Mac20Q podcast 114 – Blast from the past – Mike Reed

Once again it is so hard to believe that five years have passed since talking to a previous guest on the Mac20Q podcast. These chats I have with other Mac users who are clearly enjoying using the Mac and iOS devices are really great fun to do. In this interview Mike and I talk a lot about the video and movie business. When I talked to Mike last time he was involved in the making of some movies and now he is working towards making his own video business. He is looking at both ends of the age spectrum with helping parents to create a good quality record of how their child is progressing and at the other end with talking to old folks about their life experiences and life story. Certainly, there are people out there that wouldn’t be able to do these sorts of things for themselves. Often it can be good to pay a professional to do a good job and end up with something that you would be proud to show off to other people. Mike is currently bootstrapping the startup ‘Deer Studios’ independent film production. Mike Reed documents on a long term basis, the local filmmaker community engaged in #pompeywood and #frugalwave and experimenting with shortform episodes created and edited and uploaded entirely using the iPhone 6 Plus

Follow Mike on Twitter – @britmic

Mike Reed

A sound business in video

Mike’s specialism is with the audio quality and audio reproduction in videos and movies. When we talked last he had audio professional quality Sound Devices recorder and this time we talked about how it is possible to get good quality microphones to connect to an iPad or iPhone. Only today, I heard on another podcast somebody saying about how they were amazed at the quality of audio recording they got using just the on-board microphone of the iPhone 6. It is vitally important to get really good sound quality when you are making a video. If the video itself is not too good then people will put up with it to a certain extent. On the other hand, if the sound quality in a video is poor then the viewers will quickly move on to something else.

A favourite app for Mike

I had already got the Fantastical application on my Mac and really enjoyed using it. It is sweet when I am able to add events using natural language. Mike told me how he is enjoying using Fantastical on his iOS devices. On account of his recommendation for the application on iOS, I went and bought the version to put on my iPhone. I must admit that I am finding it very useful indeed. If you tap once on the menu bar at the top it takes you to today in your calendar. If you tap and hold down, then you can change the date to a date that you’d like to go to. You can also slide the dates in the top part and go quickly through the dates. In the lower part of the application where you see the list of events that you have in your diary, you can also scroll through that. It is easy to get the application to give you location-based reminders and it will either remind you when you arrive or you can set it to remind you when you leave at that location.

Script for the intro to the podcast

As ever there are a lot of updates to applications for the Mac and also for iOS. Perhaps there are even more this week due to upgrades to the iOS on both platforms. My upgrade to the latest OS on the Mac went a little bit strange due to it booting into an old boot disk rather than the correct external thunderbolt disk I normally boot into. It took me a little while to work out why everything was completely wrong. At least I had plenty of backups of my system disk in case everything really did go completely bad.

I am quite pleased with Fantastical that I put onto the iPhone. It is only a shame that it is not a universal application that will also work on the iPad. No big deal as I pretty much have my iPhone with me 24 seven.

In an attempt to get myself organised I jumped into using OmniFocus. I was pleased to be able to find a script that had been created which would allow me to better make use of templates. Now when I post a new blog post I can quickly create a new project based upon a template and quickly set up reminders to do certain things for the sharing of the blog post on the social networks. This way I won’t have to rely upon my memory or having to do this manually either in the reminders application or using Fantastical. Automatic is always good and I can now do that with Omnifocus for iPad and Mac.

I still can’t resist getting new applications for both the Mac and also for iOS. I got my hands on a nice little application called Textgrabber. I can take a picture of some printed text and this application will do OCR or I can get it to translate what ever it reads. It is also possible to send the text that has been grabbed to the usual sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter. Something I will have to play with in order to find out how good is over the next couple of weeks.

On the Wizardgold YouTube channel you will find a couple of new tutorials. The latest one is about how to create a looping background sound that can be used in BossJock or another audio app. I will also be making a tutorial about recording audio using that background sound to create a podcast intro. If I have that ready in time then I will have used this for this podcast. If not, listen out for it on the next Mac 20 Q podcast. Another tutorial that might be in the pipeline is to do with ProCreate the iOS drawing and painting application. I once again I have desires to do some drawing on the iPad. Procreate is still my favourite art application to use on the iPad, especially when I’m using my Wacom Bluetooth stylus. It gives me the pressure sensitivity when drawing and really works very well for my artistic endeavours. I will making a tutorial about Pixelmator for iPad which is great on the Mac too.

This is the second episode of the second series of Mac20Q and once again we have a blast from the past with a chat with a guest from series one. In this podcast I’m talking to Mike Reed and we cover quite a bit to do with making movies and creating video. In our first chat five years ago Mike was involved in making movies and his interest still lies in this direction.