Bananas

Hi Don't suppose anyone has had any dealings with a used stage lighting company? Looking to buy some new lights in and trying to maximise bang per buck so was going to look at buying some used but in good nick stuff if anyone has any contacts? I've had a mooch about on Google and found a few but i'd appreciate any recommendations etc if possible. Thanks

Hi I don't suppose anyone has or knows of some good flipcharts that are great for showing off what you can do with the boards? We've got an open evening coming up and it'd be nice to be able to put something on the board for the prospective students to interact with, some type of game maybe? Thanks

Hi all, hope everyone had a good summer. Got a problem with redirected folders Server 2008r2 and Windows 7. Sometimes folder redirection doesn't work say you have a class of 30 kids 27 of them will login fine and you'll have a few who have their home drive ok but the redirected start menu doesn't work and they have a blank menu. The GPO is using the FQDN and i've tried all the things i've turned up, disable media sense, wait for network etc etc and it still happens. If I go and login on the affected machines its fine, delete the local profile and logoff and sometimes that fixes it sometimes it doesn't, it's not always the same users or computers it just appears to be totally random and i'm out of ideas HELP!

They've "kind of" done it once already

Thanks everyone again

Anyone got any suggestions for a PC based alternative? I was having a play with Sony Acid Music 8 last night which seemed very good (but i'm no music teacher) if anyone has any suggestions for alternatives i'd love to hear them.

It's quite easy you install a second printer called black and white and you set that as default printer instead of the colour one thus they have to change printer driver to print in colour yet all the prints come out in the same place regardless. This is what we've done with our Kyocera beastie which is an excellent printer btw got it below cost price for most sellers. you can also now get 3rd party toners for the Kyocera which work out incredibly cheap!

Not really, you can change the brightness and colour of the background. I use sepia during the day to remove the glare and at night white text of black which is much easier on the eyes. Remember with a tablet you can read after the sun goes down without a torch unlike un-illuminated e-ink (I know you can get clip on lights etc for a Kindle) I was reading books on my S2 this way via Kindle app and Aldiko which is also a wonderful app. I got the wife a Kobo touch and whilst the e-ink screen is a joy to read from as nice as paper in fact you do suffer from no light source so a tablet/phone is preferably if you're doing something like camping....

It was to do with a price quoted which turned out to be rather inaccurate and the resultant conversation, just put me right off tbh. The product itself looks awesome no problem with that side of it at all.

Does anyone know if you can create custom reports on behaviour management in CMIS? For example being able to create a report showing total positives/negatives per student stuff like that? Ta

I've had some recent discussions with a rep and I didn't like the responses tbh I won't go into it here but, loved the look of the system etc but just got left with a bitter taste with some of the recent chats i've had. Cheers will have a look at those Oh and if anyone has any other suggestions that can talk to Serco that would be great too

I believe some of the Surestart centres may have those printers, certainly the one in Norwich Wolfe Road does. As to whether it's practical to get it to any of them....

Looking at a reward system. Did initially like the idea of Vivo and the website is nice and shiny but got a couple of reservations about using them and wondered if anyone has any suggestions for alternatives? Ta

Sorry Danboid but you're wrong it's not a bug they don't support those codecs in the free version at all it's on their website I looked at the product comparison of the paid for vs free versions. As for the 3gp sorry mate but you're dead wrong there too those are from my Samsung Galaxy S2 and they're shot at 720p so hardly crappy and unusable at all. From a codec PoV it might not be the best/most versatile but you're wrong on quality front, very very wrong maybe back in the early days with a Nokia phone but the quality is amazing tbh! Anyway it's a codec paid for issue not a bug. I'm quite taken with the cloud based jobbie posted earlier works really well, fast and doesn't need much in the way of local resources very nice. I might have a go with Lightworks occassionally if I transcode my files first or I might even pay for a copy as it's so cheap but OOTB experience with the free version not good for my purposes sadly. As for directly transcoding Format Factory is fantastic, easy to use produces great results and is genuinely free. I'll have a look at what you suggest will see if it's any good but my general experience of AV stuff and Java = bad but with it just being a front end it's probably ok. Ta

The free version of Lightworks is pretty much crippled on codecs. Just tried it with some MOV and 3gp files from my phone and just comes up with unlicensed format - balls I was looking forward to using that, I don't want to have to format factory all my files first. Dammit!

I'm LOVING that. We use Google extensively mostly for the students email but also apps and it's beautifully integrated into Google and Google Drive. Thanks very much I love it!!

Oh yeah not a problem with that side of things. I meant more from a usage PoV I don't like things "master pages" when building websites and I also had huge problems when students were linking 2 websites they'd created together. If they ticked the embed box or linked a website as a file (which seems logical, you have another index.html file to link, it's a file ergo link file) then when you publish the work it goes horribly wrong, errors all over the place, half publishes one site and half the other with no pictures and you just TRY finding out what the problem is. I spent a day trying to figure out why none of these portfolios would publish till I found that. It's just little things like that that bug me about it. Deployment tools are excellent and it is fairly idiot proof too...... I haven't found any problems like that in Movieplus though it really is EXCELLENT. I haven't had one single scream of it's crashed taking all my work with it (unlike Movie Maker, XP version)

If it's for the kids then cheapest possible. If it's for filming school events we just got a Canon HF-R306 and it's awesome. Battery life isn't brilliant but with a 31x optical zoom it's quite punishing so buy a larger battery too, BP-727 is about £90 and i'd also plump for an off camera charger CG-700 about £20 on top of the original purchase price of the camera. Also you'll need some decent SD cards I got a couple of Class 10 32GB ones

Yup and once they have your contact details they phone and phone and phone and email and phone and well you get the idea

Seconded, un until recently I despised the Serif stuff, in fact a lot of it I still do but Movieplus is a real GEM. Well worth the money

Cool, well as nice as the Casio projectors are they're still a bit too much upfront for now. We've got LOADS of really old Epsons to replace still got old ones running 800x600 We're just waiting on some prices for the X14. I thought the highr lumens might be a good idea as some of the staff have been moaning about their old Epson projectors being too dim so that should help. Do a few this year and then roll forward from there. Ta guys!!

At least they're generally securable but you always have the worry that some numpty can bend the pins.... We have desktops connected to whiteboard in the IT suites and to prevent them being disconnected and pulled about so people can plug laptops in I tightened all the VGA cables up with pliers. Got a call the other day saying I can't undo this cable to plug my laptop in. I said I know I did that for a reason...... I'm sure you're right about the resolution but again the only place this is really ever going to be an issue is on laptops and at the moment I really think we're a considerable way off resolutions getting that high on a portable device. I'm open to being proved wrong but I think we're probably still 3 years or so away from that. I think that resolution limit will ultimately be what kills it off though. I do like VGA for the simple fact that you can lock it in place which you can't often do with displayport or HDMI you are right though VGA sockets are ugly and bulky. I will kind of be sad to see them go, they've been around since forever and i'm kind of attached to them....

I agree, but people have been going on about the death of VGA for YEARS now, DVI was supposed to kill it, HDMI, Displayport etc etc. I doubt it'll ever truly be killed off because unless that tax issue changes if it hasn't already that is it's been awhile since I heard about it how widely it will be on laptops is the real issue and I could see it disappearing from them as you say but I really can't see it dying off in desktops any time soon (if ever). I just wondered if people thought HDMI and 400 lumens is worth it personally I think it is was interested to hear what others had to say. Does anyone have a source of cheap lamps for these, I know they're not massively expensive in the first instance but every little helps as they say Also useful if you need to connect an Xbox up for example as although you can use the cheaper connectors you might as well use the decent quality ones..... Misco quote £429 ex VAT for the X14 so we'll see what the account manager comes back with pricewise

Just looking at this as after 3 new projectors this year. Now like the look of the Epson EB-X11 but i've seen the EB-X14 is about £100 more for 3000 Lumens and HDMI. What do you reckon worth the extra £100 or not? Don't use the HDMI for anything here at the moment but I think the extra Lumens will come in handy if that's accurate.

To be fair that's simply not true, well not their software I don't know about that but their hardware these days is pretty spot on