Audio Visual Technician

PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF & Prezi

(Video transcript) Hi. Paul Donovan here from AVTechnician.ca Thanks for watching my channel. This is the channel where we're giving tips and tricks to AV technicians and those who would like to be an AV Technician.

Today I'd like to bring up a topic associated with the difference between PowerPoint, Keynote and PDF. One of the things we often find is that almost every client uses PowerPoint when they're using their presentation on the computer to the projector on the screen. Then you have those people who use MacIntosh and want to use Keynote Then there's the some people who do something radical and they use a PDF file.

And then there's one other group. There's the group that likes to use Prezi. And if you have no idea what that is that's fine, then probably you should never learn it. Unfortunately some of your presenters like to use Prezi. I call it the seasick program. What is that Prezi.com create a Prezi where everything tends go in circles pzz pzz pzz pzz and as I say it's I call it the seasck program because by the time you finish watching the presentation your eyes are going ahhhhhh Enough about Prezi. It doesn't operate the same.

Q&A #2 and 10,000 Channel Views

Today I have a couple of things to share with you. One is that as of the posting of this video I have achieved 10,000 views all together on my channel. I thank everyone for watching. It's been a marvelous experience. So see this grow. Considering that I haven't done a lot of marketing on the channel. So thank you for watching and let's see it grow. and grow and grow.

I'd like to spend a few minutes to do some more Q&A, the second Q&A on my channel. Just a couple of quick questions that have come up from people who are asking questions related to becoming an AV Technician. So let's take a look at some questions.

Folding Drape Alone

Today I wanted to show you a little bit about how to fold up drape. Sorry I don't have the actual black drape so I'm going to use a blanket. This blanket is pretty close to a similar width, anyway. This one is probably 3 foot wide, but is only about 8 or 10 feet long. What I'm going to do is show you a technique I have for which I fold drapes.

The black velour drapes what you want to remember is to fold them with the velour side in. The dirty side, the unfinished side, out. This protects the velour from damage and dirt that may occur in the course of transpor and carrying.

Pipe & Drape

Today I'm going to talk about Pipe & Drape. No I'm not referring to bagpipes and all that stuff. What I'm referring to is AV services where we will place a wall of drape behind the stage as a backdrop for making the staging look nicer. There are two significant types of drapes. There's the thin, more translucent, very light material, often called Banjo drapery. That is often used in trade shows and things like that.

I'm going to talk more about the heavier velour type drapery because this is the one takes more effort to do, and I don't use the banjo very often, I don't do up trade show setups.

VGA Distribution Amp

Today I want to talk about a VGA distribution amp. Well not just VGA, I'm also going to talk about HDMI. A lot of time in AV we have to take a signal off of a laptop or other video production item and send it out, split it off to multiple monitors. And we need some way to distribute the signal. Some people might think that you can just put a splitter in there, but unfortunately VGA, and HDMI, don't like the concept of just being split They like a bit of technology in between to help make sure the signal stays good.

Dongles, what are they?

Today I want to talk about dongles, you say, What? Some people have different names for them, but I'm going to use the word I use which is a dongle. This is, essentially, a little device that has a plug on one end and a different kind of plug on the other end, allows you to convert from one type of plug or jack, to another kind of jack.

The most common use of dongles, where we usually see them, is in the Mac world. Mac computers tend to use an awful lot of dongles when we want to attach things to the computer. This is a trend that is moving onwards with Mac and other laptop computers. When they're trying to keep the laptop super slim and start to use new connector ports that are also super slim. Mac is one of the ones that started it out, probably in the beginning. Mostly because they needed to make a unique connector. They are famous for their firewire connector, which a lot of people remember, but it's pretty much gone away.

Digital Audio Recorder

Today I want to talk about the new generation of digital recorders that are on the market. News reporters for years used to hump around a little box that was a full cassette deck for doing their recording when doing interviews. But the world of digital technology has reduced this down to really small things. Some reporters even just use their smartphone and the built-in audio recording capabilities that go with the smartphones. But the professionals, or even the independent movie makers, these days are moving forward into two brand names of digital recorders. Two of the models of the two brand names The two brand names I'm going to talk about today are the ZOOM and the TASCAM brands There used to be a Mirantz brand but that has sort of gone away, not as popular in the low cost indie film business The TASCAM recorder or the ZOOM recorder, especially the ZOOM H4N and the Tascam DR-40. Those two are competitors head-to-head in the world AV digital recorders, and the movie industry. Quite often when you are looking for them you will find that their prices are very close together. Sometimes they're $10 apart $15 apart.

EQ & FBQ and the Shark

Today I want to talk about equalizers in the sound systems. But also I want to talk about special unique item called FBQ which is a product that helps you use an equalizer. First off, EQ means equalizer. Many of you may not have realized that but that's what it is. What you'll often see, you'll see in your mixer board will a few little slide bars that are mini-EQ for your system. You also have in each channel, quite often, a low, mids and highs. Lows, mids and highs. dials, that is also considered EQ. Then you can get an EQ that is a separate box. Quite often stereo, sometimes stereo side-by-side or top and bottom. These are are EQ's with a bunch of slider often 20, 30, 40 sliders. Each one allocated to a certain frequency of sound.

Splitting the Audio Jack

Today I'm going to talk about splitting the audio jack on most of the modern laptops on the market today, or even if you are planning to use your smartphone jack and wanting to split that as well. Often times as an AV Technician we want to get sound into the laptop. Or into your smartphone to use as a recording device. Yet the laptops come with just a single audio jack. And of course the smartphones have a single audio jack -- but let's not talk about the new iphone 7 which has no audio jack, just the lightning connection. We're trying to find a way to get sound into our laptop and all we've got is the single jack. The single jack is a little mini-jack, about this size. It actually needs to have 1, 2, 3, 4 rings in order for it to work. This is referred to as TRRS -- Tip Ring Ring Sleeve. This is the type that is used to to allow to have microphone and hear sound coming from that one jack. But what you need to do to be able to split that jack. You want to have a microphone coming in.

DI Boxes

Today my topic is DI boxes. Direct Input or Direct Interface is what that means. In the AV world we will use this device to convert a signal coming from, say, an instrument such as a digital keyboard, a guitar, bass guitar and converting so it can go to the mixer board. One of the things that happens when you are getting a signal from an instrument you're getting through a cable like this with a 1/4" plug. If you look closely you will notice that that is only a single mono jack. That tends to be an unbalanced signal and it tends to also create a fair bit of potential for noise. and interference. What we want to do is we want to convert the signal that's coming from the instrument to an XLR As we do that we most likely will use a device such as a DI box.

Mic'ing choirs or drums

Today we are going talk about mic'ing the choir or acoustical instruments such as drums. Here's the challenge. You've got a choir, say 50 voice, that you want to mic them up because they are going to be performing somewhere. If you are lucky you are a performance hall such as a large theatre that acoustically suited to have a choir sing with almost no microphones. Other times you are not so lucky and might be in a gymnasium or a banquet hall or ballroom where the sounds it's not as well for dealing with the sounds of a choir, so you do need to microphone them up. We are going to talk about the different kinds of microphones and some of the techniques that you need to think about when you are mic'ing a choir.

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