Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
KPBI-TV open for coverage of the 1995-96 Arkansas Lady Razorbacks basketball season. Animation was generated entirely within Lightwave on an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster 4000. If I recall correctly, the music is a heavily-butchered Art Of Noise track.
If any of the animation from the Fox years looks jerky, it's because the Amiga/Toaster stack that produced it had enough RAM to render animation in four second chunks. I could set up a lengthy animation, but could only render it out four seconds at a time, and often only by leaving it to render overnight. A very weird limitation to work within, but it produced pretty good results, right?
Looking back at it, I think this is waaaay overlong, and it could do without the whole "basketball in space" thing. That being said, this did win an Addy Silver award locally for Best Animation. We were the only station in the market doing any in-house 3D at the time, and boy, was I jazzed about that (at the time).
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.
KPBI-TV open for coverage of the 1995-96 Arkansas Lady Razorbacks basketball season. Animation was generated entirely within Lightwave on an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster 4000. If I recall correctly, the music is a heavily-butchered Art Of Noise track.
If any of the animation from the Fox years looks jerky, it's because the Amiga/Toaster stack that produced it had enough RAM to render animation in four second chunks. I could set up a lengthy animation, but could only render it out four seconds at a time, and often only by leaving it to render overnight. A very weird limitation to work within, but it produced pretty good results, right?
Looking back at it, I think this is waaaay overlong, and it could do without the whole "basketball in space" thing. That being said, this did win an Addy Silver award locally for Best Animation. We were the only station in the market doing any in-house 3D at the time, and boy, was I jazzed about that (at the time).
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.
