Week Eight. March 26th-30th

 George and Philip were away this week in Germany at Food Safety Conference & Exhibition. 

Our Trade Stand

Trade stand setup

 Philip emailed these two images of their setup. It's really nice that they keep us in the loop as to what's going in with them. Philip wished us well for the Nokia Digital Media Awards, and hoped that we'd do well from the show. Safefood 360 are one of three finalists for a Cloud Based, Innovation Award. The other Finalists are "Sage" the accountancy software people, and "Ordnance Survey Ireland" the map people. It is a great achievement to be in the running with such well established and successful companies.





I have been working on the Iman casings video for the most part of this week. I am really enjoying getting to grips with filters in Final Cut Pro. It's amazing the difference filters can make to footage. Barry and I can see huge improvements as we are constantly working with video and graphics, but I showed some of the before and after footage to my family, only to realize that they couldn't see much difference. Either the experience has trained my eye, or I'm fooling myself ha ha, (I'm not fooling myself okay).

On Friday we all left the office at about 1pm so we could get ready for the Nokia Digital Media Awards. Barry and I had to collect our tuxedos and we were to meet up at the Convention Centre at 6.30pm. All in all it turned out to be a great night, and the icing on the cake was that we won the award, and I had the honour of accepting it with Lauren, on behalf of the company.

Announcement

Going Up To The Stage

Receiving the Award

This week was a really good experience for both myself and Barry, we helped each other out with our respective projects, and gave and received a lot of constructive criticism. It was also a first for both of us as neither of us had ever been to an awards ceremony of this magnitude before, let alone receive the award. Looking forward to seeing the lads next week. They'll be telling us how it went in Germany and we'll be telling them about the Digital Media Awards.

Week Seven. March 19th-23rd

Week seven began on Tuesday 20th March, as the Monday was a bank holiday (the St.Patricks Day national holiday). We had an early start, as Safefood 360 were hosting a seminar at the Teagasc Food Research Centre in Ashtown, Co. Dublin, on some new food safety regulations. We arrived at 8am to set up our cameras and sound equipment, to capture all the presentations. I set up my camera about half way up the conference room, to the side aisle, and Barry set up at the back of the room. I placed a zoom recorder, and my Olympus sound recorder on the podium so we would have good sound quality. The audience arrived at 9am. Lauren did the Welcome and Introductions to the days agenda, and Barry and I spent the day filming the event and also got some footage from the networking session.

About sixty people from different areas of the food industry turned up, which made the seminar very successful and worthwhile for Safefood 360 and everybody involved.

The Seminar Agenda

George

Ulrich Schraewer

Lauren

The event was over by about 3pm and we drove to the Safefood 360 office to spend the rest of the day off-loading the video footage from the cameras and the sound recorders. It hasn't been decided exactly what will be done with this footage yet, but it has been a great experience for us to get out and do the camera work and sound recording. 

Incidentally I was very disappointed with the Zoom recorder as it didn't have enough storage capacity to record the whole event. I am very glad that I used my Olympus sound recorder in conjunction with it because it had more than enough capacity to record the whole event, and at the same time produced a very high quality recording. As far as I can see the only advantage of the Zoom over the Olympus is that it records in stereo, but when the output from the Olympus is duplicated and put onto the timeline of the video it produces more or less the same result. I won't be running out to buy a Zoom recorder any time soon, knowing that my little Dictaphone can do the same job. The only real way to find out these things is to use them out in the field.

I continued to work on the food safety software for the rest of the week. This included changing the "around the world" Flash animation. It has been very useful to be able to construct transitions in Adobe Flash and Adobe Illustrator and then import them into the video via Final Cut Pro.

I finished the video on Friday 23rd and passed it over to George and Philip for upload.

Week Six March 12th-16th

We had an early start again on Monday 12th March for a trip to Celic Pure in County Monaghan. This time we are going to interview the owner of the business, Padraic McEneaney for a customer story video. Since we already filmed all the factory plant footage during week two, we will be able to merge the footage for a really nice production.

Barry and I, set up two cameras. One head on, and one side on in the interview room. We also set up a zoom H1N for the sound source. We waited for about two hours for Padraic to be ready for the interview. 

When he arrived, I set up my camera beside my chair at eye level, to have him looking at me but facing the camera. Barry set his camera for a side on view. I turned on the camera and voice recorder and began with an informal chat, then went straight into asking him the list of questions which George prepared. It can be difficult to interview someone, to achieve a good rapport and at the same time get answers to your questions, which are suitable to show on camera. 

The  interview took about an hour.  The main questions were about how he started Celtic Pure, the bottling process and future prospects for the company.

Padraic McEneaney

Padraic side on

I was very happy with the way the interview went, and felt that I had got the answers I wanted out of it.

 I feel that this customer story will look really good when combined with the bottling factory footage.

We returned to the Safefood office, after the interview to offload the video footage. This customer story video will not commence for a few weeks as we are very busy with our other work

  I spent the rest of this week working on the Food Safety Software video. It involved removing any of the safefood 360 logos from the graphics, and replacing them with the new ones which Barry designed. I also had to ask Lauren to re-record her narration with the changes. I then did the audio enhancement work on it. This project is almost complete, just a few tweaks to be done before I upload it to Safefood 360s' You tube account. It will then be uploaded to their Re-Seller Programme on the website.

Week Five March 5th-9th

At the start of this week I was editing the video and audio footage from Iman Casings. Although it was a very interesting visit, it's difficult to make it look exciting. The fact that the raw product is sheep's guts could put the viewer off. I want to try to make a slightly sickening process look interesting.

Final Cut Pro

When I am editing the process I have the Discovery Channel programme "How it's made" in my mind. The bottling factory was much more interesting, as there were lots of moving parts and different stages to film. We were spoiled with all that very interesting and diverse footage, so this factory is a real test.

I have been using two DAWs (digital audio workstations) to enhance the sound on these videos. For our first video for Safefood 360, I used Audacity.

Separating and labeling tracks

  It was a very handy tool in this situation because the narration was recorded all in one track. Audacity allows you to split it up into multiple tracks, and then export them individually in one go.

Exporting Multiple Tracks

 It also allows you to remove long pauses in sentences, thus allowing each sentence to flow better.

The other DAW I have been using is Reaper.
Reaper is very useful for removing echo from a speaking voice, and to remove background noise. I removed a low background hum from the narration with it's "VST, FFT EQ+Dynamics" effects manipulator.

Reaper VVT Effects

The sound engineering module was really helpful, as the voices and music recordings were really unsuitable in their raw state. Before I began this work experience, I didn't really appreciate how important it is to get the sound right on a video. To be actually working on these projects, the demand for quality is high, which leads you to experiment more in an effort to improve your abilities.

On Wednesday, George asked me to leave this project for a while, and make a start on a re-make of the Safefood 360 video, with the Food Safety Software brand, rather than Safefood 360. The reason for this is that they want to push the re-seller programme.

I had some royalty-free music in mind, but George suggested that I use the original track.  I continued working on this project for the rest of the week.

Week Four Feb 27th- Mar 2nd

We had an early start on Monday to travel to Ballyhaunis, County Mayo for a customer stories video with Iman Casings. We arrived at the plant around 11.30am, where we were greeted by James Barrett, the food safety manager, and then were taken on a brief tour of the plant. Iman Casings produce the skin of sausages. To our surprise we were told that sausage casings sell for the same price as all the meat inside, so it's a very profitable niche of the butchers trade.

James Barrett

Firstly, we filmed an interview with James, with Philip asking the questions (off camera), then we took footage of the processing plant itself, with James talking us through the production process. 

Then we did an interview with the son of the owner of the plant. He gave us some information on how the business was set up.





James was telling me that he works part time as a hypnotist. He helps people give up smoking, or overeating, or with the anxieties in their lives. This could be fear of flying or other phobias. He asked if I would mind videoing him giving an introduction, for his website, www.hypnosisinmayo.ie
I certainly didn't mind, or maybe he hypnotized me into doing it :)
This is a piece of James' profile on the website. If you click anywhere on James' profile you will be linked to the video footage.

James Barrett is a Hypnotist with many years experience in this field. James worked with John Connolly in Athlone and in 2008 opened the first clinic in Claremorris, Co Mayo. Westport Leisure Centre was opened in 2009. James also has a degree in Food science from UCC.Testiment to the success of the techniques word of mouth referrals were the highest in Irish Hypnosis in 2010. The Claremorris clinic was ranked in the top 3 in the country.James specialised in smoking and weight loss initially and then worked on panic attacks and depression. James is well known for fears and phobias including driving test, fear of needles, public speaking, sports hypnosis and many more. Hypnosis is much more than just a job. James leaves no stone unturned in allowing people get the life that they want.

It generally takes a few hours to transfer the footage from the cameras to the hard drives, so the next morning was taken up doing this. I often wonder how anyone can make deadlines between the amount of time it takes to transfer footage, and then the time the clips take to render during the editing process, followed by the exportation of the final product. 

The next few days were taken up listening to royalty-free music, trying to find something suitable for this project.

you would expect that you could go online and find a piece of suitable music in ten minutes, but there are so many genres of music out there. Not only that, there is a lot of music that you think is right for your project, only to find that it completely changes pace, and doesn't fit at all.