Quiet on the set…and, Action!

Welcome to GGP – Ground Glass Productions - video productions targeted for non-profit use by public access television stations.

Fitting A Square PEG Media In A Round PEG Media Hole

PEG Media is a site hosted somewhere on the Internet. (It was started by a cable access station in Maine somewhere.) They solved the problem of media distribution to lots and lots of cable access stations (CAS) by creating a library of media. At first, it was free. Then, they started charging for downloads. (Producers, like us, could upload for free.)

The problem with free is you get what you pay for. Recently, we’ve found that our uploads sometimes get stuck in the some kind of limbo there. (They actually us Amazon.com’s distribution backbone network, or something like that, or we’re hallucinating.) So, to get a video out into the wild, you have to upload it to their site, it has to be recognized. You have to add information about it, then it has to be read or transcoded or had pixie dust applied. Whatever happens, if it doesn’t happen just right, the video never makes it to it’s final resting place.

We’ve had no trouble distributing our low-rez videos (for Internet streaming on sites like Vimeo or Blip.TV). We don’t go through PEG Media for that. But, for other CAS’s out there, we need to.

There’s a Massachusetts only distribution site we also use. So, for local stations, it’s accessible. (Assuming they know how to use it.) We’ve also kept our video on our own website (which live out in the ether). We don’t like to have that as a primary pull site because it could affect our monthly usage from the ISP provider. (Although we’re probably way below any reasonable limit.)

So, what to do.

Well, we don’t know yet. We’ll give PEG Media another chance, although uploading our video a third time to their site probably isn’t the best idea…but it’s all we have.

If you are a CAS and have inquiries about our videos, just send some email. We’d love to hear from you.

2011 Recap

We bid goodbye to our domain name, groundglassproductions.com in November. That means it is no longer our homepage. We use this WordPress site for that, now. For our video archives and info pages, we use a variety of servers. Click on Archives in the menu above, or check the Blogroll on the right.

This year, we managed only two programs. It wasn’t pretty. Our house project kept us super busy for the first half of the year. We finally found some time to do Meatballs. Part of our program was recorded in Agawam and featured our granddaughter. She was terrific. We had to go low cost in our equipment, too. The drive back and forth to SCA in Spencer would have been prohibitive. We did our main recording using an inexpensive Aiptek camera. (It could do HD, though, which was fun.) For a microphone, we used a musician’s vocal mic and mixer combo. Audio was recorded into a Windows-based notepad style computer. For overhead shots, I shot video with my iPhone. I didn’t expect much at the end of the day and it all worked out quite nicely.

The second part of Meatballs was done in Spencer and Lee and Pam were working nicely together as usual. This time, we had some of the station’s equipment so we were on a more even keel. I though there would be problems matching the footage from the low-cost to normal (better) quality takes. It all meshed beautifully.

For the summer, we had a tornado (passed within 500 feet of the house), a hurricane, earthquake, microbursts, an freak October snowstorm that destroyed trees and kept us without power for almost a week…and Lee broke her ankle. So, with all that, the idea of being able to fit it another program was looking pretty bad. Then, Lee said we were heading out to Spencer and we were shooting, again, with Pam – bad ankle or not. (When you watch the video, you’ll see Lee sometimes sitting and sometimes standing. She’s still not completely healed.)

Despite the hardships, we’ve managed to produce Holidays 2011. It was all about buffet foods for the holidays. Nice stuff. We pulled together a 50 minute program. You can check it out on the Thyme In The Kitchen website.

Next year, we hope to have more production…assuming Planet Earth cooperates.

Still Ticking

Our operation moved from Spencer to Feeding Hills this year. We are still associated with Spencer Cable Access, but to a lesser degree. The driving distance has a lot to do with that. We will continue looking at video opportunities, and may pursue some things in the local area. Thyme In The Kitchen, in particular, has seen some productions during 2010.

January 09 Projects

We’ve finally gotten around to releasing a show we taped back in 2005. It’s called All About Herbs and features Lee, Pam and Sylvia delving into a variety of recipes that involve those wonderful, natural, tasty plants called herbs. Sylvia’s segment includes a nice discussion about this plant/food type with tips on picking and drying.

For this show, Art Danek (Casey’s brother who lives in New Jersey) had come up for a few days in the summer and helped out with the productions. Then, from that point forward, he would ask, “Is it finished?” You can’t imagine the excuses Casey came up with for reasons why it wasn’t. But, now, it is.

Also, Lee and Pam decided to do a new show called, Let’s Get Sauced. Of course, it’s all about sauces. This was taped on the 25th and, here we are, three days later and it’s finished! We will be uploading it to the Internet for distribution during the day. (It takes a while as these files are rather large.) This is also the last show in a while where we will have the assistance of our friend, Paul C. McKinney.

Paul has helped as a Portage Specialist, camera operator, and Sous Chef on our shows. He’s always got interesting stories to tell, making the productions more fun and keeping our talent entertained, of course. Paul is heading off to Hollywood to further pursue his acting career. He’s got a movie lined up and some of it will be filmed here in Massachusetts. That’s about all we can say, now. Good luck, Paul, with your future work. You’ve certainly had a positive impact on GGP’s operations. Thank you!!!

DVD Postal Distribution Versus The Internet

DVD distribution is costly. It’s not just the time to make and check DVD’s, it’s the blanks, envelopes, labels, and postage. For a free service (which we provide to local cable access stations), it’s nice if we can save some money. It looks like we’re about to.

We looked into the possibility of distributing MPEG2 files via Internet downloads. We can’t serve these up ourselves because our servers and ISP connections at too slow to be useful. (A 30 minute program coming off of SCA’s server, for example, would take six hours to load. Yuck.) We needed something big and fast and free.

The Mass Access group, working with the Princeton Server Group, have come up with a system to do what we need but for government programming only. So, entertainment or instructional material like ours isn’t welcome yet. Fortunately, we found some interesting alternatives.

For highly compressed streaming video, we’re using Blip.TV and/or Vimeo. These services are a lot like YouTube but don’t limit you to a 10 minute video. So, when you see a video on our main page, it’s in a compressed format coming to you right off of Blip or Vimeo. To get a higher quality video to you that you could use in your own servers, we needed something else. We may have found it.

ADrive provides a free file sharing service (it’s advertising based). They give you a hefty capacity, certainly enough to hold a few videos, and pretty good downloads. They don’t stream, but our six hour upload only took another station an hour to download. (Internet uploads and downloads usually work this way with one being so much faster than the other.)

Grafton’s Community Telelvision station took up the challenge and downloaded our latest Thyme. They report that there was a problem in video format and they needed to transcode it through some software they had, but once that was done, they were good to go.

So, all in all, things are looking up. Thanks to Danielle at GCTV11 for being the first to work with us on this!

Thyme Holidays 2008

We’ve completed this program but, unfortunately, had to skip the Nutcracker intros we’ve used for the past few years. We ran into some problems with scheduling and we’ll see if we could fit them into our next show. The show, itself, features Lee and Pam making some nice holiday recipes. Pam’s brother, Paul, is our guest chef with his own recipe for a beet-based side dish to go along with Lee’s duck a l’orange.