Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Another spot with very little footage (from the "please make promos out of nothing" era of late 2003/early 2004), this was a case where there was footage, but not a lot of it, and what was there was deadly dull (it consisted, at the time the promo had to be assembled, only of the police interview and a very, very brief demonstration of a cell phone’s photo feature). I wound up, once again, creating everything in Paint Shop Pro, and integrating that with a little bit of that video in the Avid. So many of my February sweeps promos were done “in the computer” that everything was starting to look the same. Out of sheer desperation (and completely out of ideas), I then shot the finished promo running on the monitor from various angles, and then went back in and dropped that footage over the original. It almost works.
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.
Another spot with very little footage (from the "please make promos out of nothing" era of late 2003/early 2004), this was a case where there was footage, but not a lot of it, and what was there was deadly dull (it consisted, at the time the promo had to be assembled, only of the police interview and a very, very brief demonstration of a cell phone’s photo feature). I wound up, once again, creating everything in Paint Shop Pro, and integrating that with a little bit of that video in the Avid. So many of my February sweeps promos were done “in the computer” that everything was starting to look the same. Out of sheer desperation (and completely out of ideas), I then shot the finished promo running on the monitor from various angles, and then went back in and dropped that footage over the original. It almost works.
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.
