considering how clear the video is when I put it in. I am also experimenting with advertising on Blip.tv, so don’t let any of that throw you. It is looking like I will remove that soon anyway. I have also toyed with the idea of setting up a youtube account, but I dislike the idea of splitting up the video.

Aside from that, I’m planning out the next episode and taking a little break from filming. Looking at episode one, it took three to four weeks to put out, so there is definitely the possibility of another episode in that time.

As always, I’m looking for feedback, and would love to hear from you.

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