Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Holy cow! Living in the future! The future, in this case, was a new set, new weather computers, and a green wall with a built-in telestrator (which proceeded to be used very little on-air because it constantly had to be recalibrated to show up in the right place). I was told to go ape on this spot, make it look like a movie trailer. Okay then. This was around May 2001, if I recall correctly.
Using Universe and Paint Shop Pro, I devised several layers of elements, including starry backgrounds, the Earth, the moon, the sun, a nebula, a black hole and some special text. I used the Avid to layer these together as intended, creating a spot which was, in a way, a sped-up, reverse-gear tribute to the opening three minutes of the movie Contact. It repeatedly got the comment from people both inside and outside the station that “this doesn’t look like something we produced.” That’s actually quite a compliment! It implies that we blew money out-of-house on it, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
I remember it took 40's Mac-based Avid Media Composer something like a DAY just to render the "zoom-through-space" part of the promo. Never again!
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.
Holy cow! Living in the future! The future, in this case, was a new set, new weather computers, and a green wall with a built-in telestrator (which proceeded to be used very little on-air because it constantly had to be recalibrated to show up in the right place). I was told to go ape on this spot, make it look like a movie trailer. Okay then. This was around May 2001, if I recall correctly.
Using Universe and Paint Shop Pro, I devised several layers of elements, including starry backgrounds, the Earth, the moon, the sun, a nebula, a black hole and some special text. I used the Avid to layer these together as intended, creating a spot which was, in a way, a sped-up, reverse-gear tribute to the opening three minutes of the movie Contact. It repeatedly got the comment from people both inside and outside the station that “this doesn’t look like something we produced.” That’s actually quite a compliment! It implies that we blew money out-of-house on it, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
I remember it took 40's Mac-based Avid Media Composer something like a DAY just to render the "zoom-through-space" part of the promo. Never again!
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.
