Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Solar In Seattle

I love the idea of solar, but I don’t live in a great part of the country for it. We are one of the sunniest places in the US for 3-4 months of the year and then we switch to one of the most overcast places. A couple years ago, a guy at work did a big solar installation on his house. His monitoring website doesn’t have a password on it, so I check in every once in a while to check out how much money he is saving. Over the two years since he installed it, he has generated 7.51MWh while using 21.9MWh. So he has knocked about a third off his electricity bill saving him roughly $750. I bet he has a LONG way to go to recoup his investment.

I love the idea of solar power, but the technology just isn’t quite there yet if you want to have a quick return on investment. Yes, I know there are other reasons that people do it, and yes I know there are ways you can use it to generate a bigger portion of your usage, but for me, it’s going to be a while before I head that direction. If Tyla and I ever decide to buy some vacation property east of the mountains, I will be revisiting this topic. They get a LOT of sun over there and I could see it being a very useful way to power a vacation home.

benmartens August 20, 2014 Commentary

RC Planes And Hot Air Balloons

After many attempts, I finally gave up on my FT Duster. I finally figured out that a crash somewhere along the way had caused the tail to be out of whack. I used the heat gun to melt the glue and remove the old tail, fabricated a new one and then installed it. Everything was square and it actually flew pretty well. But then, mid-flight, the power pod broke loose and the plane spiraled hard into the ground. The fuselage was pretty bent up and correcting it basically would mean rebuilding a plane. It’s only a few dollars work of foam board but I’ll save that for another day. I was getting too frustrated with it to continue.

Instead, I pulled out the plans for an FT Nutball which is MUCH simpler to construct and fly. I had it together in an hour or two and the first time I powered it up, it flew great! I ran into another problem though. Elijah was afraid of it. He’s never been afraid of the planes before but for some reason, he just wasn’t happy whenever it was in the air.

I landed before using up all my batteries, but as I was cleaning up, I noticed three hot air balloons making their way towards the park! They make regular morning and evening flights down the valley and we can see them from our house. But this was the first time I’d been at their landing spot. We stayed around for about an hour watching them land and pack the balloons away. Elijah enjoyed watching them, but he was more impressed by the park’s John Deere Gator that was driving around in the parking lot. That boy loves trucks!

benmartens August 19, 2014 Radio Controlled Flight

Meydenbauer Beach Park

A couple weekends ago, Tyla and I headed to a new (for us) park in Bellevue. It’s small but it has a nice little swimming area with life guards. Mandy and Ike joined us for the sunny fun and I snapped a few photos. You can also check out my quick Photosynth from the park. Well, technically it’s the view FROM the park. I didn’t want to look too creepy photographing other people’s kids.

benmartens August 18, 2014 Outdoors

Solid State Drives

In the old days if your computer ran slowly and you asked a geek how to make it faster, they would probably say “Add more RAM.” With most computers having 4-8GB of RAM now, memory isn’t generally an issue. There’s still a new answer to that question: Get an SSD.

I had my first taste of a solid state drive years ago when I built my media center PC. I wanted something quiet and lower power. Once I saw first hand how fast it was, I started on a mission to replace the main operating system drive in every computer with an SSD. They were expensive at first but now the costs have come way down, and while they’re still significantly more expensive than the older spindle based hard drives, they’re not cost-prohibitive in most situations.

How much of a difference does it make? I ran benchmark comparisons of the SSD and the old HD in my computer. The average speed of reading data off the disk is 2.5 times faster with the SSD. That’s for reading single big files though. More common is that you’re reading little pieces from a bunch of small files all over the place. For that, an SSD really shines. In random access tests for small files, the SSD was more than 40 times faster! The times when you notice an SSD the most are when booting the computer (or resuming from a sleep state) and when you open programs.

If you’re interested in buying one, you can find them for around $0.40-0.50/GB. Don’t go too much smaller than 120GB for your operating system drive. Windows doesn’t take nearly that much space but by the time you get it installed, do some updates, and install a bunch of programs, it’s not too hard to use that much space. If you don’t want to spend much time shopping around, consider the Samsung 830 it’s not quite the cheapest but it’s a good bang for the buck.

benmartens August 15, 2014 Gadgets

Throwback Thursday – Baseball 1997

I just realized that this photo was taken halfway between my birth and today. Wow. Anyway, now that I feel old, here’s a shot from my Junior year of high school baseball. This was the best team I’ve ever played on. Our coaches were awesome and our team was really good. That’s me in the #12 jersey in the middle of the back row.

I dug up the stats sheet from that year:

  • We were ranked 10th in the state and finished 21-6.
  • I had a 1.55 ERA.
  • I set the school record for picking the most people off base. The exact stat isn’t in there, but I’m pretty sure it was 16. As far as I know, that record still stands.
  • My batting average? 0.00. Yep. They usually DH’d for me, but I had 14 at bats and never got a hit. It’s a good thing I could pitch because I was terrible at batting. Pretty much they only time they put me at the plate was when they needed a bunt because I could do that reasonably well.
  • I made the All-District team and the Academic All-State team… What’s academic all-state? Well, you’re not THAT good, but you’re a geek too so we’ll give you some extra credit and make a special team for you.

By now you should hear Bruce belting out Glory Days loud and clear.

benmartens August 14, 2014 Throwback Thursday

Graduate Organ Recital

The video of the recital by one of our organists at church is finally completed! This was by the far the most complex event recording I’ve ever done. There were 4 video recorders and a professional audio track. Getting everything synced and color corrected proved to be quite the challenge, but I’m happy with the result. It’s just over an hour long, but you can jump to specific songs if you look for the links in the description. Dave has the audio tracks and recital program notes available on his DropBox account. Congratulations to Dave for finishing is graduate degree!

benmartens August 13, 2014 Music, Video

Recording Public Events

After my last post on Friday about the new camcorder I use for recording at church, it dawned on me that I’ve never written up some of my learnings from recording public events. I’m far from an expert, but I’ve made enough mistakes that I have some things to share.

  • Get there early. If you’ve never recorded at the venue, go there days ahead of when you’ll actually need to record. Figure out where all the gear will go and where the action will be taking place. But even if you’ve recorded at the same place many times, you can’t arrive too early. There’s always something that needs extra attention.
  • Don’t try to do this without a good video editing package that you’re familiar with. I like Adobe Premiere Elements. Whatever you use, you need (at a minimum) to have the ability to sync individual audio and video tracks and then cut between them.
  • Unless you are going to have a completely stationary camera, you’ll need at least two cameras. Leave one at a wide angle capturing everything and then do your zooming with the other camera. You can cut to the wide angle while you’re adjusting/zooming the second camera and then switch back to the zoomed view once you’ve got it all set up properly.
  • Have at least one backup for everything. So if you’re using the two camera setup described above, make sure you have at least three cameras in the process. For the audio, hopefully you can record straight off the sound mixer, but also set a little portable audio recorder up near the action to use as a last resort. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been saved by what I thought was just an extra device.
  • Plan for people getting in your way. If all of your cameras are clustered in the same spot, one person walking in front of you can ruin all of the angles at the same time. Scatter your cameras around the building.
  • Start recording early. Don’t try to hit record right as the action starts. Figure out what time it’s scheduled and then walk around hitting record about 5 minutes early. This gives you time to fix any last minute issues, and then you’ll be comfortable behind your main camera well before anything exciting happens.
  • The most time consuming part of this for me is always syncing up the various audio/video tracks. If you can pull it off, walk into the view of all the cameras and clap your hands together. (Or if you’re fancy, use one of the clap boards like they do in the movies.) That’s almost never feasible for me so I have to revert to other tricks. Sometimes I’ll cough really loud after turning on all the equipment. Other times I’ll just do my best to work with some other noise/visual that most of the gear picked up. Inevitably I spend a ton of time moving clips back and forth frame by frame trying to get them all lined up.

The more I do it, the more I learn because I keep finding new ways to screw up! If you want to check out my work, a lot of it ends up on the church’s YouTube page.

benmartens August 12, 2014 Commentary

Canon VIXIA HF R500

I do a lot of video recording at church. My usual setup involves 2 GoPros, a Canon T2i, a Kodak Z3 and a Sony sound recorder in case the main sound recording flakes out. That’s a lot of gear to lug back and forth. Also, the T2i only shoots 12 minutes of video at a time so it means I have a lot of clips to synchronize in Premiere when I get home. It was time to simplify.

Church now has a Canon VIXIA HF R500 camcorder. It shoots 1080p video and will do that for hours on end. That takes the place of the T2i as the main video source. I still set up a GoPro and the sound recorder for now but those are small and easy to deal with.

The Canon camcorder isn’t as good as the T2i in terms of video quality. Shooting in church is generally a low-light situation and the camcorder just doesn’t have the sensor in it to handle that super well. The result is acceptable though and given how much simpler it makes my life, I’ll go with it.

I’ll probably still lug all the gear with me every once in a while, but generally I think I’ll be using this camcorder.

benmartens August 11, 2014 Gadgets

Throwback Thursday – Camping 1981

A few weeks ago we got to take Elijah to his first camp site. I wasn’t brave enough for us to spend the night, but he had fun toddling around in the dirt. Mom and Dad took me camping when I was about the same age but we were in a tent in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. From what I’ve heard, I didn’t have a ton of fun on the trip. Actually come to think of it, I wasn’t really a great camper until much later in life. As a kid I think it’s a little harder to understand the joys of sitting outside and relaxing. That’s what I did all day during the summers anyway!

benmartens August 7, 2014 Throwback Thursday