SUPER CHARGED SUPERPOWERS

I’ve been accused of liking predictability, and I have to admit when it comes to technology and production, it’s true. I like tech to act the way I expect it’s going to act. So when I was getting this recent episode of Superpowers ready to stream, I was definitely disheartened when audio gremlins showed up on the tracks that were not present during recording. They weren’t castastrophic by any means, but they were present and worse – they were unexpected. The track sounded fine during the recording, and now it had noise.

I told myself the interview is great, and people would be engaged by the stories being told and they wouldn’t care the audio track was imperfect. So I pushed on with the processing, and started to transcode the video file.  An hour at high quality for a 720 video can take two hours.  As I watched this video process, and the computer estimate the time to complete it at eight hours, I was blindsided again.  I didn’t have eight hours. I had four hours. How could it take eight hours to process a 60 minute video?  I stopped and restarted it a couple of times, still the same time estimate – eight hours.

I finally stopped the processing, split the file, copied the pieces to another drive, and set up a second computer to process half of the video, with the original computer crunching the other half.

As they processed, it became clear the video wasn’t going to be finished and ready to stream by the scheduled time.  I was going to have to push the start time for the stream.  I moved the start time ahead three and a half hours, so now I had seven and a half hours for two computers to crunch out 30 minutes each of an hour long video.  I didn’t like that it was unpredictable, but I felt confident everything would be ready in time.

Seven hours later things were still processing.  I couldn’t wrap my brain around what was going on. When they finally finished, and I had copied them to a drive, and then connected them to my Tricaster, I was 25 minutes past the adjusted start time.  There was nothing to do but show the episode, so I did.

Late, and with imperfect audio, I was disappointed as I watched, wishing the production side had turned out better and was more supportive of the great job I thought Debra was doing sharing the events that were milestones in the unfolding of her Superpowers.

When it ended was when I realized that we had, in fact, entered The Twilight Zone.  I got a comment on the Streaming for the Soul FB page telling me about weird things that happened as they were watching the stream.  The electricity went out in just the part of their house where their computer was, along with the Internet.  The desk light by the computer had been flickering for a while.  The person viewing the stream finally got up and went outside, and noticed the outside lights were unaffected.  When they came back inside, the video was over, and the lights were all back on.  They thought it was unusual.  As I read their comment, I honestly didn’t think it was as weird as my post production experience, but then a couple of other emails arrived, one to Debra, asking if we had been responsible for the flickering lights?  And I got another one saying their lights in their house were flickering and the flickering was synchronized with the flickering of the lights in the video.  This was an extremely unusual comment because neither Debra nor I had lights on in the video.

Debra and I came to the conclusion that spirit had decided to make it’s presence known, and they had a lot of fun doing it during this Superpowers episode, a presence that was not only running through the video, but was clearly generating a field of energy that was being experienced in different ways by viewers watching the video.

Is it life changing energy?  I don’t know.  I do know it’s the most unusual experience I’ve yet had with an episode of Superpowers, and it’s probably well worth taking an hour, kicking back, and seeing how the video’s field of energy flows into your life.