The innerwebz are crowded with news of a huge virus spreading on Apple systems. Many non-Apple fanboys are feeling victorious. It seems like no one has taken the time to mention that the virus gets on your computer by installing an illegal/pirated copy of Apple software, iWork 09. It doesn’t sneak in through email or through hacking. You get the virus because you tried to “save” some money, or dare I say, steal something.

The virus’s only means of getting into OS X is through a willing, albeit careless, install.

Is that really Apple’s fault?

Your thoughts?

Here is the intro video we are using to introduce the sermon in our current series. The series is called “Get In The Game” and it deals with our philosophy of ministry at SSCC and how we want our church body to walk it out. The main themes from the series are serving, living in community (small groups) and seeing lives changed by Christ. The messages so far have been great, head over to SSCC and pick up the podcast if you haven’t heard them. Everything for this series was designed around a ESPN Sportcenter concept. Our stage set has a Sportcenter news desk look, along with bleachers & goal posts framing our video screens. All of our staff and volunteers have been encouraged to come dressed in attire supporting their favorite teams. (Go Dogs.)

Back to the project. This is one of those deals that I am proud of but at the same time, I can QUICKLY identify things I would do differently across the board. I was limited with time to get good video footage for one thing. On the design end of things, again, if we had time, we could have created more layers and individual elements in the graphics and added more variety. But hey, we just aren’t in a place right now at SSCC where that kind of time is available. All the graphics for this series were designed in house, mostly by Chris. He designed the “title graphic” for this series first, this is the image that the video ends on. Everything else we have done has been based on that initial graphic. In the previous link you can see three images we have used.

The video is a combination of work from Photoshop, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro and After Effects. We took Chris’s graphics from Photoshop and Illustrator, video footage captured & edited in Final Cut and composited everything in After Effects. The BG music was thrown together by Fred even though I asked for it late. He got it in on his way out of town for vacation.

Again, I have to say that we are proud of the overall project. It took a lot of planning and coordination between people and applications. That being said. It is immediately apparant that there is much more we could have done to make it more professional looking. However, I have to regularly remind myself that our goal is not professionalism. Our goal is to effectively create environments where people can encounter Christ. I do believe the video did a good job of setting up our messages. Especially when seen in the context of the stage set and other elements around the building.

Here is the intro:

This second video is a loop that runs continuoulsy on two plasma screen TVs as a part of our set on stage:

What do ya’ think?

Thanks to my work, I got to be an early adopter of Leopard (AKA: OS X 10.5), Apple’s new state of the art, benchmark setting operating system. And let me tell you, it is pretty impressive. Everything I have done is faster than before, which is nice, as many ‘other’ operating system upgrades use more of your computers resources than before and slow things down a bit. I have already tested After Effects & Photoshop in Leopard and both ran smoothly after my archive & install. (Interesting in itself b/c according to Applecare, I would have to reinstall most third party software.) Why did I talk to Applecare you ask? That leads to the first three hours, where my screen looked like this after my upgrade installation.It was nothing 30 minutes on hold with Applecare couldn’t fix though. A simple reboot to the DVD and ‘disk repair’ verified that the MacBook Pro was fine and that it was indeed the ‘netinfo manager’ that had been corrupted during install. This is the database file that brings you your login screen (or something like that), which, as you can see in the picture, I didn’t quite ever make it to. Apparently, I was not the only guy in the States with this issue yesterday, Google “leopard blue screen install,” go ahead, haha. Also, an after hours call to Applecare revealed that they staffed it heavily after hours for tech support choice 1 on the phone: Leopard. To my dismay, Jared (my Applecare guy, not the Subway guy) recommended an archive & install to skirt the issue. The dismay part was because I was told that I would have to reinstall my third party apps. I don’t know about you, but installing Adobe CS3 Extended, After Effects CS3, Microsoft Office and everything else does not make for a happy day at the office, not to mention that it would take most of the day. I am pleased to report that so far, every App that I have tried to open has worked, including CS3 and Office, with no reinstalls or updating or anything. They were right on the dock were I left them. Maybe this post will help someone els skirt the problem, if they have the ability to get on another computer when theirs locks down, haha. Or maybe they will read it first here, since this is one of the hottest blogs on the web.Anyone else have any interesting update experiences.

-Travis