Two Worlds Theatre News Dec. 08

Labyrinth & Garden

My work lately has been the clearing of debris around the “site”, mainly left over building materials, which is providing wonderful free fuel for our excellent scrap wood and wood pellet driven underfloor heating system serving both the theatre and cottage. There are still a few more days of clearing. I work this on dryer days, and we have had a good frequency of those this winter, so far.

At present, access to the labyrinth garden entrance is a bit muddy so I did start laying a network of lovely limestone paths and will continue to do this soon, hopefully by Yule. The wheelbarrows carrying the scrap wood is currently putting the existing temporary paths a bit out of shape, but by Yule I hope some will walk the labyrinth for observance and reflection.

I do look forward to getting back into working within the labyrinth garden. It does amaze me how its essence of peace seems to be stronger every time I enter it. I feel a caressing of love within there and am eager to hear the reactions of others who enter there soon.

Despite our frosts, the young trees still seem strong with evidence of life with their fruitful buds patiently waiting for opening time next Spring.

Through January I will be doing a lot of work on the pathway to improve their levels so by early summer it may be walked on safely and softly with bare feet. I will also add some more drainage to take away water that may cause mud.

Two Worlds Live!

Over last weekend my son Sky visited to cable up the theatre to the internet and enable it to broadcast live online. I was amazed by his knowledge and creativity and I learned such a lot.

Online broadcasting used to be exceptionally expensive but now there are several free live broadcast services online that are able to support themselves from advertising revenues and merchandising. It seems like they have discovered that they can operate like TV stations. UHF TV Stations are in the business of selling advertising to partially pay the producers that produce media that attract viewers that will also watch the ads.

With online broadcasting I do not know any producers and studios that get paid any revenue from advertising. I am sure that will happen in the future when producers and production companies gather large online audiences and auction themselves to the online broadcasting host that will share the most of their advertising revenue. I think it will be hard to develop a subscription based service for awhile, but in time people will pay for advertising free viewing when the advertising becomes overpowering. Of course, the porn and “get rich quick” studios will get into the subscription model very quickly, and probably have done already. I do not investigate those.

Anyway, after that rant, Sky recommended me to Mogulus . At first we could not get any feed from my Canon video camera, thinking that the online service did the encoding from the camera feeding online. Looking back, that was a daft expectation as the analogue of the camera output could never travel online.

I then tried the Windows Encoder, as this is what I used for webcasting way back in 2001. We also read on forums how others had used Canon video cameras with Windows Encoder. No, still no luck.

Hooray, deep in the Mogulus support services was advice to download the Flash Encoder. As my son Sky is a huge Flash fan and programming whizz with anything Flash he was excited at this development. Once downloaded, we found this to be an exceptional free software. The broadcasting configuration options are stunning! This has features we would expect from an expensive program, a complete production engineer’s toolbox!

Yes, it processed the live camera feed and we were live on the air in a minute !!!

Using a low configuration with highly compressed video and audio plus a slow upload streaming of just 128 kps, the quality of live feed was stunning. We checked this on another PC to see what a viewer would see. Quality was way above most things seen on YouTube and worked very, very well on full screen.

So, Two Worlds Live was born !!!

Now we have to create some productions

At present I have a backlog of landscaping jobs, mentioned above, and administration for our upcoming USA tour in March and guided tours for people coming to Ireland during 2009.

Once on top of that I will launch online broadcasting pages for folks around the world to tune in. When these pages are up, circulated around and connected to the social media I am sure productions will be developed.

We can handle music with background settings and anything theatrical. Of course, we will keep connected to myth and Celtic themes.

Also, anywhere where there is internet, especially wi-fi, we can do outside and roaming broadcasts. The ideas for this are endless.

Keash TV

A local broadcasting service is an up and coming spin off from Two Worlds Live!

Our local people have an abundance of tales, photos, film and video footage that may too easily be lost, and it is a part of Ireland that people around the world would not want to lose. So on Keash TV we will archive this valuable media memorabilia and add live broadcasts of local traditional events where we can. Broadband has only just arrived in most of this area to make this possible.

We also hope to start up monthly workshops that are a kind of video shorts festival for local folks to get into video and share their work too …. and for visitors too who would like to join us.

…… and with Celtic Ways Guided Tours

The studio, theatre, labyrinth and online broadcasting services are all available to enhance your visiting experiences, if you need them.

To keep up with news of the above services, and share your news please go here and sign up at either the news or brochure boxes.

Looking forward to hearing from you.