PodCampSLC 2008
Monday, March 17th, 2008The inaugural PodCampSLC 2008 took place on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. The turnout was pretty good. There were a few glitches with building entry and wifi, but all-in-all it was a fairly smooth unconference I suspect. I had great fun meeting people and listening to interesting conversation and one very well done, very educational speech on audio engineering by Mike Wiseland. I also was pleased to meet Jake Spurlock, who works on skiutah.com blog as part of a school project. Very cool stuff. While browsing the blog, I saw this truly gorgeous ski photograph by Grant Gunderson.
Some really cool things I learned at PodCampSLC were:
- The Zoom H4 is a dynamic and superb little podcasting tool.
- The Sure SM58 is a common mic you can get for ~$100.
- The AT4050 is a great mic (three mics in one: cardiod, omni & figure 8) that retails for $999, but you can probably get it for around $550.
- The biggest problem with lower end video cameras is hum from the tape.
- Vegas is a really great professional podcast editor that also does video.
- VisualHub is great video editing software.
- I really like startcooking.com (mentioned by Doug from Podango).
- 50,000 downloads/month is not enough reach to attract sponsorships, 50k might be enough for niche advertisers.
- If it takes 1 hour to create a 13MB audio podcast, it probably will take 10 hours to create a 50MB video podcast.
- Blogging is a great search engine tool. (I knew that one!)
- The best mic situation for a group setting (i.e. users group meeting) is a Zoom H4 type device to record the speaker plus two table top mics for questions from the audience.
