Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
The final sweeps story for February 2004 was one of the first times I was able to do virtually an entire spot with footage that month. One of our intrepid reporters “ambushes” people who have parked in handicapped parking spaces without the proper car tags or window stickers. It’s actually fun, though I did have to take the audio out of sync with the video in order to protect the identity of the driver. It’s also got a little bit of a false ending to it – master control always loves that.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes of from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
The final sweeps story for February 2004 was one of the first times I was able to do virtually an entire spot with footage that month. One of our intrepid reporters “ambushes” people who have parked in handicapped parking spaces without the proper car tags or window stickers. It’s actually fun, though I did have to take the audio out of sync with the video in order to protect the identity of the driver. It’s also got a little bit of a false ending to it – master control always loves that.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes of from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
