Our October meeting took place in our NEW meeting location - The Birmingham Temple. Judi Freund - Executive Director of the Birmingham Temple greeted us with open arms and great enthusiasm. It's nice to be wanted! Terry took us through the typical workflow of using Apple's DVD Studio Pro 4 to have complete control over the DVD authoring process. He started off by showing last month's meeting video in Final Cut Pro 5. Then he walked us through the process of using Apple's Compressor app (which is included with DVD Studio Pro) to convert the video to MPEG2 format and the audio to Dolby AC3 format. Then Terry moved into DVD Studio Pro to assemble the video and audio with menus. Using a layered Photoshop CS2 file Terry built a custom static menu. Then he took that same Photoshop file and took it into Adobe After Effects 6.5 to animate it. Once the animation was complete he then imported the QuickTime movie into DVD Studio Pro and used it as a "first play" track that seemlessly morphed into the static menu created earlier. It's just like the big guys do in Hollywood.

The Birmingham Temple was well received by the members in attendance. Several commented on how much cozier it was than the library. The afterglow took place at Ginopolis Grill on Middlebelt. The food was yummy. However, the seating arrangement wasn't the best. As always feel free to suggest afterglow spots. Keep in mind that we get anywhere from 10-25 people and separate checks is always a plus. Also long time member Christopher Trey made a suprise return. He is doing well and still building a library of sotware boxes to impress his friends.

Wi-Fi at the Meeting

We have our own DSL line at the Birmingham Temple. Unfortunately the equipment is located on the other side of the wall (about 1 foot of brick) in a shed. Although I was concerned that the signal strength might not be good enough, it appeared that everyone that wanted to connect was able to in various parts of the room.

Sending emails during the meeting

Although we have Wi-Fi internet, it is through SBC and by default SBC now blocks port 25 (which is the standard port for sending email by your email app). If you have an SBC Yahoo email account then of course you can send email by using your login name and password in your email client. However, if you're on a different email system you'll either have to wait til you get home, or use the webmail provided by your ISP. You can usually login to your ISP's website and send mail that way. If you're on .Mac, you can configure Mail to use Port 587 and smtp server smtp.mac.com. And of course you can just use the .Mac page to send email without having to change your email client. If you have mail through MacGroup, you can use http://mail.macgroup.org to send/receive mail during the meeting.

Special Thanks

I would like to thank the meeting volunteers that helped out at our last meeting. Especially Shirley Kussner (who stands during the entire meeting operating the camera), the Grey's and the Stones for working the registration table as well as Elaine and Loretta. Also the Genius Table folks: Bill, Phyllis and Jack. Lastly Calvin for pitching in whereever needed, Joseph Grey for taking photos and Leonard for creating the new donation form.

Watch the last meeting via QuickTime Streaming

If you missed the last meeting you can watch it via QuickTime streaming here.

Next Meeting November 20, 2005 - Main Meeting Topic - Creating Databases with FileMaker Pro 8.