Media Experience & Interests

Dan really, really enjoys having the opportunity to invest in telling a good story. He would not tell you he's a gifted "storyteller" - he feels that's for others to decide - and he's happy to let people he knows are gifted run with a story in partnership. What he cares about most is that the story actually gets told, and that it gets told well. 

Stories MATTER. Dan is convinced that the story tellers will be a big part of shaping the decades to come, and he plans to be one of them. The kinds of stories he seeks to tell are stories based in truth. Whether portrayed through fiction or through story retelling, it's the essence of truth coming through a story that matters so much to Dan.

Good stories should leave you with thoughts, ponderances, and conclusions... hopefully truthful conclusions. 

Good stories should impact you in some way, and hopefully in profound way.

Good stories can stir you to action - whether internal or external in nature.

Good stories should allow you to see a perspective you could not see on your own, and in that perspective inform you with truth.

Good stories should be engaging - whether from a cinematic or informational viewpoint they should engage you in the story.

One thing that makes Dan different from many others is that he's both a great communicator and a great technologist: He's able to take abstract concepts and put language around them. He's able to take deeply technical jargon and communicate the essence to someone completely outside of that discipline. He can think like an engineer while also thinking like a writer. 

Beyond the technology realm, Dan is also a man of faith and is deeply spiritual. He's used media for many things in the spiritual genre to date, and this area of storytelling is one he longs to really focus more time on, and he has several ideas for projects that he's looking for willing partners to collaborate on. (Dan doesn't like the genre name "Religion", by the way... it has connotations he does not agree with. He prefers "Faith" or "Spirituality" to label the genre that encompasses faith beliefs.)

If you need help putting your message into language to tell a story, then contact Dan... if it's a good match perhaps you can tell a story with him.

While storytelling is a joy for Dan, he also values and pursues documentary-style efforts... telling a message through a recounting of real events. Dan has done some short video works in this space, and he hopes to eventually do more.

Dan has used media to inform or teach. This can look similar to the end result of a documentary, but is more casually presented. 

This has been one of his primary uses of media to date simply because of demand. He's done his own projects in this space, but he's also helped to capture several teaching projects of others and publish them for consumption.

Out of necessity Dan ventured into the deep world of video and video editing. He's gained experience in Davinci Resolve because it is free to use, although he since has purchased Resolve Studio for its added benefits. 

Being honest, Dan will tell you that video editing is somewhat fun but is not the thing Dan ultimately longs to do because video editing is a means to an end for him. Ideally, Dan hopes to find some editors to outsource work to so that he can focus on storytelling and production aspects of media. That said, Dan is capable with the media, cut, edit, fairlight, and deliver screens and he's in the process of learning to do more in the fusion and color screens of Davinci Resolve. He has done some color grading and has purchased a course to learn to do that with more excellence and efficiency. 

Dan is actively learning the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite (having just acquired a Creative Cloud license!) His first project was an intro clip for two teaching videos he just made, and he built the intro clip using After Effects. He's picking up Adobe Premier, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and probably more after that. While the interfaces are completely different, his Resolve experience and Paint.net experience have helped him get going more quickly than if it was a fresh jump into video and photo editing.

In terms of videography equipment, Dan longs to be able to acquire some really good network-controllable 4K recording devices with good zoom lengths, but for now he mostly uses GoPros and phones to capture video. He's become moderately familiar with tripods and lighting and such as well - being that it is a necessity to understand for decent video capture in many circumstances. 

On a related note, Dan learned that bad audio may ruin a video, so he's built up some skills in audio over the past few years with a goal of capturing clean audio as much as possible! (See below for more info.)

IMPORTANT LESSON: if your audio is terrible, then forget about the video!

Dan learned early on that audio quality is critical to the success of a multimedia project unless you plan to entirely use effects, external narration, or music to tell the story... but then it's important to get those things right!

Thus, Dan has learned some audio things yet would not call himself an audio engineer. He's experimented with different microphones. He's done touch-up and correction in software. He's cut and spliced and overlaid digital audio. In essence, he learns as he goes. What Dan has learned to date is primarily to either capture and produce quality video, to facilitate good audio reproduction in online meetings and streaming, and to create and mix digital audio for various uses.

Software tools he uses frequently include Audacity, Davinci Resolve Fairlight, and Virtual Cable.

Dan is pretty good at capturing photos, but by no means is he a professional photographer. He fully understands the difference between a good picture and a bad picture, though. When he's with people he often gets asked to take the pictures, and that tells you something!

In the realm of photography Dan has not learned in any depth about DSLR or mirrorless still cameras, though on auto settings he can use them without issue. He mostly takes photos with the iPhone which works well (as long as you're close enough, of course).

For photo editing Dan uses Paint.net. Sure, it's not Adobe Photoshop... but it's pretty darned good and it's free!

Like many others since 2020, Dan has learned to do green screening to remove the background. He's learned to do it not only with Zoom (which seemed to have one of the best background removal engines for a couple of years), but through Nvidia Broadcast as well. He uses Nvidia Broadcast almost exclusively now as he has found it does a better job than Zoom in most cases.  He's tried to do green screening directly in OBS and vMix, but honestly those routes have not worked very effectively for him. A good Nvidia graphics card and Nvidia Broadcast seems to be the best way to go.

Wondering about XSplit? 

Dan heard that it may have a good green screen capability, but he has not used it for a very specific reason... reach out to him if you want to know why. It's probably great, but Dan isn't comfortable about using it at this point.

Dan's a pretty good writer... not by his own admission but by the declaration of others who have asked him to write more. Enough said.

If your need is for an excellent communicator, Dan may well be your guy. Reach out!

By no means a lighting expert, Dan's seen enough success and failure to know that lighting and good color are super important. To that end, Dan has purchased a lighting course to complete at some time in the future, and he's learned by experimentation some things about lighting. He also has learned to do some color grading in Davinci Resolve to try to minimize differences in lighting between different cameras and camera angles.

In terms of video effects, Dan has been learning to use various effects in Davinci Resolve Studio. 

In terms of photography effects, Dan primarily uses Paint.net and its built-in library of effects.

Okay... most of the western world had to jump into at least the "meeting" side of streaming pretty quickly in 2020. Dan had already been conducting online meetings, but he had to ramp up on that as well. Given his overall interest in media he began digging into the challenges of doing online meetings and interviews with various tools and online platforms. What Dan wanted to do is more than what most people wanted to do - he wanted to be able to stream to meetings in the same way he would stream to YouTube or Facebook, etc. So...

Dan learned to use vMix first, and then OBS. He eventually settled on OBS for the majority of his needs because it easily plugs into Zoom and other meeting applications with its "virtual camera" feature. That said, he learned to do some really fun stuff with vMix and would go back to vMix for multi-platform streaming needs (such as streaming live simultaneously to Facebook and YouTube, or Facebook and Twitch, etc.) In fact, he'd probably use OBS and its virtual camera feature in conjunction with vMix to do now what he had fumbled his way through doing with just vMix previously.

In terms of livestreaming, Dan has used Facebook and YouTube RTMP streaming many times. He's aware of the plethora of online services to do the same and hasn't used those services yet, but if you have a need for him to help you with those he could learn them quite easily.

Now to get really raw: there ARE a few things Dan hasn't mastered that he really wants to master but hasn't done so because of the time involved and the complexity of the problem... it's really the engineer side of Dan that results in his wanting to crack these hard problems. One example is using vMix - possibly in conjunction with OBS Studio - to overlay effects on a live Zoom meeting that Dan is also participating in. It's not really a problem to do this on a zoom he's not participating in, but to do it on a Zoom he is participating in complicates things a bit. He did this successfully before using vMix alone and two separate systems, but it required detailed attention to certain details to prevent audio loops and such. He thinks it could be easier to do using vMix and OBS together, or vMix with a remote NDI session from another system to capture the Zoom view of other participants... We'll see if he gets the time or inclination to figure that one out.

Dan is familiar with social media and uses it for media messaging. Messaging (getting the message out) is his passion, not the social media platform or the user interactions that occur on it. If you're looking for a social media expert or someone to be the lead on responding to people on social media, then Dan is probably not the right person for you. If you're a "messenger" or you are looking for basic guidance on use of social media for your own messaging and media distribution, then Dan can probably help get you to the next level.