Tuesday, March 04, 2008

That's So Raven!

Two Sunday nights ago I skipped the Oscars and hit up Will Ferrell's FunnyOrDie Comedy Tour: Presented by 'Semi Pro'. Though Will would be "presenting" I assumed his role would be limited, and I went for the three comedians. I've always been a fan of Zach Galifianakis (who is responsible for the post title) and Demetri Martin (who my friends and I spied at Grey Dog's one afternoon making little charts and drawings on a notepad). And though I was unfamiliar with Nick Swardson before going and whose particular type of humor is not my favorite (more Dane Cook-esque), I couldn't help but get into his tales of drunkeness with the crowd. I was pleasantly surprised by Will Ferrell's presence, especially when interviewed Tom Brokaw (or T-Bo as he called him once) as Ron Burgundy.

Amy from the tour blogged her insider experience on FOD here. The New York Times blogged its take here, which includes a smart perspective on how the promotion of the tour underwriter, 'Semi Pro' was more subtle than limited. NYTimes concludes:

...this audience demonstrated how well Mr. Ferrell knows his fans, and how a Web site can drive an entire comic enterprise. Except for a quick opening clip, the stage show included nothing about the movie; with all the online hype, it didn’t have to.


I have to agree...and if you're new to this blog or it hasn't been apparent from recent IOI posts, I'm hooked on FunnyOrDie. Yet the point of this post was less to recap the event (that was just the hook) than to test out my new flip video. I bought it earlier that Sunday and have since found it ridiculously easy to take videos and download them to my computer—it runs on two AA batteries and has a USB arm that flips out (hence the name) and connects directly to your computer. Now I wanted to see how easy it is to upload my first-ever thirty-seconds of video (my walk to the show) to YouTube in order to embed here...and here we go:



Not hard at all though the .AVI file took a few minutes to upload to YouTube and then lowers in quality vs. viewing in Quicktime on my laptop. Any tips/suggestions from owners on process or use? Oh yeah, that and I hate my voice...but I knew that already. Unfortunately as I'm spending more time videotaping/being videotaped, videoconferencing for work, on Yahoo Live!, Seesmic, and who knows what else in the future, so I guess I'll get used to it.

1 comment:

avin said...

yeah, im all about the flip video. i actually used one on some new biz research recently (out of necessity since we didn't have time for real film set up) and it worked great. audio was clear (even in a semi-noisy restaurant), video was solid...good stuff, been thinking about getting one myself but i wonder if its just another of those toys that will sit in a drawer somewhere and i won't put it to enough use.