Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
This promoted a special package during one of our newscasts which was essentially a big behind-the-scenes tour of our weather cave (the weather crew was happy to move into much more spacious quarters afterward) and a tease about an upcoming weather pager service being sponsored by the station. This promo again had a great music bed, and a ton of fast cuts in time to the rhythm (and some excellent footage from the package shot by photog Mike Hall). Each super seen during the promo was accompanied by a 50% ghosted, de-focused, and slowly-expanding-while-fading duplicate of itself, creating a kind of “shockwave” effect. Took a lot of time to do on the old Mac-based Avid; these days you can get After Effects to do the same thing without even breaking a sweat.
Fun fact: the weather cave seen here became the promo department's office later, including my desk. It was glassed in and became known as the Promo Pod (really more by my doing than by any official decree).
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.
This promoted a special package during one of our newscasts which was essentially a big behind-the-scenes tour of our weather cave (the weather crew was happy to move into much more spacious quarters afterward) and a tease about an upcoming weather pager service being sponsored by the station. This promo again had a great music bed, and a ton of fast cuts in time to the rhythm (and some excellent footage from the package shot by photog Mike Hall). Each super seen during the promo was accompanied by a 50% ghosted, de-focused, and slowly-expanding-while-fading duplicate of itself, creating a kind of “shockwave” effect. Took a lot of time to do on the old Mac-based Avid; these days you can get After Effects to do the same thing without even breaking a sweat.
Fun fact: the weather cave seen here became the promo department's office later, including my desk. It was glassed in and became known as the Promo Pod (really more by my doing than by any official decree).
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.
