After months of waiting (in fact it must be a good year since we first heard mutterings) the first Babylon 5: The Lost Tales DVD has arrived in Europe! B5 has been absent for far too long, it’s good to return there, like returning home after years away. It’s not all quite the same since I left but it’s still home…

Don’t worry, there won’t be any real spoilers in here. No doubt we’ll do a proper review in an upcoming podcast (hmm, it certainly won’t be podcast 5, we’ve just recorded that. Podcast 6 is planned, it won’t be that one. Podcast 7 is the Dalek Special (long story for another time!), so it’s not going to be that, either. Podcast 8 then, maybe! That will probably be mid-November, so you’ve certainly got time to watch this before then!)

The disc box art (as you can probably see on the right) claims this is ‘An Original Movie’. That’s not strictly true. It is certainly original, all new footage. It’s not so much a movie, though. It’s more two separate episodes, the first of which chronologically leads into the second but otherwise is completely unrelated. The box art gives away the main players in the two stories – sorry to spoil you with an image of that but you didn’t expect to be able to buy this DVD without seeing the box, did you?!

The two stories are, somewhat curiously, called ‘Over Here’ and ‘Over There’. On the DVD main menu you have the option of watching both (effectively a ‘Play All’ option) by choosing the first option ‘Voices in the Dark’. Alternatively you can select one of the episodes below it. That confused me at first, I chose that first option but the opening credits initially made me think I’d accidentally selected some bonus material! Don’t be fooled first time – that really is the opening credits. Presumably those opening credits will be retained for any future Lost Tales DVDs. It’s basically pictures of the characters from Babylon 5, taken at the time of the original series. They also include Doctor Franklin and G’Kar, who we will clearly, sadly, never see in The Lost Tales (given both Richard Biggs and Andreas Katsulas have died and JMS says he will never recast those roles). It’s a nice montage of the original characters, though a few have been left out (perhaps most notably Ivanova and Lyta). When I’d finished watching the two episodes I went back to the beginning to watch the opening credits again, now knowing for sure that’s what they were! It starts with that music, the caption 2281 and the destruction of B5 :cry:. The years then cycle back to tell you when the stories are actually set, i.e. some years before Sleeping in Light – just in case people are confused by B5 still being around! That short little sequence was enough to make me immediately dig out my B5 Season 5 box set and watch Sleeping in Light – something I’ve only done a couple of times since watching it on TV.

The picture quality of Voices in the Dark is excellent. Going back and watching Sleeping in Light straight after really made it apparent just how much better this new DVD image quality is over the series box sets, even the last one. The Lost Tales are being filmed in High Def, so we can be sure to see a HD release of this at some point, in one format or other. We also get full 5.1 audio on this DVD, another win over the Dolby Pro Logic of the original series. All in all it looks and sounds nice. All the familiar ships are there. Babylon 5 looks like the Babylon 5 we all know. They’ve upped the polygons, improved the textures but without direct comparison you might think nothing has changed – memory cheats, this is B5 how you always thought it looked! Perhaps B5 itself was a tad too blue now, a little too shiny maybe, but it looks good. A lot of CGI sets are being used here but nothing new there, they were doing that in the mid 90s in B5, too. Yes, you can still tell it’s CGI in most places but then you can in the likes of the new Doctor Who, too. These aren’t blockbuster film bugets we’re talking about here (and even in some of those you can still tell). Overall a very effective audio visual experience.

The sets are few in number and the number of actors are limited too. There’s no B5 C & C, no Zocalo, no central corridor full of humans and aliens. You hardly notice their absence, though. Crucially, it still feels like B5, even without these. The two stories are written with these limitations in mind. They are both quite personal stories, both effectively dealing with three people. The first is the Lochley story and that is very JMS! Lots of questions and leaving it up to the viewer to bring their own answers into it, their own beliefs. The second is a somewhat more conventional story that revolves around Sheridan and Galen. Sheridan’s morality is tested. Dark things lay ahead if he takes the wrong path.  There is no doubt this is B5!
Neither are stunning episodes in the way that Coming of Shadows, Z’ha’dum, Severed Dreams and the like were. That’s not the point of this B5 anthology series, though. The main B5 story arc is said and done. It was a five year arc. That story didn’t start with the B5 pilot episode though, there is a rich history/back story that informs the series. Likewise it didn’t completely end with Objects at Rest (or Sleeping in Light, for that matter, though I think the anthology series will all be set before that). The events in the B5 5 year arc resonate for, well, millenia – as we saw in The Deconstruction of Falling Stars. This series is a peek at the lives of our characters after those monumentous series events. Nonetheless, you can’t help but get the feeling JMS is already setting us up for a story arc after watching Over There. Sales of this new DVD will determine if he has a chance to explore that new arc further in other Lost Tales discs.

Personally, again without giving anything away at this stage, I really enjoyed them. Yes, they are basically character pieces. Anyone expecting great space battles, the telepath war or a major piece of information that puts the entire series in a new light will be a bit disappointed. That was inevitable. Some of these may come. There are hints about making a DVD of the telepath war a few discs in. If budgets grow, who knows what we might see. If you enjoy the way JMS thinks, then you’ll like this new disc. If you miss B5 then you’ll almost certainly like this disc. If Galen makes you laugh then you’re certainly like this disc! The cast in general do a great job, especially Boxleitner and Woodward – you can tell they are enjoying being back!

The extras are pretty good, too. Sadly no commentary. A fair bit of behind the scenes bits, including short interviews with the three primary cast members and JMS. JMS answers a lot of questions about the production and even shows us his original concept for The Lost Tales – sadly rejected by Warner Brothers! There’s also quite a moving memorial to Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs, whose characters are also mentioned specifically in the story.

All in all it’s quite a gentle start back into the B5 universe. It’s great to be back there again and I recommend it to all B5 fans, especially at the good price of £8.99 you can easily find it for online. There was always two sides to B5 – the epic and the personal. This disc distinctly goes down the personal story route but with temptations into the epic, if we are lucky enough to be able to continue this journey.

Those that cannot figure out how to even set the category of their posts shall not be allowed to make rules!

Just a quick entry to announce that Staggering Stories (or, at least, the domain name) will be around for at least another 10 years!

Up until now I’ve only ever been able to renew the domain for 1 or 2 years at a time. Now, thanks to our new hosting company, Bytemark Hosting, I had the option to go all the way up to 10! And I did.

Of course in 10 years time I might have forgotten the renewal date is coming up, perhaps even forgotten how to do domain renewals! That’s a problem for a different decade, though. Unfortunately the maximum registration period for .co.uk names is still 2 years – so I’ll have to renew my own domain name a further 4 times in the intervening period. Perhaps I won’t forget how to do it, after all…

Who knows, perhaps by the time I next renew StaggeringStories.net I might even have gotten around to doing that major face lift I keep meaning to do..!

A couple of months ago I was desperately trying to figure out how to make a quality (in a technical sense) podcast. There was a lot to discover and I couldn’t find a single place with all the information I needed. This is me trying to rectify that situation. Here’s how our Podcasting setup is built.

We are, perhaps, slightly unusual in that we always wanted to record each of us as a separate audio track, even though we are all in the same room together. That’s where our real problems began. The vast majority of audio recording programs can only deal with one (albeit 2 channel, aka stereo) input. With such software and appropriate hardware mixing of microphones we could, in theory, handle two mic inputs (one on the ‘left’ channel and one on the ‘right’). We had three to deal with. Add to that the fact that all normal consumer sound cards only have a single two channel (yes, stereo – though I’m coming to dislike that term) input, then clearly we had some problems.

The obvious answer, the cheap answer, was to simply use more than one computer to do the recording. Sounded like a good idea at the time and that’s exactly how we did the first podcast. Turned out to be more trouble that it was worth…

The First Podcast Setup

Three computers. Three headsets with microphones, going directly into the standard sound cards via 3.5mm jacks. Three copies of Audacity recording at once (one per machine, of course).

Not only did we have three computers recording at once but each was actually running a different operating system! We had an old PowerPC based Mac Mini running OS X, my old Dell laptop running Linux (Fedora Core 5, I think) and a desktop Athlon XP self built machine running Windows XP. The desktop machine has a decent SoundBlaster Live card – old but still a decent signal to noise ratio for a consumer grade audio card of its time. For the Mac Mini (which don’t have audio input built in) I went out and bought a Griffin iMic, basically a USB soundcard – again, pretty decent signal/noise ratio, thanks in large part to it not being inside the electrically noisy inards of a computer. The Dell laptop had a crumby onboard ‘soundcard’ that doesn’t give a particularly great headphone output let alone a decent mic input. Needs must, though.

This setup worked, just! The two major problems were 1) the microphones, particularly on the cheap Plantronics headsets I bought specially (they claimed to be ideal for voice chat), gave very poor results and 2) each computer had a subtly different understanding of what 44.1Khz was. In other words, it sounded pretty poor and the three channels gradually drifted out of sync during the recording session.

Obviously the cause of the drift was the fact that each computer was using a different quartz crystal and it is highly unlikely any of them are accurate enough to keep time so perfectly to hit 44,100ths of a second, let alone the chances of all three matching in their inaccuracy. This is made all the worse by the fact that each microphone picked the other two talkers, though quietly. The more out of sync it became the worse the ‘echo’ of the other two talking sounded. Clearly the idea of having three separate machines recording was not such a good one.

The advantage of setup one was cost. All I had to buy was the Griffin iMic2 (about £35) and two extra headsets (Tony was bringing his own)(about £15 each). So, probably little change from £70. That’s not too bad at all. Sadly it wasn’t good enough for us, or my perfectionist nature in such things, at least.

The Second Podcast Setup

Here’s where we are today. It sounds so incredibly better you’d almost think we’d become professionals overnight!

The first priority was to get a soundcard that could handle input from three, preferably four, microphones at once. One priority for me was for it to be supported under Linux. Through Internet research I quickly came up with a decent sounding card – an M-Audio Delta 44. This has 4 inputs and 4 outputs. It is a PCI card, that ruled out the Dell laptop and the Mac Mini (thank goodness – for some reason the Mac Mini appeared to have trouble with the first recording – various 10 second segments of Andy’s recording were lost somewhere along the way from this machine. That was bad but made even worse by the fact these segments weren’t replaced with silence but were simply gone, i.e. 10 seconds of missing time on Andy’s track. That didn’t help the synchronisation issues!) That only left my desktop machine.

So, new soundcard. Semi-professional multi-track soundcard. Unfortunately Audacity doesn’t support recording multi-track. I needed something that did. That led to a fantastically complicated piece of software called Ardour. This is another Open Source project, this one definitely with the professional audio technician in mind. I won’t get into all the complexities of Ardour, and the JACK Audio Connection Kit (that’s a recursive acronym) it relies on, under Linux. Suffice it to say it took considerable time even to figure out how to get a basic recording going! An incredibly powerful piece of software that will work fantastically for your more complex podcasting requirements.

New soundcard, new software. Microphones. My initial idea was to keep the headset mics, at least for a couple of months while I recover from the expense of the soundcard and a new hard disk drive for the computer (to install Ubuntu Studio, that comes with Ardour and JACK out of (in?) the box – far too complicated to attempt to install it myself under my normal Fedora setup). The sync problems should be a thing of the past and even these rubbish mics should sound a little better with this semi-pro soundcard. Sadly it wasn’t to be that easy.

The Delta 44 accepted line-level input. I should, perhaps, explain. I didn’t understand this myself back then, so hopefully this might help someone else. On many consumer soundcards, you have the option of either mic level or line level input. Sometimes these have separate 3.5mm jacks or sometimes it is one jack and a software checkbox somewhere to set the input as one or other. What does this mean? Microphones, as a rule, output very low level signals – to compensate the mic level input has a little pre-amplifier circuit that boosts the levels. Generally these amplifiers are pretty rubbish, at least on your bog standard onboard soundcards, and add a great deal of noise to the signal. That’s what the line level is for – you have a better amplifier (or a sound source that doesn’t require amplification, pretty much anything other than a mic) outside the computer. In other words the line level input expects a loud solid signal and doesn’t mess with it, whereas a mic level input increases the volume for you at the expense of quality. You can see where this is going, can’t you? Yes, a semi-pro card like the Delta 44 wouldn’t be seen dead with a consumer type connection like a mic level input. It will not amplify a microphone to a usable level for you. When I attempted to record a mic connected directly to the Delta 44 all I got was silence.

Silence doesn’t generally make for a good podcast and we’d probably be sued by John Cage’s estate for copying his controversial 4’33”! That’s when I realised I needed to dig out a little mixing desk we bought a couple of years back and give that a try. That didn’t work either, at least not with the headset mics. Then I dug further and pulled out the semi-pro microphone we bought at the same time as the mixing desk. Suddenly we had life! What was the difference?! A microphone’s a microphone, isn’t it?

This ‘semi-pro’ microphone is Shure PG-58. This is the sort of microphone people think about when they think of stand up comics or lead vocalists in popular beat combos. The traditional mic on a mic stand – the things that look a bit like a round scoop of ice cream on a cone. Despite the looks (and the quality/performance) the only real difference between this and the little mics in the headsets is the type of connector on the end. Professional mics, as with this Shure, have a special connector called an XLR. Modern consumer type mics have a 3.5mm jack connector (the same type you find on headphones outputs, like on an iPod, confusingly). This mixing desk, a Phonic MM1002, has two XLR microphone inputs. It has various other jack style inputs, too, that’s how I was connecting the headset mics. The crucial difference for my purposes was that this mixing desk has built-in pre-amplifiers for each XLR input but not for any of the jack connections. In other words I would only be able to use professional style microphones with this mixing desk…

We already had one working microphone, the Shure PG-58. I needed either two more (one each for Andy and Tony) or a mixing desk that would pre-amplify off a jack. Given the longer term plan was to replace the rubbish headset mics I decided it would be better to take what we had with this mixer and XLR mic and add to it. Except, yes, you did remember that right – this mixing desk only had two, count them – 2, XLR inputs. New mixing desk? Even if this mixing desk had three or four XLR pre-amped inputs it wouldn’t have helped much anyway – it only had two outputs, it’s a stereo (i.e. two channel) mixing desk. i.e. it mixes all the inputs you give it into one stereo output. Two mics, one panned completely left and other completely right, would be fine. Those two mic inputs effectively fed directly into the two mixing desk outputs and then into two of the Delta 44 inputs, if you follow. So, not only did I need two more mics but also another little mixing desk to sit next to our existing one, to give an additional two outputs.

Why was I reminded of Lando Calrissian? “This deal is getting worse all the time.” Oh, well, in for a penny (well, quite a few), in for a pound (quite a few of them, too!) I found a very similar mixing desk for £35 (the original we bought a while back was a pre-owned from a local music store for about £50) from one online retailer, so hurriedly put an order in – time was rapidly running out before the next podcast recording date. I also put an order into a different (and altogether more trustworthy looking) e-tailer for two Shure PG-48 mics (the less expensive brother to the PG-58) and three microphone stands – holding the mics for about two hours would get tiring and generally make conversations just feel less natural. Ouch, this is getting very expensive!

After a couple of anxious days the mics and stands turned up but still no word on the mixer. In the end I gave up and located a phone number for the company. It turns out that the particular mixing desk I ordered was no longer in stock and had been discontinued! That explained a lot of what I was seeing on my Internet searches. It transpires that the direct replacement mixer had only one XLR input! Again none of the other inputs were pre-amped. Damn. I was out of time, so accepted the new specification model. No wonder I had such difficulty tracking down a two XLR mini mixing desk – nobody was making them anymore, at least not at a price I considered reasonable. Fortunately we’ve been able to get Keith away on podcast recording evenings by tricking him into exploring the big wide world to find things for us (if you’ll believe our little stories!) Whatever, we’ve so far been lucky in only actually needing three microphones so this crippled mixing desk hasn’t hurt us, yet. I foresee a time when we might have to do something about it, though.

Nearly there then! Only, what’s this? These mics have come with leads that have jack outputs!!!! In my haste to purchase them I didn’t notice (I never even realised you could buy them like this). That was clearly no good for us. I’d already visited the local music shop to buy cables to connect the mixers to the Delta 44. Now I needed two new mic leads with XLR male to XLR female. By this point it was the day of the next podcast recording! I phoned the local shop that morning to confirm they had what I needed. Unfortunately I had a prior lunch arrangement. I sneaked away from that a bit early and drove to the music shop. More expense! The last of it, thankfully (for now, at least). Rushed back to work – another executively long lunch break! All was complete. I hadn’t had time to actually test it or, really, figure out Ardour but that was fun for before we started recording in the evening.

So that’s our podcast setup. It was one big learning experience. The one thing to take away from this: if you want to start messing with semi-pro kit like a multi-channel sound cards then you’ll likely need expensive semi-pro kit throughout. Consumer and semi-pro kit do not mix!

If you are looking at a similar setup, here’s a rough costing of what I bought: M-Audio Delta 44 (from eBay): £54.50 (retail nearer £90), Phonic AM120 MKII Compact Mixer (£35), Shure PG-48 dynamic microphone (2 x £24), boom mic stands (3 x £17.95), mic pop shields (2 x £6), mixer to sound card cables (3 x £5.99), replacement mic to mixer cables (1 x 7.99 (2.5 metre), 1 x 14.99 (5 metre)). Wow, this is the first time I’ve added these up. £244.30! Ouch! I probably missed a bit of P&P in there too. I think we’ll need to do a good hundred or so podcasts so I feel this was money well spent!!

Seriously, though, it really is worth it – just compare the sound quality of Podcast One to Podcast Two. The difference is incredible, at least to my ears. If I have a problem I tend to throw money at it until it goes away – this time it has. Of course there is no amount of money that can make me any more interesting to listen to! Having said that, if nothing else, listen to our podcast and appreciate the effort we all put into it. That effort by no means stops at the sound recording kit, that’s for sure. But that’s all for another blog entry!

I survived Star Wars: Celebration Europe! Many didn’t, those Stormtroopers would as soon shot you as pose for a picture! No, not really – I wasn’t aware of any deaths at this convention. The fun really is going out of these events these days!

Joking aside, it was pretty good fun. If far too packed on the Saturday and Sunday. The number of attendees on Friday felt about right for a venue of that size. On Saturday it was heaving – I seriously doubt they were within fire regulations on that day. If there had been an emergency people would have been trampled to death, I am quite sure. As I said, though, no such excitement for us this year!

Lots of people in various Star Wars costumes, with a big presence (for a European event) of the 501st Legion (occasionally I’d see a group of seven or so Stormtroopers partrolling the interior perimeter). I really must get myself one of those costumes – if only I weren’t a little short for a Stormtrooper! I used to really enjoy getting into the old Doctor Who costumes (notably the Sea Devil and Voc Robot) and menace the general public! Those were the days! I’d love to create a Mk. 1 Tonb Terak costume some day (basically a variation on a Mandalorian body armour with a modified and grey resprayed Biker Scout helmet).

The main events were really happening on the Celebrity Stage, though. There Warwick Davis (Wicket the Ewok) acted as MC for various interviews with cast and crew from the Star Wars films. It mainly concentrated on the original (and best!) trilogy, though the chaps who played Darth Maul’s body (Ray Park) and child Boba Fett (Daniel Logan) were about for a panel each. Mostly it was behind the scenes chaps, though. At least one of those was on three panels, another on at least two. Basically they seemed to be a little short of ‘celebrities’ for this stage, all but the ‘big name’ actors doing double or triple duty to fill in the schedule. That was a bit of a shame, not that these chaps weren’t interesting but a bit more variety would have been good. Some big names I saw included Mark Hamill (very entertaining), Billy Dee Williams (a touch worthy), Anthony Daniels (right up himself) and Rick McCallum (not quite as smarmy as I was expected (but close!)).

Expect a full review in the next Staggering Stories Update (another load of reviews – I promise I’ll write another story shortly. Yes, really! It’s not called Staggering STORIES for nothing!!)

All in all a corporate event (though not particularly well organised) but it wasn’t nearly so money grabbing as I expected. Besides a £6 glossy programme guide, they got not a penny more from me, I’m glad to say! Not a fantastic event but not a bad event either. If they sort out some of their organisational issues it might even be worth attending again next year.