This was how my desk looked before I realized that I needed a better storage solution.
How did I get here?
- Standard Definition video takes roughly 1 gig per 5 minutes of video to store. That adds up pretty quick over the years.
- Recently I have only buying LaCie’s but that hasn’t always been the case. Working with small budgets (which I do a whole lot of) makes me buy the cheapest hard drives I can find at the moment. So their is no uniformity. I hadn’t created any sort of master list of which files and which media were on what hard drive so I would often have to hunt around for a while to find an old project.
About two weeks ago I had enough. I sent out a tweet asking about any good storage solutions for my mess. My brother recommended I check out Drobo.
Overview: Drobo is a data storage robot that automatically backs up your data so that if any of its drives fail at any given time it can recreate the information on that drive when you replace it. Before my Drobo, few of my projects files were backed up. If a hard drive would have failed I would have had to spend a lot of time and money trying to rescue the data off the drive.
Drobo has 4 drive bays. (Drobo Pro has 8 drive bays). Each bay will take any size drive (there are drives come as big as 8TB if you can afford them). Put at least two and up to four drives in your drobo. I have (3) 1TB drives and (1) 2TB drive (this is a mistake which I will explain later). The idea is that as you fill up your drives and need my storage space the price of larger drives will be low enough that it would make more sense to replace a 1TB drive with a 2TB drive then to get a new Drobo.
How much storage do I actually get? Well, this is where I made the mistake. The actual storage is all of the drives combined minus the largest drive (Capacity Calculator). So in my situation I have 5TB of drive space but my largest drive is 2TB so I only have 3TB of actual storage. The remaining storage is used to back everything up. If I were to have had (4) 1TB drives I would still have the same amount of storage space and saved money on not having to by a 2TB drive. It only makes sense to by a bigger drive if you are going to use at least two of them.
Is the Drobo good for video editing?
The drobo has Firewire 800 ports and on the site boasts of speeds on average of 55mb per second. Larry Jordon writes a review about using the Drobo machine for video editing and the bottom line is that it isn’t fast enough o use for anything more than SD and HDV footage, but it is excellent for Video Storage for tapeless workflows. He writes:
“Drobo’s average disk read speed is 22.6 MB per second and its average write speed is 25.3 MB per second. While fast enough for DV and HDV, this is comparable to a slow, single FireWire 400 hard drive.”
Conclusion:
The Good: The price is right ($400 for the Drobo and about $150 for a 1TB drive) and it is very nice knowing that my data is backed up. I’m excited to watch the price point for the 2TB and up drives to fall so to continually update the storage capacity of my new little data back-up robot.
The Bad: I was hoping I could treat the entire machine as 1 drive so that all my media files and project files would be organized in the same folders making things always and only in one place. I could do this but Drobo tells me that it will take a long time for the drive to boot up if it is that large. It suggested that I partition the drives into 1TB chuncks that will boot up in under a minute.
My current video project has about 18 hours of tape, most of which is interviews. I decided early on that I needed to transcribe these interviews but wasn’t sure how to go about it. The budget for the project is limited so paying for high quality transcription was out of the question. Professional transcription runs around $2-3 per minute of audio.
Solution #1: Mechanical Turk
Amazon has a service called MTurk (mechanical turk), which they describe as “artificial, aritificial intelligence”. Basically, if you have a mundane task that needs to be done such as tagging photos, or transcribing interviews this service is for you. Break your job up into small chunks and add each task as a “HIT” (Human Intellegance Task) to the MTurk workforce. People can view each task and do them as they please earning a little bit of cash for each “HIT” they accomplish.
I uploaded two hours of audio in 5 minute chunks to MTurk at $2 a HIT. In a little over 24 hours I had everything transcribed. The transcription wasn’t perfect but it was pretty darn good and the price was right. Andy Baio at Waxy has detailed instructions of how to create your HITS for the MTurk workforce.
It took me about 30 minutes to get everything ready to upload to MTurk and it took me about 30 minutes to gather all of the transcriptions and put them back together into one document. I was pleased with the outcome and the price.
Solution #2: Use Interns
If you have interns around you can set them up to do some of your transcribing. My experience is that most people are really slow and find the job incredibly tedious. If you want to keep your interns around don’t make them transcribe hours and hours of tape.
Solution #3 DIY
This option ended up being the best solution for me for a couple of reasons.
- Like I said already, I didn’t have the budget to do it professionally.
- It had been a while since I had watched the interviews so it was a valuable experience going through them again while transcribing.
- I can type pretty fast. To keep the speed up I would type using one computer and play the video using another computer. This way I wouldn’t have to tab between two open programs. If I were to do more I would run the audio through a filter to slow it down without destroying the pitch so I could keep up with the audio as it played. The thing that slowed me down the most was having to start and stop the audio.
- I knew which parts I didn’t think I would use in the final video, so I could either skip those parts altogether (and just leave myself a note that it was skipped), or I would type of a summary of what was being said.
Solution #4: Budget for transcription
Next time I will make sure that I have transcription budgeted in so I can just send it out to be done professionally. Inevitably, however, there will always be those projects that you just don’t have the budget to spend on transcription but still need it typed out.
This guy is great. He reminds me of everything that is good in the world. BTW, My business cards are home made on recycled paper.
A spontaneous Tweet-up:
I ran into a casual friend at church near the coffee table and we abruptly began our obligatory small talk.
“How has your weekend been?” He asked, but then he stopped himself as he remembered, “Oh yeah, you did some gardening and built a new gate.” He had been following me on Twitter.
We laughed about this new and strange relationship we had - knowing so many mundane details about each other while rarely interacting in person. It was a strange feeling knowing that I had been “watched” by this guy. But then again, that is why I was doing it right? - to be watched.
We both admitted that we love Twitter yet at the same time, when we step back and look at it, we realize how ridiculous it really is as a form of communication. He reminded me of the famous quote by Marshal McLuhan “The Medium is the Message“, and we asked ourselves, what does Twitter as a medium do to our messages. Here are some thoughts:
1. Twitter teaches us that being followed (watched) is of high importance. Celebrity culture already taught us that being watched means you are important, blogs, MySpace and Facebook reinforced it further, but Twitter has put the nail in the coffin. When you log into your Twitter account you see immediately how many people you are following and how many people are following you. Even the most humble among us will be happy to see that number tick upwards and be tempted to device ways to increase our followers. We have been groomed into this belief that we are only as important as the quantity of people who find us interesting enough to watch.
2. Twitter teaches us that quick information is king. Twitter caters to our sound bite culture. If you can’t communicate it in under 140 characters then I’m not that interested in it. Granted, you can communicate a lot in 140 characters, but think of all that is communicated when you sit next to someone in silence. Think of all that is communicated when you hold someone’s hand. Human beings are not merely information dispensers and receptors, but Twitter is teaching us that we are.
3. Twitter teaches us that community is about common interests. Using Twitter, I decide who I want to follow. Essentially, I build a community of people around me who I find interesting. If I add someone to my Twitter feed and get tired of their twits I can skim right over them, or I can just stop following them all together. If someone is interested in following me but not I them, then I don’t. It all boils down to my interests. Twitter teaches us that community is simply a group of people who find each other interesting.
How does this affect the Gospel and Christian Community?
Do you treat God like a friend on your twitter feed? Do you throw up 140-characters-or-less-prayers before meals and in moments of need. Do you decide when you want to pay attention to what God is saying and when you would rather not.
Are you looking for Biblical Community or to hang out with people you find interesting? All of our modern mediums are drenched in the message that community is really just common interest groups - twitter is just another example. It takes a very serious effort to believe otherwise.
I am thankful for facebook and blogs. These tools gave an outlet to well intentioned, but unbearably annoying people, who otherwise had to tell you what they found interesting through email forwards. For the last few years, I have seen an amazing decrease in obnoxious email forwards that land in my inbox.
But, there are some who still don’t understand the devastation you are causing humanity by forwarding that cute email on to your entire email list. Yes, devastation. I don’t think that is an overstatement.
Would you put an innocent person who you care about in jail for a couple of days if you had the power to do so? I am imagining that you would immediately say no. Why wouldn’t you do that? Well, life is precious. Life is so precious that one of the worst punishments we could think of as a society is taking away someone’s right to life by locking them into a prison.
Consider this: how long does it take you to forward an email you found interesting to 100 people? Oh, it takes you about 30 seconds. How long does it take those 100 people to open the email, scan it, discern that it is worthless and then delete it from their inbox? Oh, lets say you are quick at this kind of hideous task and it takes you 10 seconds. So, it took the forwarder 30 seconds to send the email but as a result that person took an accumulative 1000 seconds of other people’s lives away from them. That is 16 minutes of human life you widdled away willy nilly because you thought something was humorous.
Do this once or twice and am pretty sure humanity will find it in their hearts to forgive you of your sins. But out there those who we would have to describe as serial email forwarders. For these people, there are not enough hail mary’s that will rescue you from the deepest and hottest parts of hell. Just one email forward a day will take away 4 days of precious human life within a year. That puts you up in the ranks of other disgusting time killers like hospital waiting rooms, the DMV, and grid lock traffic. Do you want to be thought of like grid lock traffic? No you don’t. So put the email down, slowly. Back away from the email.
If the thought of quiting your forward habit is too much to bear then start a blog and tell everyone one time that everything you find amazing will be posted there.
Should we stop listening to so many online sermons? On a good week I can take in as many as 4 sermons from heavy hitters like Bell, Keller, Driscoll, and the like. I even find listening to my own pastor through ear buds is a much better experience for me then live preaching… somehow, I can concentrate better when I can move around.
But a blogger just challenged me: stop listening to so many online sermons. Why? Well, the biggest reason he gives is that we unfairly compare our good intentioned, but not quite as eloquent local preachers to these world-class preachers we have become accustomed too. I find this reaction a bit misguided.
Sure, I’ll give you that listening to 4 hours of the best preachers in the nation each week may not be the best use of my time (however, better than many other things I can think of)… but here is why I want to cry foul when I hear this kind of grumbling… We created this monster! Instead of insisting people stop listening to online sermons we may need to reexamine why and how we got here.
The protestant movement made preaching central to our church gatherings. We put the pulpit center stage and designed services so that the preaching was the prominent part of the service. We adopted all sorts of rhetoric and communication devices to make our preaching more impacting (read homiletics) and we pay pastors to spend a considerable (and in some cases all) their time preparing their sermon.
Yup, preach the word in and out of season. Yes. The word of God is powerful and will lead people to repentance. Yes. We need the word guiding us, lighting our path, challenging us… but why so much focus on our 35 minute expositions.
From personal experience, spending 20 hours of my week preparing for a sermon is a lot more tangible then sitting with people in need. A good sermon will get people in the doors of your church. A good sermon will also get you good feedback from the congregation, which is nice because they can see that you are working hard for them.
Regardless why, practice this year in and year out for generations and you wind up with pews full of people assuming that what they need in their life is some good ‘ol fashion preaching - the more, the better.
Then comes the internet, and we have the ability to distribute our sermons to the ends of the earth for virtually no cost at all, and people can now listen to our sermons without having to be present at church at all.
And of course, some people are better preachers then others. They are more homiletically inclined I suppose. Maybe they have an extra ounce of the Holy Spirit. Either way, they fill up their churches and now they are raising the charts in iTunes under “Christianity and spirituality”.
Now anyone can hear world class sermons any time and you, yes you local pastor preparing your sermon… you have to compete.
Or do you?
Maybe… Sunday morning shouldn’t be all about the sermon.
The biggest problem of online sermons isn’t that too much biblical information will ruin you, or that the competitiveness of preaching will make it harder to fill our churches….
The biggest problem with online sermons (and sermons in general) is that they are impersonal. Listening to a sermon is like reading a book you found in the Christianity section of Barnes and Noble. It could be good for your soul if you let it, but you really need a church, a body, to be connected to.
I think the lesson we should learn from the abundance of amazing, inspired, abundant preaching is that we need to be living life as a body first and foremost, and be preaching to crowds second.
Let us imagine it is ten years from now. I’m 38 years old. You are, well, you are older too. Kids who are 11 years old right now are finishing college and moving into the workforce. If you are 11 years old right now you have used the internet as much as you have used a television, and you are use to seeing video everywhere.
In ten years a good video will be as common as a good blogpost. My RSS reader will be filled with Vlogs I am following and all of them will have really good, interesting, entertaining content. Companies will have a vlog, actors will have a vlog, magazines will have a vlog, and television stations will no longer be television stations as much as they will be vlogs.
In ten years from now video equipment and powerful NLE software will be accessible to the masses like cellphones and word processors are now. Kids will be fluent in video edited like they are fluent with typing and email.
We won’t be wowed as much by special effects and 3D animation. We will live our lives not concerned with what is “real” and what is digitally composited, instead we will be forced to take everything at face value or believe none of it.
News will be localized again as there will be really good content created in and for local communities.
In ten years, even with the advances in technology, video will still only be as good as the stories it tells.
I’m proud of my new promotional video for Advent Conspiracy. Brian from Polyphone Music created the soundtrack. Check it out and consider being a part of the Advent Conspiracy this year as well.
I haven’t been wearing my boot because it is clunky and annoying. I don’t have the numbness anymore (maybe just a little in the mornings) and I rarely think of the pain (except when I pivot quickly). The hospital bill was only $375 dollars. I was expecting much more.