Reading Recap

Well, Limpy is coming back to make things a little easier as a comic strip/children’s book this Fall. I’ve been working with an artist from Ukraine to bring Limpy back to life and once again unite the town like only a turkey pecking tires could. Limpy’s Adventures will be featured on my new website, www.ReadingRecap.com that I started last year, which will officially be live for the Fall Street Faire. I’ll have stickers and stuff for the kids and parents at a booth there as well.

The new site aims at combining everything Reading into one central spot. From PTO fundraisers (Did you know Parker has a Cupcake City fundraiser next month?), events, meeting recaps, local businesses, original videos etc. There’s even a downtown Haven train depot live camera feed. Anything Reading for anyone not simply on Facebook. If you’d like to help with any content (even if it’s you simply taking a walk in the town forest and narrating a trail) or do some meeting recaps, please let me know. I already have some help but welcome anyone’s assistance.

When we started this site a couple months ago, I had a great idea for an original video series. I would drone the Friday night home Rockets football games this season at Reading Memorial High School, and name the series Friday Night Super Lights. A different kind of view than everyone was used to seeing. That was the easy part. What transpired in getting that accomplished was a far greater task than I anticipated.

I started off by looking on YouTube for anyone else making High School football drone videos. Surprisingly, there were very few. The handful of videos that I found, that lasted longer than 20min, had the drone all over the place and were distracting. The most glaring issue was none, yes none of them had audio. Which makes sense when your drone can’t record audio. Content wise, you can always dub over some music or background noise but why didn’t anyone think to just record the audio separately? That’s a big part of going to the game itself. After coming up empty on my research, I began planning what would get the job done.

Then came editing. We ended up with close to 200GB of 4k footage, split between 50 files since the max recording is 4GB per clip. Stitching them all together was easy, syncing the audio was the biggest headache to get right. Because we had to fly down to swap batteries, the separate audio from the game was still recording, thus it created gaps that needed to be aligned across all the files. All in all, from importing, editing, exporting and uploading, it took a solid day’s worth of time to get right. It didn’t help that after it was all done, I pivoted into wanting the live score shown throughout the game like we were working with ESPN’s budget. The result was worth it though.

For the future, we plan on recording the band/half time show now that we have the timing down. We know when we should start to fly up to conserve battery at the start of the game, when the 3rd quarter actually starts compared to when the team gets on the field etc.

In closing, I’d like to thank everyone who walked past us those two weeks on Birch Meadow Drive and commented on how cool the video feed on the controller was and how much they loved the prior drone stadium video. Reading has the most incredible community and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Thank you much.