Your chance to get your technical and creative questions answered. This week we talked about: DVD authoring choices on Mac OS X

6:32 pm - Jay Alpern - Founder Excalibur Productions

We'll be talking with Jay about the perils of Oral history projects, dealing with non-pros, the dilemma of getting involved in a project and whether or not to put in "more than is being paid for" for marketing purposes.

Jay Alpern is a graduate electrical engineer from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with a long and distinguished career in engineering and video production in both government and industry.

He was an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency for twenty-four years. During that time, he was responsible for the conception, development, deployment, and operation of complex technical systems of the highest national significance. Jay was among the first of his contemporaries to use animation and video production techniques to visualize advanced systems before they were implemented and, later, to obtain approval for their deployment. For his achievements, Mr. Alpern was awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, Intelligence Medal of Merit, Meritorious Officer Award (with stipend) and various Certificates of Commendation, including one for Courageous Performance.

Following his retirement from the CIA, he co-founded Zeta Associates Incorporated. The company provides system engineering and program management support for major government programs, many of which Zeta and Mr. Alpern defined and for which, as an adjunct, he personally developed video projects. Mr. Alpern served on the Board of Directors from Zeta’s founding until his retirement while personally providing key leadership and system engineering support to client projects of up to $150M in size.

Mr. Alpern founded Excalibur Productions in 1996. Excalibur uses state of the art production tools to develop animations, video productions and print materials for the scientific, technical, corporate communications, educational and instructional markets. Mr. Alpern moved to Dacula, Georgia at the beginning of 2003.

6:50 pm - BuZZ in Depth

We'll take the important BuZZ from the week and look at it in depth so you know what's really important now, and what will become important in the future.