Over the last four weeks, I've been playing my part in the creation of a set of World Cup 2010 HD video podcasts by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for London's Absolute Radio.



The podcasts, which are available on YouTube and the iTunes Store as well as Absolute's own website, showed animated characters of David Baddiel and Frank Skinner chatting about their thoughts as related to the England Football Team's progress in the 2010 World Cup competition which took place in South Africa. Read More...

Tags: video, podcast, absolute, radio, baddiel, skinner, compression

As an educational media producer, I've had a long and fruitful association with the Open University that goes back as far as 1977, so I was very pleased to be asked to undertake a large and innovative online training project for the OU's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) at the beginning of the year.

The OU has been the leading partner of a project called NeOn - a large and ground-breaking open source software project funded by the European Union and involving 14 other partner organisations throughout Europe - since 2006.

One of the planned deliverables of this project was a full set of online screencast tutorials in which the participating software developers demonstrate their own applications in the form of web-accessible video tutorial movies.

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Tags: Work, Media, Screencasts, Tutorials, Training

I'm sure somebody has modifed the clocks to the point where they're giving us less hours in the day or days in the month. Since my last post I've been working flat-out on a range of things - most notably doing some online video consultancy bits and pieces for the Open University here in Milton Keynes as well as building a new website for SimplyDV. Read More...

Tags: simplydv, website, wordpress, writing, editing

There's nothing worse than a sales person who is attempting to demonstrate a product about which they obviously know very little. We've all been there, and some of us may well have bought something on the back of such a selling job. However, I've been doing my bit to help improve the situation - at least where camcorders are concerned.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been helping Panasonic, one of the world's leading consumer electronics brands and a company whose products I've been reviewing for several years, by supporting retail staff training initiatives through the delivery of the first of a series of "HD Camcorder Academies".

With sales staff at the company's expanding number of retail stores - recently rebranded "Panasonic Store" - around the UK it's imperative that the people working at the sales coalface are armed with all the right facts about the camcorders they're selling. Having achieved success with a recent "Camera Academy", the company decided to adapt the concept for its first equivalent HD camcorder workshop. And that's where I came in. Read More...

Tags: training, camcorder, workshop, academy, panasonic

Yesterday (Saturday 12th) saw me spending a few hours at the London studios of QVC UK, where I was working as a Guest Presenter on the Hi-Tech Toys & Electronics show.

I was there to talk about the JVC GZ-HD300 high definition camcorder.

After a couple of days of preparation - during which time I got to know the camcorder and shot some test sequences that could be reviewed in the broadcast - I was in front of the cameras at approximately 00.40hrs and chatting enthusiastically to staff presenter Dale Franklin.

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