Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 4 hours ago
This promo, another Hearst pre-packaged piece about a DVD player that skips over scenes of sex and violence, gave me a chance to revisit the “moving film” gag I used about a year or so ago on a story about Hollywood studios using northwest Arkansas as a location. This time, however, I played up some other elements too, right down the the green-backgrounded “The following preview…” screen and some on-screen text meant to evoke the hyperbolic movie trailers of the 1950s.
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 or 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.
This promo, another Hearst pre-packaged piece about a DVD player that skips over scenes of sex and violence, gave me a chance to revisit the “moving film” gag I used about a year or so ago on a story about Hollywood studios using northwest Arkansas as a location. This time, however, I played up some other elements too, right down the the green-backgrounded “The following preview…” screen and some on-screen text meant to evoke the hyperbolic movie trailers of the 1950s.
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 or 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.
