Our chat was very informal and we had a laugh along the way. He is also into video creation and uses a Canon video camera to capture his images. I met up with Andrew first of all on YouTube which is a surprise seeing as Twitter seems to be the place these days. Mind you seeing as we are both into vide then it should not be a surprise.

Andrew is a photographer too and loves nothing better than getting out and about taking pictures of amongst other things , Fire Hydrants. Have a listen to the podcast because he talks about what he has in his camera bag and also about the workflow he uses to take something from initial idea to a finished art work.

Gary Rosenzweig pictured here in an English pub  (Mind you if he was doing it properly he would have a pint of beer in his hand) talked to Mac20Q about what he does with MacMost Video. He has been very busy producing Mac tips in video form for about 2 years and is doing very nicely on YouTube.

He was previously into making games with Flash and still might do the odd game. He has also made an app for the iPhone. So as you can see he is multi talented with the programming, podcasting with video, writing books, drinking beer and probably many other things too. He is successful in bringing in revenue from his podcasting, He has the links on the MacMost site and apart from one month doesn’t have the advertising in the videos.

Gary also has an Sony HDV camera which is plugged into his MacPro and he records live into Wirecast which comes from the same company as ScreenFlow. I was amazed that his preference for movie editing was with iMovie because it is so fast to do the editing. He could use FinalCut Express but prefers iMovie. He compresses the file at the end of it all with MPEG StreamClip. He uploads to Blip.tv and it will send the file off to YouTube which saves some time with the uploading. Naturally you will find Gary on FaceBook and Twitter.

He recommends that if you want to get into video podcasting and you don’t yet have a HD Camera then just shoot in standard def. move up to HD when you are able to. If you wait until everything is perfect then you will never get to make a podcast.

Gary admits to being a geek, and using terminal editor on his tiny netbook rather than using the Ubuntu that was installed. He was using EEE Ubuntu. He has been using as Mac for a long time though and was issued a Mac SE in 1987 when he was in college. It was a requirement to have a Mac there.

For a favourite application he has to choose between Garageband and iMovie, but was perhaps edging towards iMovie more. Gary does use Audacity and although it is a free application I would recommend that you use AmadeusPro, it looks prettier, more Mac like and I think it is more stable too.

He uses Fluid the custom browser application that you can use to make a web application for one specific purpose. I have it for FaceBook but Gary uses it for a Todo application. he is an iPhone user and use MocaVNC, Tweetie, Cycle Meter, and Scrabble plus other games. On the MacMost Newsletter he does a recommended iPhone app of the week.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Bob has been a supporter of Mac20Q for some time and was telling me that he has listened right from the start of the podcast. Thanks Bob, good to have you along for the ride. He was the winner of one of our software giveaway competitions too!

A good chat was had and covered all the good stuff about being a Mac user. Bob is in the process of making a podcast about Bridge the card game. He started doing it as an audio podcast then decided to start again but with video. Makes more sense if you can see the cards, for this he has been using BoinxTV. I also have BoinxTV but it didn’t work on my iMac and when I looked at it working on the MacBook I decided that it was more for making Live TV programs with multiple cameras. I think I am better off using FinalCut Express or iMovie.

Whilst on the subject of FinalCut Express, I have still been working away to learn how to use the application and I am pleased that I am getting into it due to using Lynda .com with the excellent tutorials they have there. I also found FinalCutKing web site and there is a whole load of video tutorials on the IzzyVideo web site. All good quality stuff. I checked out YouTube also but the quality of the tutorials is much more variable and at the lower end of the scale.

I though it was funny that all the news sites have been talking about Applecare not being available to smokers because the filth that had accumulated in the machine had made it un safe for the technicians, Well smokers are disgusting creatures and deserve it if it is true. Blackened lungs and blackened insides of the computer. So there you go passive smoking is bad for computers too.

Back to Bob – he is certainly a die hard Mac user, having experience with Macs from the very early days, he did veer away during the dark days when Jobs was pushed aside but was happy to come back to the fold when Intel processors appeared in the Mac computers. Thanks to Bob for coming on Mac 20 Questions. I had a great time chatting with him and if you would like to be featured on Mac 20 Questions then why not contact me and we can make a date and time to record an interview.

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Enough if the personal news and on to the Mac, even though I wasn’t able to use mine as much this weekend. I just put together a video showing how to use the green screen feature in iMovie. The first time I did it I couldn’t believe it was so easy! This time I recorded what I did with ScreenFlow version 2 which is still working great even though it is beta and not due out until any day now.  Using iMovie to to the chromakey is just a case of dragging the video with the green screen in it into the timeline on top of the background you want to replace the green with. If the screen is lit properly and without shadow caused by creases, it won’t even need any adjustments. I had to make a couple of adjustments but after that it was perfect.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I do plan to get a longer pole for the green material and to put the iron over it too. I will stretch it over some extra poles perhaps to get it just right. You can put a moving background behind or a still image if you wish.

I am still toying with the idea of getting Final Cut Express, which would be better than iMovie but I am finding that iMovie is quite capable now that it has gone to version 09.

Click the image to listen

Busy time here but I managed to record a podcast. I would have done it with video for the Wizardgold News but went with audio because I started to record after the light was gone and I don’t like the image you get when working with lights rather than natural light. Although if I was to use my video camera rather than the iSight camera I could have made some adjustments I suppose. Then again there are video adjustments possible in iMovie also.

Any way the upshot is that I did it in audio only. I recorded and turned it into a podcast in Amadeus again. The second podcast all done in Amadeus and I like it. Slight different way of working that’s all.

I talk about using a service called Knowem to be able to quickly see where I have my user name out there. It checks about 120 sites and I can then click on to sign up at the various sites. Basically it is to profect my user name and identity so that no one else can register Wizardgold and use it nefariously. I see there will be a Facebook name thing happening this weekend also. Will you be getting your name registered. Will there be people doing bad things to try a bit of Facebook cyber squatting, I wonder.

In the podcast I give a bit of news about the 20 Questions sites. If you would like to be featured in a podcast talking about whatever you fancy or more specific with the Photo20Q, Video20Q, Writers20Q, then contact me using the form below. Lets talk !!

With the new 2.8 WordPress, last night I updated most of my sites. Only with one of them do I have a problem.  The text is not showing up in the posts on the site yet are still there in the database. I have exported out the posts also to keep them safe while I do what I have to to sort the problem out. Weird that it only messed up on one of my sites.

As I say in the podcast there will be no Round table meeting this evening. Mostly because of the fact I am working until 10pm and the rest is due to it seeming that it has all been done in the other podcasts. I listened to IMP, Mac OSKen and MacBreak Weekly and Vexed Tech podcasts and there is not much more to say. So I will stick to the Mac 20 Questions style of podcast which is about real users using the computer for real.

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Click photo to listen to podcast

Chris Marshall lives in the south of Spain and enjoys his cats and Harleys sharing his many Apple computers. Even his cats have their own web site, now that is definitely geeky. At least they have been spayed, thats’s the cats not the Harleys !! In his humble abode he has iPods coming out of his ears, in the bathroom, on the roof, probably in the bedroom also. You have to have music wherever you go.

Chris suspects that we mac users could be unofficial beta testers for many of the offerings from Apple. What do you think ??

As an instant message addict, he likes to use Adium as well as a bit of iChat and of course some Skype for chatting and video. Brings in photos mostly through Adobe Lightroom. A bit of photoshop for tidying up. A huge fan of iMovie using it to do work to collate footage shot off a helmet cam while trekking around on a Quad bike. Sounds like fun ??

Chris is obsessive about backing up after falling foul to not having backed up things properly before. He has backups using SuperDuper and kept in a firesafe offsite. Drop box is used but not for making backups, he uses it for sharing files around. Chris even has an Amazon S3 account but would not consider using the cloud back up way as a primary back up strategy.

A favourite app is iWatermark and I mentioned one I like called Jumpcut.

TvMaxPlus for having Tv on your Mac

Favourite iPhone Applications

QIK – Note to Self and PDAnet

All used on a jailbroken iPhone and uses the maps book mark feature on it to know where the car is parked to be able to find it afterwards.