Free music for your productions

June 4, 2008 eiriksocreative commons, free, music, no drm, podcast, podsafe, rights7 Comments

Recently I asked my twitter friends if they had any favourite places for finding music that can be used in podcasts and productions on the internet. Here’s the result:

Jamendo
About 10 000 albums. Lots of creative commons licensed. Modern design. Pretty good search and useful tag cloud.

Owlmm
Fantastic search engine that you can feed with some of your own music to let it find similar music. And narrow your search to give Creative Commons licensed music.

Podsafeaudio
Lots of creative commons licensed music.

Podsafe music from Uhørt
Lots of creative commons licensed music and even soundtracks.

Update:
Wikimedia Commons
Large archive of images, video and audio.

And of course a regular creative commons search.

Some free sound effects:
A1freesoundeffects
Partners in rhyme
Mediacollege sound effects

You can find more resources through Podsafe on wikipedia. And please feel free to add your favourite sites in the comments.

Thanks, @forteller, @mvcoile, @viskar, and @Ingwii. All of them people that I highly recommend you to follow on twitter! In addition to the fact that you follow me of course…

What to do if you are nervous when presenting

June 4, 2008 eiriksoadvice, Presentations4 Comments

Photo: Borut Peterlin / Mladina

The quick answer: tell the audience!

An actor once told me that it’s only one thing that’s worse than being nervous on stage. And that’s sitting in the audience watching a nervous person on the stage. Knowing that sounds scary. But it’s not. It means that the audience want you to feel fine. They feel sorry for you and want to do everything they can to help you.

So, I want to add something to that last part. The thing that’s worse than being nervous on stage is sitting in the audience watching a person that tries to hide the fact that he or she is nervous. It’s the hiding and pretending that’s bad for the audience. Be honest. Be yourself.

Through the last 10 years I’ve done a lot of presentations. Experience will make you less nervous. But from time to time you’ll encounter a situation where you feel nervous. You’re experienced, but this is the first time you speak to 2500 people. This is the first time you present in another language than your own. This is the first time you present for a small room filled with 10 important executives. The stage felt bad and the lights hit you right in the face. And so on.

First of all, you should know that the audience won’t see it if you’re slightly nervous. I’ve had presentations where I felt uncomfortable, but judging the response the audience didn’t notice anything.

Then, if you suddenly start feeling really nervous. Struggeling to find your words. Getting too hot. Feeling really uncomfortable. Then simply tell the audience.

“Wow, you’re a highly competent audience and suddely I started feeling nervous.”

You won’t believe how much tension that removes. Both from you and from the audience. And if you manage to be even slightly funny when stating that you’re nervous it will work even better.

“I’m sorry. I’ve gone thorugh this presentation a hundred times at home, but unfortunately I don’t have a huge stage with 2000 kilowatts of light in my living room. This made me more nervous than I expected.”

Some more presentation advice from earlier articles:

Essential equipment for your presentation

Two essential tricks in powerpoint

How to make illustrations even if you can’t draw

How to avoid making boring presentations

Happy presenting! And as always, I have to recommend presentationzen for more on this topic.

Invites to Medioh!

June 3, 2008 eiriksoinvite, medioh, video12 Comments

I am currently trying out a video aggregation service called Medioh. And I have a couple of invites for the people that would like to try it out. The only thing I ask for is that after you get the invite you test the service and give me some feedback on what you think. I must admit that I am not really impressed yet, but have only given the site a couple of minutes.

And how do you get the invite? Post a comment here asking for one. Use the email you want the invite sent to when posting the comment. Emails are not published and I will never spam you.

Medioh gives you a possibility of searching for and subscribing to videos across the web. Not tied to only one site. You find more information about Medioh here.

Test clips from Canon HF10

May 28, 2008 eiriksoavchd, canon, final cut, hf10, imovie, test clips, video20 Comments

People that have been following me for a while know that I bought a Panasonic HDC-SD5 and returned it because of too much noise in the audio.

So, I’ve been patient and waited for the Canon HF10 Solid State AVCHD camera. It arrived about a week ago and unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to test it in detail yet. So far it looks very good. Small, but more sturdy and solid than the Panasonic. No noise on the audio and a very nice progressive recording mode. Way better performance in low light and a built in 16 GB of memory in addition to the SD-slot.

It works very well with both iMovie and Final Cut Express.

Update:
Here’s a detailed review with tech specs on Camcorderinfo.

I have published some very short test videos and will add more later.

25p-960×540.mov 18-May-2008 01:22 43M
= recorded in 25p and scaled down to half size

25p-testclip-canon-h..> 18-May-2008 02:21 177M
= original recording in 25p, Apple intermediate file

50i-testclip-canon-h..> 18-May-2008 02:11 126M
= original recording in 50i, Apple intermediate file

50p-960×540.mov 18-May-2008 01:52 55M
= recording in 50i and converted to 960×540 50p

For the converting from 50i full size to 50p half size I’ve used the free and excellent JES Deinterlacer. I set it up with the following parameters under “Project”:
Standards Conversion
Custom
Minimal Blend
Settings: Height: 540 Width: 960 Frame rate: 50.000
Movie speed: 1.000

Here’s another quick clip. Something I did to demonstrate Shazam ID on my phone. The video is slightly edited in iMovie, transcoded and uploaded to Brightcove. The recording was done in 25p, saving the hassle of deinterlacing. If you’re reading this in an email update or RSS reader you might want to click through to the article on eirikso.com to view the video.

http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/376819422

And here are two stills from the same camera. It’s snapping decent 3 megapixel stills as well.

Twitter in plain english

May 18, 2008 eiriksotwitter3 Comments

Garr Reynolds posted an article back in April that included this quick video about Twitter:

I’ve tried to explain twitter to a lot of people lately and I think this video does a good job. And while you’re at it. Commoncraft have a very nice explanation of this strange thing called RSS as well. When thinking of it. Everything from the commoncraft show is pretty fantastic!

The Microsoft plane

April 25, 2008 eiriksoadria, commercial, Microsoft, plane8 Comments

I must admit that I didn’t like the commercial on the plane I boarded this morning on my flight from Frankfurt to Vienna. I’m sorry, but my experience with Microsoft products doesn’t give me a sense of security and reliability. I know Microsoft want me to think of such values, but I don’t. And I really, really want to think of security and reliability when I board a plane.

Think twice when you place commercials. Without this one you wouldn’t have reminded me of the bad parts of my experience with your products. You end up paying to hurt your reputation.

Speaking

April 23, 2008 eirikso3 Comments

Seems like May is the month for conferences. I have a pretty tight schedule, but if you’re in the area then drop me a line. This is my international presentations for the next couple of weeks:

Vienna, April 25 – 11th Roundtable Presentation & On-Air Promotion
Lucerne, May 8 – EBU Connect (link to PDF program)
Amsterdam, May 19 – THE 124th AES CONVENTION
Amsterdam, May 29 – EMBRACING NEW MEDIA IN YOUR PUBLIC RELATIONS AND CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY

Facebook and Twitter and friends

April 20, 2008 eiriksofacebook, friends, twitter5 Comments

People keeps comparing those services. I don’t get it. They’re completely different. Twitter is an open conversation and a place where you meet new friends. Facebook is a closed conversation and a place where you meet old friends.

I just did a quick count. On twitter I follow 299 people. And 37 of them are friends to the level that I would have said hello if I met them on the street. On Facebook 151 of my 200 friends are at the same level.

That said. Currently I rarely visit Facebook. And I use Twitter all day long.

To share or not to share

April 19, 2008 eiriksoPresentations, sharing7 Comments

I’m sharing a lot of my knowledge here at eirikso.com. I’m sharing images on flickr and SmugMug, quick thoughts on twitter and presentations on Slideshare.net. The internet is fantastic for sharing content and I think sharing is a very good idea. It’s simple – if you share, people share back. I learn a lot by structuring my thoughts enough to be able to communicate them. And I learn a lot by having an intelligent community out there that is ready to help me out by sharing their knowledge back.

But when you share information people can take it and use it without giving you credit!

Yes they can. And recently I got an email from a person that attended one of my presentations a couple of weeks ago. This person attended another conference with other people speaking the next week. One of them using content that was clearly borrowed from my presentations. And without giving any credit.

So should I stop sharing? Stop sending out PDF files of my presentations? I don’t think so. The value of sharing content is bigger than the problem of someone using your ideas without giving you credit. Such use is of course irritating. And not very polite. For the people in the audience that know where your content comes from you simply look like a jerk if you don’t give credit.

I remember an old interview with the photoshop guru Kai Krause. He was sharing all his knowledge in a series called Kai’s Power Tips. And he was asked why he shared all his knowledge. “You’re giving away your best asset”. He answered that he wasn’t. He was giving away yesterday’s knowledge. He was already working on something new. (And what’s he doing now? Living and working in a 1000 year old castle. With a priceless view and lots of space.)

Kai Krause’s statement is bold, arrogant and full of confidence. And I love it. So for me another important reason to share is the fact that I push myself forward. And that’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of people borrowing your thoughts. They’re borrowing old thoughts. Go ahead, use it. I’m on my way further down the road anyway.