Stories of ThinkTech

MOVING UP ON OUR ENTR’ACTE Have you checked out our entr’acte?   We broadcast our entr’acte between the talk shows we stream on our Live to Playlist system, and it is on a special LTP playlist that plays through every day and night. Wondering what an entr’acte is?  It’s French, Entr'acte  (or  entracte , or German:  Zwischenspiel  or  Zwischenakt , or Italian:  intermezzo , or Spanish:  intermedio, intervalo or sainete ) means "between the acts". A pause between two parts of a production, synonymous to an  intermission , and often includes music performed between the acts of a production to bridge the dramatic action and make a transition from one act to the next. For ThinkTech, the entr’acte fills the gap between talk shows and it can therefore be up to 30 minutes long.   It includes public service announcements, commentaries, break music and a potpourri of selected clips. If you have any ideas for commentaries or or othe...

LTP GIVES US NEW POSSIBILITIES      As you know from previous blog postings, ThinkTech has deployed its new Live to Playlist system to achieve higher production values, more punctual start times, and to provide hosts and guests the chance to see and learn from watching their talk shows on the airdate after their production date. Shows produced on Mondays are aired on Tuesdays and so on through the week.  But there's something else.  LTP gives us the opportunity to populate our Sunday and Monday Playlists with special focused collections of videos, and we intend to do just that. The first thought was to air our weekly Top Five and Staff Pick shows, which are selected on Sundays, on the LTP playlist for Monday.  That way, our Top Five and Staff Pick winners and our viewership in general can see and celebrate the Top Five and Staff Pick shows through the broadcast day on Mondays.   But a Sunday Playlist offers new opportunities, too. There are many g...

SOFTWARE FOR THE LIVE TO PLAYLIST TRANSITION We've been working on the Filemaker Claris software routines and scripts that will allow Hayley, our Production Manager, to automatically post and schedule our talk show events not only on our Google Production Calendar, as has been the case in the past, but also to our new LTP Google Airdate Calendar. As we described in our Special Bulletin on the subject, the air dates will now presumptively be on the next day after the production dates; for example, if the show is produced on a Monday, the air date will be the Tuesday immediately following, at the same time.  With the help of our coding expert, we've been able to write the routines necessary to handle these changes, and our LTP system is ready for primetime.   The email messages to hosts and guests will go out, as before, asking them for the show information about their shows, advising them of the production details and dates for their shows, and sending them the Zoom links ...

  ANNOUNCING LIVE TO PLAYLIST Never a dull moment when it's better every day.  Our ThinkTech staff, and especially our newly-appointed Studio Manager Michael Pangilinan (congratulations, Michael!) have been working on a new system by which our live shows will be packaged, posted and then played on our playlist software the following day.   So, shows produced on Monday will be on a playlist for Tuesday, and so on through the week.  Although most of the shows will not be streamed live under this system, we will have the time to improve the video and audio, start time and length for each of them before they are streamed.  As a result, our production values will be better for the shows posted to social media and then streamed on the next day playlist.  This will allow us to schedule the exact time of play for all the shows on the playlist, including the live shows from the day before, the encore shows we use to fill pukas in our production schedule, the sh...

LINKS POSTED FOR WHO'S RUNNING FOR LG; EVALUATING THE MAJOR CANDIDATES The Lieutenant Governor webinar program went off very well today.  It featured Louise Ing (photo at left) as moderator and the four invited candidates (Democrats Keith Amemiya, Ikaika Anderson, Sylvia Luke and Sherry Menor-McNamara) who appeared, answered questions and presented their positions.   They all looked and sounded great in the production, and it is absolutely worth watching for their comments.  We have uploaded the video of this webinar to YouTube and Vimeo, and here are the links:   https://youtu.be/qzV3dLwxMAk https://vimeo.com/726223845  These are available to the public on demand so feel free to click on them and watch the program.   We have also scheduled a replay of the webinar on thinktechhawaii.com at 10:00 am next Friday July 8th.   And we will submit the video to Olelo 54 to be played as a special broadcast and post the links on our social media...