proVanceTek Company Blog

We recently completed the DVD for Alison Kulp and Mike Bechtel's wedding.

There ceremony was held on the terrace at Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus and their reception was held inside.

We covered the ceremony with three cameras, two manned. Per the request of the client, we were provided an audio feed from the DJ who was providing sound amplification. We also created a video that was played at the reception and created several montage videos to highlight their reception for in their final wedding DVD.

For more information about our wedding video production services, please visit our wedding website!

Our company helps other small businesses and home users with a broad spectrum of IT support options. Our services include web design, development, and hosting; live and post video production; live and post audio production, IT technical support, and structured media design, installation, and service.

proVanceTek offers a concept for modern living that integrates voice and data services in one place to allow for multiple telephone, cable, satellite television, and data network for an entire house and home office.

We make use of Leviton Structured Media components. This hardware is designed to accommodate the convergence of telephone communications, computer and Internet services, audio/video, and much more. By creating an innovative series of flexible and pre-configured modules and media centers that manage and distribute voice, data, audio and video, Leviton Structured Media systems deliver the bandwidth and speed that today's and tomorrows information and entertainment technologies will demand.

We recently completed the DVD for Tracy Brewer and Scott Pennington's wedding.

There ceremony was held in the Pennington back yard, where their reception was also held underneath a big white tent with beautiful table decorations and upbeat tunes.

We covered the ceremony with three cameras, two manned. Per the request of the client, we were provided an audio feed from the DJ who was providing sound amplification. We covered the key moments of the reception and created a montage to music.

For more information about our wedding video production services, please visit our wedding website!

proVanceTek owner, Robert Vance, created a video while in high school to accompany a song that his choir performed at an annual choir concert.

This year, the Hilliard Davidson High School Vocal Music Department decided to create a one time only tribute performance, “A Patriotic Salute”, in honor of our Veterans.

The performance was on Sunday, March 7 at 3pm in the Hilliard Davidson High School Performing Arts Center and featured the Men’s Concert Choir, Women’s Concert Choir, Symphonic Chorus, Boys in Blue, Blue Ladies and Senior Choir.

A Military Honor Guard presented the Colors and the program concluded with a video tribute while the Senior Choir performed Peter Wilhousky’s “the Battle Hymn of the Republic”. This was the video that Robert Vance created some ten years ago. proVanceTek resurrected the video and retouched it, as the original was VHS and had started to deteriorate.

A dessert reception in honor of our Veterans followed immediately after the performance, catered by Abner’s Restaurant.

proVanceTek recently released http://wonkatickets.com/ for Hilliard Bradley High School Theatre Department. The goal was to have a quickly launched, user-friendly website where patrons could purchase tickets. The site makes use of PayPal to process credit card transactions or patrons can even make their purchase using the available balance in their PayPal account.

In addition to the publicly available main section of the site, there's also a password protected area where staff can "sell" tickets to students for the in-school performance. This section collects the student's first name, last name, and student id and adds it to a database. From the database, the data will be exported as a CSV file for the school's attendance office for their record. We're also working on a system that will be used for admission to the in-school performance where each student's student id barcode will be scanned as they enter the performance and the data will be added to the database in context of whether or not the student who purchased a ticket actually showed up to the performance.

If you'd like more information about proVanceTek web development, please feel free to contact us today!

On a cold, clear, moonless Friday night in the middle of winter, all is not quite what it seems in the remote, mythical town of Almost, Maine. As the northern lights hover in the star-filled sky above, Almost's residents find themselves falling in and out of love in unexpected and often hilarious ways. Almost, Maine inventively explores the mysteries of the human heart, touching us with laughter, heartbreak and hope.

proVanceTek worked with Hilliard Davidson High School Theatre's Technical Director to create a collapsible, internationally traveling, Northern Lights backdrop for the school's 2009-2010 winter production. The show was first performed January 29 & 30, but will be traveling to Edinburgh, Scotland.

Almost, Maine is the production that Hilliard Davidson High School will be traveling to Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2010 to be presented in the American High School Theatre Festival as part of The Fringe Festival.

From conventional home theaters, to fully automated smart-homes, we provide customers with state-of-the-art, integrated systems that enhance your everyday life. Starting with design, we work closely with customers to ensure the final system is unique, powerful, and most important, easy to use.

We can custom design and install home theater and whole house audio-video systems, plasma and LCD TVs, computer networks, home security, intercoms, and more electronic systems.

We utilize technology to enhance your everyday life. Our commitment to the industry is paramount to make certain we are providing everything to meet your current AND future needs. Our strength lies in our passionate, experienced staff and elevated standard of customer service.

Today proVanceTek delivered fifty DVD copies of The Columbus Chorus of Sweet Adelines December 2009 concert. The concert was held in the Hilliard Davidson High School Performing Arts Center. proVanceTek was hired to record the concert in High Definition, master the DVD, and duplicate fifty copies for members of the organization.

proVanceTek offers video production services to small businesses and organizations in the Central Ohio area. We offer recording, mastering, and duplication services in both live-to-tape and post-production settings.

Our video production experience allows us to deliver a quality product to our customers no matter what the project is - engagement videos, wedding ceremony videos, wedding reception montage videos, anniversary videos, graduation videos, sports highlight videos, etc.

For more information about our video production services, feel free to contact us!

Robert Vance, proVanceTek founder, graduated from Ohio University with a BS in Telecommunications and a minor in Technical Theatre. While attending undergraduate school he was employed by Ohio University Telecommunications Center (WOUB - PBS) which services Southern, South Eastern, and Eastern Ohio with two television stations and six radio stations.

Through college, Robert freelanced a number of high-profile projects in the Columbus area. He assisted a handful of touring musicals with sound engineering, was sound designer and engineer for a local performance of Carmina Burana and a couple local High School's musicals, and was sound designer and engineer for a local performance by Mickey Rooney (The Wizard of Oz). He has also continued to do similar work since.

During Robert's last year at Ohio University, he also completed an internship at WBNS10TV in Columbus, Ohio in their production and operations departments. Robert was in studio, control room, engineering, and remote microwave trucks. He received academic credit from Ohio University for his completion of the program at WBNS.

Robert has since started his own company. proVanceTek has continued to grow, though briefly based in North Carolina, in Central Ohio and maintains a geographically diverse base of customers. However, Robert and his company are always looking to meet new people involved in theatre, video production, broadcast engineering, web design, and IT support.

The owner of proVanceTek, Robert Nelson Vance, worked on this project himself. The customer needed some graphic design done for their Hilliard Idol vocal competition to be held at Hilliard Bradley High School in December 2009 - The premise was a spin off of American Idol. The job called for poster to be made that would be printed on 11"x17" posters and enlarged to 4'x6' vinyl banners to be displayed around the school and the community.

proVanceTek has a history in providing clients with top notch graphic design. We've had projects with clients including Hilliard Davidson Theatre, Hilliard City Schools, The Ohio Educational Theatre Association, East Carolina University, and Chili's Grill & Bar to name a few. Projects have ranged from direct mail materials to large scale banners such as this one.

Contact us to find out more about our graphic design services!

proVanceTek has always provided video, sound, and lighting support for individual components of an event, but it's only been recently that we decided: "Hey, why aren't we providing any all-inclusive solutions for people's events? Why are we just doing one thing or the other?"

proVanceTek works with a couple local vendors with whom we have had a positive relationship for years. Our company provides the creative design concepts that tie together all the technical elements of your event - sound, video, and lighting. We will work with your entertainer, caterer, event planner, and anyone else you've hired to perfect your event - We just happen to have the experience necessary to tie the technical finishing touches into your wedding, reception, gala, etc.

Contact proVanceTek today to find out how we can help make your event truely memorable using lighting, sound, and video!

Robert Nelson Vance, owner of proVanceTek, worked with Hilliard City Schools in an effort to open Hilliard Bradley High School Performing Arts Center at their new high school. This included ordering and installing equipment, inventorying items on construction specification sheets, creating cut sheets for contractors to complete work in the facility, etc.

The culmination of all this work was the Dedication Ceremony for the new school. The ceremony included instrumental and vocal performances by Bradley students and the guest speaker for the evening was our own Governor Ted Strickland who praised the community on their financial support of the facility and spoke of how the building is environmentally-friendly and technologically equipped for the 21st century.

Contact us today for more information about proVanceTek's Theatrical Support!

proVanceTek has been doing web design for small to medium sized organizations in the Central Ohio area and has the experience necessary to ensure an effective online campaign strategy for your group. You can simply sit back and relax while we provide a full service, turnkey package that suites your marketing needs.

proVanceTek's owner has been in the marketing industry since 2005 and has gained valuable experience in online, video, and print marketing. Robert Vance founded proVanceTek in 2007 to pursue his entrepreneurial itch to own his own marketing business. proVanceTek has since acquired customers all over the country and continues to slowly, but steadily grow.

The postcard seen in this post is an example of the marketing creativity employed at provancetek to provide a down-to-earth marketing style that proVanceTek customer's clients seem to connect to.

Contact proVanceTek today for a free, same-day quote!

"SubEthaEdit is a powerful and lean text editor. And it's the only collaborative one that is a joy to use. By combining the ease of Bonjour with the world's best text collaboration engine, it makes working together not only possible but even fun…"

SubEthaEdit is a text editor that allows you to edit all different types of files including TXT, HTML, PHP, C++, and more! Not only does it allow you to edit these files it also allows you to do collaborative editing with others over your local area network.

When coding you have the option of using the built in modes (or languages) and with each language there are different syntax colors. There's a growing number of mode releases that other users contribute. If needed you are able to create your own modes.

One of my favorite features included is the ability to auto complete functions and previously entered text. It also has a common feature that most other editors have where it recognizes that you have created a function or class and allows you to select them from a list, which is particularly nice when you have thousands of lines of code.

After using SubEthaEdit for the past year, I can honestly say that I do not know what I would do with out it. As a Computer Science Major I use it whenever I am programming. I use it for my PHP development, C++, JAVA, etc.

On July 3, 2008 Robert Nelson Vance, proVanceTek owner, displayed his personal video production skills in the presence of friends, family, and perfect strangers at the Columbus, Ohio Red White & Boom 4th of July fireworks celebration.

In the preceding weeks, Robert gathered video and audio clips, previously recorded voicemails, and photos that he had collected for the previous four years of his relationship with his girlfriend and was all set to music. Robert produced a ten minute video that highlighted all the memorable moments of the prior four years with Kaela and he had creatively integrated his proposal at the end of the video.

The video played on an X-Box and displayed on a LCD monitor with a Bose audio system that was all powered by a gasoline generator. Needless to say, all this commotion caused other people to wonder what was going on and complete strangers ended up gathering around and also watching the video.

Using video for special moments is becoming a common way of creating a bold, memorable moment that's remembered for a lifetime and proVanceTek has the experience to do just that!

Contact proVanceTek about your engagement or wedding video needs!

Google Latitude is a service you can subscribe to using a Google Account that allows you to share your location, in real-time, with others. It utilizes your cell phone or computer's internet connection to determine where you're located and will display it on a Google Map for your friends to see.

Location sharing starts only when both you and a friend agree. You can invite friends via email or easily add them from your Gmail contacts. You can share, set, hide your location - or turn off/sign out of Google Latitude - from a privacy menu. You can also hide your location or share only a city-level location with certain friends. Additionally, you can create a status message and upload photos. It also syncs directly with Google Talk. You can check your friends' status messages to see what your friends are up to and can quickly contact your friends with an SMS, IM, or phone call. You can also get directions to lead you to your friends.

Check out Google Latitude today!

First, who is this Plain City Auction we speak of? Well, for short, they're one of our clients and great friends of ours. We've been working with them for years. But, in more detail, they're an auction house located in Plain City, Ohio, which is just outside of Columbus. They usually sell antiques furniture and other various antiques.

What is a preferred partner? Well, we're still not sure either. Infact, we kind of wonder if they even know yet. All we really know about it at this point is that they're essentially looking to cross-promote other local vendors goods and services. They always have a large turnout at their auctions, so it's actually a surprise that this didn't happen sooner. But our understanding is that they're looking for other local or related businesses that would like to promote their company to a large number of people for little cost.

We've heard that they're having large-format print adverting produced for their preferred partners that they'll have prominently on display at the auctions. Since we do their website hosting, they've already approached us about providing similar online advertisements through their website and their auction newsletter emails. We're pretty sure that they'll also be printing advertisements in their snail-mail auction newsletter and that they're open to other suggestions if you're interested in becoming one of their preferred partners.

If this sounds like an advertising outlet you'd like to pursue, please visit http://plaincityauction.com/contact/ to get in touch with the auction's owners

What does the semantic web offer my site? This is a question I hear all to often. Much of the talk about the semantic web, one of the new hot buzz words, deals with its integration into popular tools such as drupal or the power it will provide when every one's doing it. As someone building sites for clients before the semantic web is in the mainstream it can be easy to dismiss the technology for the time being. Let's look into why it's good to embrace the semantic web now in some practical ways.

What The Semantic Web Means To Your Site Now

Metadata is a something that's been around for a long time. It's in our Microsoft word documents, we often store it in XML, and it helps us better describe what ever it is we are working on. What if your metadata and the metadata of others could work for you?

Imagine someone is viewing a piece of content on your site and you have related content based on the keywords used in the content but, you didn't have to fill in the keywords. They were provided by a smart engine that reads you text and finds them. Or, you have some content about a company and information about that company is displayed in a sidebar automatically based on information from other services. This is what we can do with the semantic web today.

On the flip side, when we have content about sites, companies, services, or other things we want to share them with others. Embracing the semantic web allows use to do that in a way that machines can read, something many websites struggle with. Remember that Google, Yahoo, and search engines are machines trying to read our sites.

proVanceTek just completed a wedding website project for Chris and Joellen Carpenter. The website is a elegant, simple, static HTML design. The website is media heavy, including hundreds of photos and various videos.

We also provided video production services for the client, by 1) creating a video montage from wedding photos set to licensed music and 2) taking video from two camera sources that the client provided from the wedding ceremony and cutting together a quick wedding ceremony video. The website, including the videos, was turned around within twenty four hours of the wedding so that non-local family and friends who were unable to attend could quickly have plenty of multimedia to view; much of the website and many of the photos were live within hours of the ceremony.

Regarding the website's video player technology, the client needed an inexpensive solution to include online video within the website. proVanceTek incorporated the videos into the website using the open source version of a Flash video player called Flowplayer. The solution was fast, free, and accomplished what the client wanted. The only real caveat is that free version watermarks the video when in full screen mode.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new wedding website!

proVanceTek is proud to announce the release of a suite of new service offerings aimed at organizations who rely on critical Drupal websites. These new services include Disaster Recovery with Hot-Site capabilities and Off-site Backup and Restore. Both services are individually tailored to each client's specific requirements.

For clients who host their sites with another host:

Our disaster recovery with hot-site backup services provide a level of assurance that in the case of a catastrophic failure of your web server or core infrastructure, your website will return quickly to service the needs of your visitors. Leveraging our off-site backup tools, we will maintain an up-to-date version of your entire site, ready for production should the need arise.

Our backup and restore service provides the assurance that in the case of a major failure, your website and data are available off-site and packaged for a quick restore. Using our backup tools, you will have the ability to automatically backup your site based on your set schedule.

For clients who host their site with us:

While the data on our servers is protected by redundant hardware located in a secure, state-of-the-art data center - with multiple redundancy power sources for uninterrupted power, multiple redundancy internet connections for uninterrupted internet, halon fire-extinguishing systems, etc - we understand that the accessibility of your website is paramount when it comes to the success of your business. For this reason, we offer additional protection for the most sensitive of projects - hot-site backup services for our own hosting. If the one-in-a-million chance that an earthquake's epicenter is the location of our server's data center, rest assured that your important data is waiting off-site, ready to go live. Awesome!

Contact proVanceTek today for hot-site backup services!

proVanceTek recently released a new spiffily designed static HTML website for Dr. Mary Nyangweso Wangila of East Carolina University. Dr. Wangila is a Religious Studies professor at the Greenville, NC located university and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious recognitions.

proVanceTek collaborated with Mary to finalize a design that achieved her needs technically and met her goals esthetically. The color scheme and layout came in the form of suggestions directly from the client and from there proVanceTek delivered a professional, slick design that continues to impress the client.

Because we receive phone calls for estimates soo frequently, we finally decided to provide online pricing for a number of common requests that we receive. In the web development section of our website, you will find pricing for student resume pages and portfolio websites, faculty vitae pages and portfolio websites, and small business homepages and content managed websites.

Contact us today for a free same day quotation for your new website!

This weekend we visited USITT Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio.

What is USITT you might ask? Most audiences at a performance don’t stop to consider everything it takes to get to that point. The performance is just the tip of the entertainment iceberg. So much creativity and hard work go into scenes, lighting, costumes, sound, make-up, stage managing, and the performance area itself not to mention keeping everyone safe. It is the design, production, and technology professionals in the performing arts and entertainment industry that the United States Institute for Theatre Technology (USITT) has served since 1960. USITT provides an environment for these professionals to connect, create, share, and communicate their craft.

What specifically is the Annual Conference you may wonder? It's the combination of professional, university educators and students, secondary educators, and even novice theatre technicians who come to learn about the latest technical theatre trends from theatrical vendors - who bring the latest and greatest technology - and presenters - who have seminars covering management, lighting, sound, costuming, state makeup, etc.

USITT's 49th Annual Conference & Stage Expo held in Cincinnati was a huge success with record attendance. The 2010 Annual Conference will be held in Kansas City, Missouri and in 2011 it will be in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Yet another yummy website courtesy of the Drupal Content Management System - http://ifood.tv/

Drupal has been becoming the industry standard content management system and is now being used by corporate companies, universities, the government, etc.

Some high profile Drupal sites include: Sony, Sony Ericsson, Lifetime Television, Harvard Law School, MIT Media Lab, New York State Senate, President Obama, Warner Bros, Francesca Battistelli, Michael Jackson, Virgin Radio, and more.

There's soo many reasons that Drupal is awesome, but let's just name only a few: User Management, Page Titles and Meta Tags, Custom Content Types and Views, Revision Control, Taxonomy, Advanced URL Control, SEO Friendly, PHP Template, Hundreds of Community Contributed Modules, Hundreds of Community Contributed Themes, Stable and Reliable, Excellent Documentation, and Drupal the Large and Friendly Community, etc.

Let's briefly mention some awesome Drupal modules in no particular order: Views, CCK, Contemplate, Printer Friendly Pages, Pathauto, Date, Ecommerce, XML Sitemap, Captcha, Service Links, Token, Taxonomy Access Control, Fivestar, Google Analytics, Event, Panels, and there's many more.

Basically, Drupal is awesome. If you're interested in creating an awesome, easy-to-manage, feature-rich website, contact us today!

Robert Nelson Vance, proVanceTek owner, provided video production services at the 2009 DrupalCon held in Washington DC this week at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Robert recorded all the sessions in one of the six main presentation rooms for the duration of the event; that worked out to be 20 of the roughly 100 sessions at the conference. The documentation of DrupalCon sessions will be extremely beneficial to the Dupalers who were unable to make it to the conference.

Some of the videos Robert shot were uploaded to the Internet Archive within minutes of the conclusion of the presentation, the others were available online within an hour of the presentation. One of the first videos uploaded had nearly 500 downloads within the first hour it was available online.

proVanceTek is already working on arrangements to provide a more extensive DrupalCon video production solution for the upcoming DrupalCon conference. Initial plans include proVanceTek providing complete video production services for the entire conference, multi camera live-to-tape production, and directly capturing video sent to presentation room projectors from the presenters laptops. The initial plans would essentially kick up a notch the next conference's documentation from a relatively consumer DrupalCon DC to a full-blown high definition professional video production for each session presented at the next conference.

For more information about Drupal, visit the content management system's website.

Find out more about our Video Production!

We've been working closely with the Greenville, NC Chili's Grill and Bar, East Carolina University Up 'til Dawn, and WRNS Radio on a St. Jude Children's Research Hospital fundraising event planned for 2 March 2009. The event basically entails no effort on the donor's behalf - simply show up at one of five Chili's in Eastern North Carolina on March 2nd, eat dinner as you normally would, and Chili's will donate 10% of the bill to St. Jude!

proVanceTek has been generating print media for the event to be distributed locally around Greenville in neighborhoods, at local businesses, on the campus of East Carolina University, etc. Here is one example of a flyer we designed to help promote the event.

Additionally, proVanceTek has been working with East Carolina University Up 'til Dawn on their similar, every Wednesday, events. It almost appears as if the idea was borrowed from ECU UTD, as they had been working with Chili's in Greenville on organizing their Wednesday events and had already hosted two before the WRNS event was even planned - great minds think alike! To help UTD raise money for St. Jude, simply visit their website, print their Chili's Fundraising Flyer, eat dinner as you normally would at the Greenville Chili's every Wednesday, present the flyer to your server, and Chili's will donate 10% of the bill to St. Jude!

To find out more about these events, please visit http://ecu-uptildawn.org/