Sidepodcast

A Live Aside

I like to judge the success of an evening by how long it takes one to recover, and given that Christine and I were still feeling the after effects of Friday's inaugural Evening with Joe on Monday, I'd consider it a blinding success.

Joe tackles Formula 1's big questions with a microphone and a glass of wine.

Friday 26th was a busy day for us. We arrived in London uncharacteristically early, which gave us plenty of time to look around the designated venue, The Engine Group, just off Oxford Street. It's a great place, in an ideal location and Joe had booked the entire upper floor for the evening, bar included.

Wifi was provided, which was a great boon for Christine who was planning to live blog the whole evening, providing text and picture updates throughout the night for those unable to attend.

Before the doors opened, a quick soundcheck revealed the only major headache of the day - the building offers a fully integrated audio/video system to feed satellite TV to various speakers and screens, but there was no means of obtaining a direct audio feed of Joe's talk.

Let us not discuss the unfortunate incident with the locked door.

Joe took his seat just after 7pm to an almost full house, and from that point the night turned into something of a blur. Questions came from the floor thick and fast, and Joe tackled each one with candour. Every question was a good one, every answer detailed, insightful and often humorous. Still the questions came.

Although the original plan was for a Q&A session followed by a meet and mingle, the never-ending quest for knowledge meant questions continued past the enforced break, and kept on coming until event organisers eventually shut the bar and threw us out... well almost. I have no idea how Joe managed to talk for a whole evening and make it feel like five minutes had passed, we all wanted more and the night came to a close far too soon.

If we had a complaint it was only that there wasn't quite enough time at the end of the evening to meet everyone present. Being in the company of so many dedicated and intelligent Formula 1 fans must be a very rare thing, and I wish we could've spoken to everyone and for longer.

Eventually we really did get thrown out, packed up our recording equipment and headed to the nearest pub for yet more F1 chat. Sometime around 3am, we found our way home.

If you didn't manage to make the inaugural Evening with Joe, you really missed out. There is a second event planned for March 29th in Melbourne, and further talks around the world throughout 2010. Don't miss them.

We did eventually manage to record the whole evening using a room mic, but we've ended up with something like 3+ hours of content, so it might take an extra day or two for the podcast to see the light of day. Lou was designated official photographer for the evening, so watch out for plenty more pictures coming soon as well.

In conclusion, I think Joe's onto a winning idea, and I'm hoping that more F1 journalists give some thought to reaching out and meeting fans. F1 may be becoming more open than ever this year, but it could do with getting a bit more personal too.

A big thank you to Joe for putting together a fabulous evening's entertainment, to everyone who came over and said "hi", and to those who bought us drinks. I wonder how we can get to Melbourne?

Taking a Cue From Apple

Almost since the day Sidepodcast started creating videos, you'll have heard Christine bemoan the lack of a teleprompter. Remembering reams of text, under the pressure of hot studio lights while the cameras are rolling is no-one's idea of fun. Having something to fall back on is often a necessity.

Credit: Sidepodcast

Behind the scenes of the Sidepodcast Christmas special, Christine eyes up the shot. The ProPrompter can be seen above the camera and the GorillaPod legs wrap around the body.

The problem with most teleprompters, is that being somewhat specialist by nature, they have a habit of costing a pretty penny. By way of example, the small model we were looking longingly at was set to cost us £1,800. You can see why we've been putting it off for a while.

Reusing Existing Hardware

Thankfully there's an app for that, and when Bodelin Technologies released ProPrompter (iTunes link) for the iPhone / iPod Touch our quest for an affordable autocue system was over. Coming in at a far more reasonable £5.99, the application allows the iPod to act as a tiny teleprompting system.

True, the screen is a little on the small side for this role, but playback speed is variable, colours are customisable and loading content is straightforward. If nothing else, it's a considerable improvement on holding up sheets of A4 paper and manually swapping them as required. The iPod is mounted atop the camera via a Joby GorillaPod with suction pad attachment and will happily sit there for hours.

Lacking Presentation

It's little improvements such as this gem that make us motivated to create more video content this year. Incidentally, having looked into what other sites are offering in terms of F1 video, a trend we've noticed wherever we look, is the distinct lack of presenters hosting shows.

Neither Autosport TV nor GPUpdate TV seem to offer anything beyond stock footage and a voiceover track (which is almost exclusively male). Can finding an onscreen presenter be that difficult in this day and age? Maybe having a person in front of camera is something else we should be giving USF1 more credit for.

If you're doing any form of podcasting, be it video or audio, we highly recommend the ProPrompter solution. It reuses our existing hardware and the application has already paid for itself in time and effort saved.

Live Video with Live Commenting

So here's the plan. Yesterday we released the beta version of a new live commenting system, and as that was designed to aid discussion during live video we figured we ought do something to test it out.

It's the Hungarian Grand Prix next weekend, which means we're due another episode of Inside Track and thus we'll be filming the pieces to camera shortly.

If you're around please fire up live commenting and let us know if you can both see us and talk to us at the same time. We'll be doing the same so should be able to talk back in realtime... well hopefully anyway.

Another F1 Minute Recording

Following on from yesterday's test, we're doing another live session of Sidepodcast as F1 Minute gets recorded. Don't expect great things, the minute is naturally only 60 seconds long, and only so much chaos can happen before it's completed. We're just trying out some new camera angles, and some tweaks to the setup so we can move on to the next stage of our audio streaming plans. Watch this space!

F1 Minute Recording

With the live streaming going so successfully, we want to test out the next phase of our plans for world domination. We're slowly building up our portfolio of shows that can be broadcast live, and with Inside Track checked off the list, next is F1 Minute. Granted, it's only a minute long, but it's only really a test to see whether we can manage to record an audio show and still collect the audio, plus discover what there is interesting to look at when I'm simply speaking into a microphone.