Behind the scenes of the Thunder announcement
It may have been the worst kept “secret” in town, but that didn’t seem to mean anything to the hundreds gathered at Leadership Square in downtown Oklahoma City on Wednesday evening.
Clay Bennett led the announcement of “Thunder” as the official nickname of the Oklahoma City NBA franchise. Bennett was flanked by Thunder radio voice Matt Pinto, general manager Sam Presti and coach P.J. Carlesimo.
So those were the suits on stage. But there were hundreds on the floor and along the second floor railing to watch the surprisingly brief press conference. Some peeps just got off work, like my friend Chad who works in the building. And others made the effort of finding parking, loading up a parking meter and trudging inside to elbow their way to a view of the stage and the hidden logo.
As for our coverage, we recorded a quick video in studio – from the new look Dodge Sports Desk – to announce the team name becoming official. Kept it simple. One minute. Here are the facts. Team name is Thunder. Gear is available. See more later on NewsOK and in the paper.
The result? The top viewed video on the site for Wednesday.
At Leadership Square, we had two cameras in action. Tim Money recorded the 12 minute press conference to his Firestore drive, then dumped the three QuickTime files on my MacBook Pro. Tim and Damon Fontenot then went looking for the suits and The Oklahoman’s sports guys: the knowledgeable Mike Baldwin and the always dapper Darnell Mayberry.
In cases like this, it helps to double up on the video editing process. We shoot everything in HD, so the files are large. A 12 minute video with no cutaways or interviews or soundbites takes only a few minutes to edit: drop in an intro, outro and a lower third and you’re ready to begin the export process. Exporting a 12 minute vid takes about 15-20 minutes. Then encoding through Adobe Flash Encoder at 500 kbs takes another 35-40 minutes. Not the fastest turn around, but in this case the 5 pm press conference was online at NewsOK by 6:30 pm. And that includes leaving the laptop running to export the video while driving back to OPUBCO.
Tim and Damon cranked out a couple more videos: analysis with Baldwin and Mayberry and a package from Damon.
Damon went looking within the Thunder organization to see how they felt about the new name.
But we did more.
I’ll all for giving TV its props for live coverage and broadcasts. It’s what they do. They do it well and make it look easy. They have the infrastructure to go live – on TV or online, and frankly they should be going live as much as possible. Video is new to newspapers, and it’s a transition from print to digital.
But that’s no excuse for not getting into as many digital spaces as possible, which is why OPUBCO has a video crew and is venturing into live coverage of events. We used a Sony HVR cam, plugged into a smaller Sony laptop. It may have been a Viao. We used Mogulus to stream the event, although we have used other means in the past, resulting in various levels of success. We are a Mac shop, so we aim to use as many Mac products as we can, but today we went PC and it worked just fine. Audio and video. Imagine that. So we had a decent live stream, for 100 kbs rate, of the event.
We have a template on a NewsOK page, newsok.com/live, that we use for our live events. In this case, we dropped in the embed code from Mogulus and utilized a freeware chat program to “talk” with fans watching online. Brad Belyeu, who has spend a ton of hours troubleshooting and researching hardware and software for the OPUBCO video crew, manned the laptop, answering questions.
You can check out pics I took from my iPhone while at the event to see the large crowd and the numerous media types in attendance. Give the Thunder credit. They made it an entertaining event. The Hornets became a hit with the non-basketball fans because of their entertainment value. Looks like the Thunder are continuing down the same avenue.
Except for that logo…
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Thanks for going into the technical details! I am very interested in knowing what you use to get the content on the web. For a couple of events, we’ve done some live video feeds to the Chamber web site using some third party tools, and it has been a lot of fun. Keep up the good work