SerenityMovie.net

[jeremy]

Please give us your feedback on Episode 1.
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[Guest]

Too much Jar-Jar, not enough Darth Maul.

Oh, you mean...

never mind.

[indigocliche]

[Guest]

Thanks for the show... and all the effort you guys put in.

[Companion Kate]

Aha - glowing reviews. Well that's nice.

But still, what I'd really like to hear are your ideas on how we can improve it, what you'd like to see in future editions, and so forth.

The Signal could not have happened without this forum, so this really is a community effort, and it's going to remain a communty effort. So we need you to tell us what you want to hear. You can do that either here, where our community gets together, or by sending email to signal@serenityfirefly.com (in which case it might get read out on the show). So I want to thank Jeremy for getting this community together via this wonderful forum, everyone who got together and made the Signal, and everyone who listened to it for ... well, for listening to it.

We really do want to hear from you.

[CTParker333]

I haven't downloaded it yet, but I'm looking forward to listening to it as soon as possible. One problem I see is that the file is very big. Typically a 40-50 min podcast is ~25 meg. At 50 meg it was going to take over 4 hours for me to download it, even with a cable modem.

But I'll definately download it as soon as I have more time/bandwidth. I look forward to listening to it.

[jeremy]

I re-encoded the show at a lower size, it's now only 26MB. That should help.
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Keep Flyin!
Check out our Firefly fan documentary Done the Impossible
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[Brandon]

It took me many hours to download as well - I don't know how many. I started downloading when I got home from work, and it wasn't finished when I went to bed. So I haven't had time to listen yet, nor did I have time to transfer to my MP3 player this morning. But I will listen to it and comment when I get a chance, I'm quite looking forward to it.

I don't know what the new and old quality are, but I would probably enjoy the higher quality as opposed to a smaller download size. Are you getting a lot of downloads? Are they putting a strain on your site? I notice the forums are running very slowly.

[kbachelder]

First and most important... the podcast is GREAT!!! Thank you Thank you

Couple of ideas on the "technical side"...

Some of the background music was a little loud so it was difficult to pick up the words at a few points.

To make it faster for folks to download you might want to experiment with using a lower bit rate maybe 40K. I think 128K is overkill for a podcast and while 64K is good it is still means the file will be around 25-30MB for an hour show.

Downloads have been very slow yesterday and today (I've done it a few times for others) and I'm guessing that is because of the number of downloads or available bandwidth. If the budget allows you might consider using the services of Libsyn (https://www.libsyn.com) because they do a lot of podcasts and their pricing is very reasonable.

You might also want to consider using the FREE services of Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) to create an RSS feed that is much easier for "non-techies" to use and because you can track the number of subscribers you have.

This thing rocks. Thanks. Did I say that before?

Kevin

[lhoward]

[kbachelder]

Might also want to post some "show notes" like most podcasts do so people know what is covered on each show and you can include appropriate links to items that are discussed.

During the show I heard something about another sci-fi podcast (the dig??) that was doing some Firefly stuff. Do you have a link for that?

Thanks,

Kevin

[nobody]

I couldn't get the torrent to work. My torrent client said "got bad file info - , (at Wed Jun 22 '05 @ 11:59:08 AM)"

Has anyone else got the torrent to work?

[kbachelder]

I got the same error on the torrent file as well.

I have used a torrent program to get the TWIT podcast so I think my software is OK.


Kevin

[pontiac_fanatic]

I have never listended to a podcast before--heck I didn't even know what it was. Download took maybe 5 minutes and I enjoyed the show.

In fact I am going to watch a Firefly episode tonight.

Thanks for using my conversion story--its been along time since I wrote that and I had forgotten what I had said. Came off pretty well I think

[Erica]

I'm only 2 and a half minutes in and I love it already. Does that make me a freak?

[CTParker333]

I think you guys (and gals) are off to a great start.

This has probably been thrown around a few times before (all the boards kind of blend together after a while) but Michael and Evo would probably love this pocast. If not for there shows on either DragonPage or Slice of SciFi, then for their new project The SciFi Podcast Network. If you could get exposure on one of those, you could get the word out pretty fast.

Good luck on the upcoming podcasts, looking forward to them.

[Brandon]

Really enjoyed it!

I would have preferred that the clips from the show at the beginning didn't go back and forth from left to right channels. The clips were mostly well done (as was the host), but sometimes the clipping could have been cleaned up a bit more. The voice of the host was generally great, but sometimes the sound quality due to the mic was annoying to listen to because of popping or other distracting factors (especially during the News segment).

That bit about airing the pilot last was funny. I liked the general humor throughout the podcast.

Where is that "Here's how it is" clip from? It's a great summary of Firefly. I haven't watched the early episodes for a while (I've been watching the later episodes recently) but I don't seem to recall it's from an episode?

I did like the comparing of Firefly to other scifi shows.

I agree about the length, an hour is kind of long. The long bit trying to describe the show (it takes more than a sentence!) and talk about different parts could have been split into multiple segments over several shows, and thus focused a bit more on each part without being as long. Although I suppose you'll focus more on each part in detail anyway in future podcasts.

I love the Mal clip from Out Of Gas, talking to Zoe about Serenity. Definitely integrate more clips (and not just 1-second blips) into the actual content (host talking) of the show.

For example, when the host mentions that Firefly is a show with a sense of humor. Perfect spot for any number of clips.

Music, sets, special effects, silence in space are all mentioned, and I thought given the way the show was going, those would be elaborated at this point, but they weren't. Excellent topics for in-depth study in future podcasts.

The cheesy music at 15 minutes through behind "News From The Verse" was awful. AWFUL! LOL Please avoid cheesy music at all costs.

The echoing voice was a bit over the top.

Having the trailer audio in the podcast was cool. Having the voice-over of the text was good - but it could have read all the text instead of just the beginning text, and... the echoing voice was again overdone. Having a review of the trailer in a future podcast would be an idea.

Mentioning the comic so briefly without more details was kind of odd. If it was going to be a brief mention such as that, it could/should have gone in the news section. Obviously you'll go into more detail in a future podcast.

A number of sites are mentioned throughout the podcast... but (correct me if I'm wrong) I think fireflyfans.net was overlooked entirely. It'd be nice to mention it in a future podcast.

The conversion stories - weren't they introduced as being from serenitymovie.com, when they are in fact from serenitymovie.net?

The music segment at the end - excellent!

The closing music (with a crowd singing too - where's that from?) was great!

[Companion Kate]

What is the "right" length of a show, and what is the "right" quality-to-size ratio, are obviously matters of personal taste. When I planned this show, I based the format (albeit rather loosely) on Slice of Sci-Fi, which is an excellent show with high production values. Like "The Signal", they have a good mix of host chat, special features, news, emails and so on. By contrast, many other shows consist only of one or two people talking into a microphone for the whole show.

So let's get some figures. This is a list of some of the shows that my podcatcher downloaded for me this morning:

• Cover to Cover (time = 51:45, filesize = 24,273K)
  
• SciFiDig (time = 52:03, filesize = 26,002K)
  
• Slice of Sci-Fi (time = 48:47, filesize = 22,886K)
  
• The Signal (time = 52:13, filesize = 26,417K)
  
• This Week in Science (time = 59:30, filesize = 27,895K)
  
• Winging It (time = 57:17, filesize = 26,893K)
  

You can see from these figures that The Signal is not atypical.

When we first launched the show, the download time was horrendous. There were three reasons for this: (1) we had encoded the file in too high a quality, doubling the file length with no real benefit, (2) we were using a slower server than we have now, and (3) the show was just too damned popular - too many people trying to download it at the same time.

We've fixed all of these problems. The file size is now 26meg. We're using a libsyn server (which is the same server that Slice of Sci-Fi use). And the download rate sorted itself out with the passage of time.

If you think that the show still takes too long to download, and you want us to do something about it, then I'm afraid you're out of luck. This is the nature of podcasting. You see, you're not supposed to sit there twiddling your thumbs waiting for the download to finish. Sure, you can download the MP3 by hand if you want to, but pod-savvy people know that there is a better way. Get yourself a pod-catching client, and all those downloads will go on in the background, while you get on with something else. Later, they might get copied into a portable MP3 player (though that step is optional, as you can play them on your PC). Welcome to the world of podcasting and podcatching.

So yes - by all means download the show by hand if you want to. That's how most people learn about podcasting. But once you've done that by hand a few times, and you've got bored with it, automate it. Install iPodder or iPodderX, and see how easy things suddenly become.

As regard the length of the show, from the figures above you'll see that that is also not atypical - although there are of course plenty of shorter podcasts around. My intention is that an "average" Signal podcast should be around 40-45 minutes long, with some longer and some shorter. If you think I'm wrong, and that The Signal should be shorter than this, please tell me why, and what other shows you are comparing it with.

So that's the story. We've speeded up the download as much as we're going to. Now it's up to you. If you really like the show, get into podcatching.

[Companion Kate]

[Companion Kate]

[gt0163c]

I just finished listening to the podcast.
Very good overall.

Hopefully the download issues are fixed (it took a few minutes on my super fast whatever connection at work).

Some comments on what would make it better.

Airing video in an audio format. Ya know, that always kinda bothers me. Yeah, it was kinda cool to just hear the trailer, but if I hadn't seen it (many, many times), I would have been completely lost. Cause, ya know, no pictures to go along with it. In the future, I would avoid airing the audio of video clips that don't contain a lot of dialogue. Those of us who have seen the series (again, many, many times) would find it cool and all that because we know the scenes. But, for newbies, yeah, not so much.

Fewer examples. When listing all the different sci-fi shows and ships and such for comparison, I got the idea after the first one or two. Listing three of four more get redundant.

Incorrect facts. For the original US prescreening (5 May), there was not one cast member at each screening. I believe the cast members travelled in pairs (Nathan and Ron were in Austin. Alan and Gina were together, I think in the northwest somewhere. Jewel couldn't make it due to a scheduling conflict.). I think the original idea, based on Joss's original email about the screenings was for one cast member at each screening, but it didn't work out that way. There's a list of what cast members were where for the 5/5 screening either on www.fireflyfans.net or the Universal board. I don't remember which. Not a huge deal, but incorrect facts like that always bother me.

I think that's it. I look forward to enjoying more episodes.

[Companion Kate]

Thanks for the feedback, gt0163c.

Regarding the incorrect information - thank you very much for the correction, and I promise we will definitely put the record straight in the next show. May we read out the relevant extract from your post?

We expect to have red faces from time to time. Just didn't think it would happen so soon!

[Companion Kate]

[jeremy]

[gt0163c]

[Guest]

[anne_in_az]

The Chinese section and the music section are awesome!!

PS That's me above, I forgot to log in.
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"Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony..."

[Guest]

[kbachelder]

Duh...sorry forgot to login before I posted the message above.


Kevin

[sandyg]

Loved it! No technical comments, I'm afraid...but I really liked the host, loved the Chinese lesson, and enjoyed the quotes sprinkled through the broadcast. Made me want to watch the DVDs again...they never get old, do they? Keep seeing new layers! Can't wait for September, but have to say this site and the new podcast are helping!