Somewhat of an experiment…we’ve started a new WordPress blog/page for independent video producers who provide programming for PEG stations. It’s called PEG Indies.

One of the problems that arise in this kind of work is the need for “indies” to do distribution via DVD’s. This is costly and time consuming. As more PEG stations are going digital, with video servers providing much of the playback, having to use DVD’s is just so 20th century.

The idea is to have videos posted, for preview, on sites like YouTube, Blip, Vimeo, etc. Then, the larger MPEG2’s (which many of the video servers require) are either downloaded from a site that can handle the bandwidth and storage, or acquired some other way (maybe even DVD, in fact). The goal is to get information about projects and content out to more folks so that it’s easy for them to find. By posting things here, PEG’s can keep up-to-date.

This will only work if indies participate. TIme will tell. For now, GGP is the first indie there.

There are likely much better solutions to this problem out there. If we find them, then this site will become obsolete. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another century of technical development for that to happen.

Sylvia discusses herbs

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.

Lee and Pam in Let's Get Sauced

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's Headshot

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 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!

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.

Welcome to the GGP – Ground Glass Productions – on WordPress.com. GGP is all about video productions, many targeted for non-profit use by public access television stations. We are also part of PEG Indies on WordPress.

You can visit, or return to, the regular  GGP home page by clicking here.