Behind the scenes: producing BCS videos after the game
Last night, Oklahoma lost to Florida 24-14 in the BCS National Title game in Miami. David Jones and Paige Dillard met me in the OPUBCO Studios about 10 pm to watch the final mintues. The Oklahoman’s Mike Sherman sports editor came down to the 7th floor from the 8th to tape three segments.
I had three videos pre-produced: graphics and script. Paige pulled photos from The Oklahoman’s staffers in Miami ready for our videos. Jones prepared the studio for the three shoots.
We knocked out the first video, a post game show that lasted about five minutes talking about the game.
Then we rearranged the sets and taped two segments – one about Sooner coach Bob Stoops and quarterback Sam Bradford.
We finished taping around 11:30 pm. We record and edit using Final Cut Pro. We encode the FCP .mov files into .flv files using Adobe Flash Encoder. Exporting and encoding is by far the lengthiest part of the production.
We left the office two hours later after posting the videos and editing NewsOK.com and NewsOK.tv to properly display the videos.
Bike to work week fun video
Yes, really.
One of The Oklahoman’s business reporters, Don Mecoy, approached me with a video idea last week. He and his fellow reporters from the Biz desk were working on alternate methods of getting to work stories. With gas prices high, people have options: bike, bus, walk (ok, maybe not walk) and other stuff.
So Don Mecoy, who has a couple nice bikes, decided he would bike to work from Edmond. Read his account here. Jim Stafford would ride the bus.
David Jones and Kyle Roberts shot Mecoy as he rode to work, about 10 miles. Stafford took a hand held camera on the bus as he rode from Edmond to downtown – past The Oklahoman’s office – to catch the right ride to the office.
Kyle edited together a classic piece. Mecoy and Stafford were great sports and good to work with. It’s not your routine gas price package.
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Vegas: Day 1
Getting a shuttle from McCarran airport in Las Vegas makes one think the taxi queue is the way to go. After 45 minutes of inhaling bus fumes, David Jones and I departed for the hotel.
The NAB Show is, as it says, a digital media event. In year’s past it focused on broadcast television. Now if focuses a lot on the Internet. Just as the newspaper industry is focusing on the Internet.
The digital industry is all about learning the latest technology. Tim Robbins is the keynote speaker on Monday.
Last day on the Hill
Tuesday was a busy day for the OPUBCO crew on Capitol Hill.
Jones, Horton and I finished trouble-shooting our gear, tweaking the settings and going through test drives of the new Washington DC video set. Jones and I wrote training documents for our boys Chris Casteel and Mark Green.
Would you believe you can’t find a printer in DC? Two Fedex/Kinkos did not have printers for our thumbdrives to print the documents. It’s always the little things that are the most frustrating setbacks.
We joined Ed Kelley for a tour of the Washington Post Interactive. I met up with old friend Matt Havercamp at WPI as we picked their brains about newspaper video. More on this visit in a future blog.
Back at the National Press Building, both Mark and Chris taped debriefs for this weekend with Ed. Both seemed comfortable running through the processes of setting up the set and going on camera.
Oklahoma weather in Washington
I took a tour of the Belo operation in Washington DC today. I was joined by Ed Kelley, David Jones, Scott Horton, Chris Casteel and Mark Greene from OPUBCO. Our mission was to look at what Belo is doing with their bureau from the Capitol.
We didn’t expect the surprise.
And we didn’t expect the gorgeous weather: 70s and perfect.
Upon arriving in a mostly empty building (it’s Presiden’ts Day and DC takes this day seriously), we were pulled aside and told the Belo staff at the DC bureau were just informed on Friday of staff cuts. The Belo bureau in DC is a combined print, online and broadcast team. I got the impression they had more synergies in the past than the present. And the staff cuts would only further that gap.
Ed and I spoke more today about how large operations like Belo and the Atlanta Journal Constitution are going more towards silo’d efforts, where departments focus on their core compentencies instead of collaboration.
Should be interesting to see how it shakes out.
It was also interesting to see the weather take a left turn, for the clouds to roll in and the skies to open. The temp dropped about 20 degrees and it started pouring. Welcome back winter.
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Washington DC bureau update
David Jones, Scott Horton and I worked on the new Washington DC set this morning, installing the teleprompter software with the help of Donna Young’s crew. Sometimes ya just hafta call for some backup to get the job done.
With that accomplished, we finished setting up the compression and resolution settings and knocked out a quick debrief previewing our upcoming DC coverage.
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