Foxvideo Productions

I wasn’t anticipating a 24-hour flight and journey on the day of my 70th birthday! This time it’s Mindanao Island, Philippines with Gorsley Baptist Church and The Peace & Hope Trust for 3 weeks in July. Many thanks to my supporters (you know who you are) and a shout-out to Banner Financial Services who went above and beyond to sort my health and travel insurance.

Now retired, and with a very reduced monthly income, my spending has to be tightly monitored! Over the years I’ve managed to find some free apps or programs for Mac that I use on a regular basis and now, couldn’t do without, so I thought I’d list the most used ones here.

Some weeks ago I bought a Samsung T7 SSD drive for under £100, this drive is amazing for speed and works well with my Davinci Resolve system. I wanted another one but most places are selling them for around £130, I spotted Jessops were offering it for £99 so placed an order and received an order acknowledgement.

5 days on and the money has still not been taken from my account and I've had no correspondence from Jessops - In the marketplace of today, where online traders are competing for business and same-day dispatch or even same-day delivery is now the norm, Jessops are severely failing and I won't be using them again.

UPDATE!
An email back from Jessops within an hour advised me they were out of stock and expecting more stock later this week or early the following week…..Why was there no mention of the OOS situation on the website or even an email at the time of ordering they were waiting for stock….?

I’ve been using Blackmagic Davinci Resolve for over 18 months now and have not regretted dropping Final Cut Pro once......until now!

A good friend from my chapel asked me to shoot a piece to camera for him using a green screen, we shot it in the chapel as it had space and good lighting. The shoot went well and Mike did it in one take using the autocue, the second time round.

I was given an old reel to reel tape to digitise, to be played out at an upcoming event at my church. Not a problem as I had an Akai 4000DS Mk2 reel to reel recorder.....or so I thought!

Spooling through the tape at 3¾ ips (inches per second) I found many segments of music, when I found speech that I was looking for, it had been recorded at half that speed, 1⅞ ips which the Akai couldn’t play so it sounded like the chipmunks!

Creating an engaging video for YouTube involves many stages. First you need good content and then get the lighting and exposure correct, framing is important and of course making sure it’s all in focus. These all need to be right before you even begin to edit the video. When you start the edit you need to get the cuts in the right place to convey what you had in mind for the style of video. It needs to flow with no ‘jump-cuts’ and make sense with no continuity errors. Then there’s the audio….

AI is the new ‘buzz word’, you hear it everywhere, in the news, in the papers, in social media and even in everyday conversation.

A video editor friend of mine related a problem he had recently where the person being interviewed for a video insert said 2002 instead of 2020, so he found an online site where you could uploaded a sample of the voice, type in what you actually wanted it to say and it generated the correct phrase in the correct voice for you using AI.

My wife reckons I have more Apple Mac’s than pairs of socks, she might be right. I have an ‘everyday driver’ MacPro 5.1 for email, CCTV, web browsing and maintaining the websites and social media accounts I administer for people and organisations. I’ve maxed the RAM, added a Metal GFX card, replaced the processor for a 3.06GHz 6 core and added SSD’s. I also have a 2020 27” iMac used for video editing with Davinci Resolve and a Mac ‘Mini’ used for my Church that I take with me every Sunday to run the service on using Presenter from WorshipTools and I'll have a blog post about that App soon.

I’ve stopped browsing the pro video and audio pages of eBay daily, but I do pop in every other week or so to see what’s around. 2 weeks ago I spotted a Blackmagic Decklink2 PCIe video capture card with a starting price of £10, in it’s day this was a top of the range capture card that sold for around £450+, I won the auction for £19.50.