[Mike Cohen]

Cool job you have there.

An an alternative to the greenscreen, why not setup each show so perhaps the intro and conclusion are greenscreen. I like the idea of adding some military imagery to the jumpbacks, even just some b-roll at say 10-20% opacity mixed with the background elements.

Then for the actual news segments, find some different locations. One could be next to, or slightly in front of a plasma or LCD display, with the news graphic or some b-roll/titles in the screen, then cut to the story full screen. Make the background a black drape, maybe with some flags out of focus in the background – stick a fan off camera to give the flags some motion.

Another location could be a behind the scenes shot, with the anchor on a stool with an unused camera and other video gear in the background.

Or get a second camera handheld to shoot a side view, wide shot or close-up, during the greenscreen shot.

Another type of shot you see on both MTV type shows, and occasionally during interview shows, is a shot at ground level, with the primary action in the background, out of focus, and in the foreground is a video monitor showing the output of the primary camera. Show this for a few seconds here and there, it breaks up the monotomy of your shots.

If you have a mini-DV camera, try positioning it in various spots in your studio during the primary greenscreen shoot. Up high, down low, hand held behind the main camera, in a doorway, looking in through a window. Anything to keep viewers on their toes.

Another thing you could do with the greenscreen, in have the anchor screen right, head to toe, then knock back the background a bit, and bring in a graphic in the left 2/3 of the background. He does not necessarily need to refer to the screen, but that might be cool to try out.

Rather than beginning the clip with a guy at a desk saying “Here’s what’s happening around the army,” why not have a 10 second intro with some patriotic music, flags and military imagery.

Or alteratively, go around the base and get some soldiers to say the intro line. A guy standing on a tank saying “Here’s what’s happening around the Army” is much more interesting, plus it lets your viewers say “hey, that’s Private Smith. I want to watch this…”

Some ideas, we all look forward to seing what you create next…Good luck and thanks for your service.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

if you have Premiere 2.0 you can copy the VOB to your hard drive, change the extension to MPG, import into Premiere, and export as AVI.

[Mike Cohen]

you can download a timecode AVI clip from this web site, and lay it on the top track. We use this, although it is only 1 hour long.

https://www.mediacollege.com/downloads/video/timecode/

[Mike Cohen]

What if you find the portion of your sequence you need, copy that to a new sequence, save the project as a new title, delete the unneeded full sequences, do a project manager to make a smaller version of teh project keeping only the used media, then open the new compact project, which should only need to conform the used media in your short sequence.

That’s what I would try.

Mike Cohen

[Mike Cohen]

what if you make each subtitle in Photoshop and save as a PSD over a transparent background?

[Mike Cohen]

we had a Datavideo unit and its performance with Premiere was flaky at best. The best luck has been with Canopus units.

One thing I learned recently, to get better performance out of this type of device, is to disable IEEE-1394 networking in the windows control panel. Apparently Bill Gates thought everyone would use firewire instead ethernet, but you do not need that feature. My Canopus ADVC-110 works better as a result. Try it with your problem.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

it gets even more confusing if you want a track matte on a clip with motion. The motion on the track matte track is at ful size, hence nested nested sequences come into play. They could have made it a bit less cumbersome, but I guess Adobe would prefer you buy AE for complex stuff.

Still, I have found all sorts of ways to push Premiere to do motion graphics and other clever tricks.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

try to eliminate words like Internet Explorer or Quicktim Player. Many Flash movie players are generic looking. I suspect Firefox could use the publicity however.
A bigger issue I have it the Dell or HP logos seen on monitors and computers.

[Mike Cohen]

funny considering the resources governments have put into phasing out SD transmission. Apparently American government wants the SD spectrum for other purposes.
The best example of the public not being quite ready for DTV is when you visit a Best Buy, and they have an over the air snowy SD signal of the football game going into the $5000 Sony HDTV.

Mike

[Mike Cohen]

thanks for the ideas everyone. I like the idea of floating text snippets over a background, rather than just panning the pages themselves.
The theme of the book is Italian cooking for losing weight – I know it sounds crazy. I think I will shoot some food – while the book itself has no pictures of food, I think it will add something interesting to look at.
Mike