Murder suspect caught
A lot changed on this story. And quickly. From this morning when the story was the suspect was caught, to a few hours later when the affidavit was released and we suddenly had details. I taped a version of the caught suspect when I got to the office this morning, but never posted it because we had two sports shoots, a Sunday Conversation and an attempted editorial shoot. By then the details emerged and it was time to rewrite the script and post a new update.
Today I used the NewsOK updated version. The newsroom does a great job of updating NewsOK with the latest information. Mostly I try to use as much of their work as possible along with as many photos or video/b-roll as I can with our updates.
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.
What kind of video advertising works?
The pre-roll.
One hundred percent Black Angus Beef. This tasty beef is…
Yeah, we’ve all heard that pre-roll on NewsOK about a million times now. Good work on the VO, Angi.
But guess what, pre-roll advertising works. Check out this article from Beet.tv:
In an interview with earlier this month, Vizu CEO Dan Beltramo confirmed what we’ve been hearing for a while now: Pre-roll is the most effective method of brand advertising online. Period. And he has the numbers to back it up; in a food item campaign Vizu analyzed, pre-roll had six times the brand lift of display advertising.
Using the green screen
Sometimes on NewsOK you’ll see various advertising that is beyond the usual tile or banner. You may have seen the Oklahoma City Philharmonic or a choir “walk out” on the screen of your browser.
We use a green screen in the 7th floor studio, similar to what you see on the local TV stations’ weather segments. You can see in the above picture (click for larger image) Brad Belyeu with a cut-out basketball (yes, basketball) on his head. The newest walk-out ad is more of a “peel-away” ad that you’ll see at the top right corner of your browser.
The Thunder basketball bought this form of advertising on NewsOK and we’ll have it online soon.
Brad is a season ticket holder to the Thunder. We spent about an hour in the studio earlier this week working on this shot. Todd Fraser used C-stands usually meant for lights or shades to work as a window that pushes down; then draped it in green to keep the green screen effect.
1 of 4 Google searches on YouTube
Video is major part of the Web and YouTube dominates Web video. ComScore has a report that says video search on YouTube accounts for 25 percent of all Google searches.
Google owns YouTube, by the way. But the report says even separated, YouTube would be the second largest search engine.
Read the report and TechCrunch’s analysis of the report here.
Video search on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S., according to the latest search engine numbers from comScore. Its monthly qSearch report, which was released on Thursday night, breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. More searches are done through YouTube than through Yahoo, which has been the case for the past few months.
Flights resume at Will Rogers
On Thursday, we posted two videos about travel delays at the airport due to fog: Fog closes Will Rogers to incoming flights and Fog in OKC (catchy headline, eh?) . This morning, NewsOK.tv’s Tanner Herriott was at Will Rogers World Airport as soldiers returned home for the holidays.
And holiday travel has resumed.
Tanner’s video will post later today. Here’s the accompanying story from Brian Sargent on NewsOK:
About 420 solders from Fort Sill are scheduled to leave from Will Rogers World Airport today for two weeks of holiday leave. Soldiers also are departing from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
About 2,700 soldiers from Fort Sill’s 434th Field Artillery Brigade are participating in the annual event, commonly known as ‘exodus’ or winter block leave, fort spokeswoman Emily Kelley said.
“I told my family all I wanted for Christmas was to come home,” said National Guard Pvt. 2nd Class Joshua Bliss.
Bliss, 23, hasn’t seen his family in Columbia, S.C., in about three months. He said he is looking forward to spending time with his family, especially his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
We taped four videos this morning in the OPUBCO Studios. Ed Kelley’s Oklahoma Matters commentary was about Pete Maravich. He was there to watch Pistol Pete’s performance at the State Fair Arena in 1968.
We also taped two entertainment videos Weekend Look with George Lang and Heather Warlick (who uses some festive font colors in her latest post) and TV Talk with Penny Soldan and Heather Warlick.
And we just wrapped up the daily energy update. It usually airs live at 2 pm. Yesterday, Oklahoma House Speaker Chris Benge spoke about touring an Arkansas nuclear plant, so we included a clip from Benge.
NewsOK video gets a facelift
Why the redesign? We produce 10-15 videos most days. They quickly rotate off the NewsOK home page. So the video landing page needed updating to better showcase the video library we’re growing.
Highlights:
- Featured videos up top. We have four of them.
- Latest or most recent videos are listed in order beneath the featured videos.
- Programming grid. On the right side of the video page you’ll find today’s programming. All of the videos on this page are taped, so the times you see are when we expect the videos to be posted online.
Clicking on the navigation will take you to specific video topics: news, business, sports, etc. On those pages, you’ll find (what else?) videos about news or sports or business, starting with the most recent up top in the play area and continuing with more videos down below. In the middle are the most popular videos as clicked on by you the user.
We also gave the video templates a new look. It’s much more like a YouTube video page. On the right side of each individual video, you’ll find related articles and related videos for more browsing.
When shoppers stampede
Quality stuff today from the video crew. Even Jim Stafford pitched in with great footage from Elk City of shoppers dashing into Wal Mart this morning.
YouTube is growing up
CNet has a good look at how and why YouTube is changing its approach towards advertising, and towards user-submitted content.
In the past week YouTube has announced it will auction off search terms as part of an ad program, called Sponsored Videos, designed to enable anyone to expand the viewership of their videos. YouTube also said last week it obtained rights to post full-length movies produced by a large film studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. What this means is that YouTube has given up on the idea that user-generated content can be a successful standalone business. It’s about time.
YouTube and AOL are both deciding that people eating crickets is not the path to gold. The novelty of the absurd has its place, but it’s not what you should hang your video views and ultimately bank accounts on.
The truth is the ability of user-generated content to generate lots of cash has been in doubt for a long time. Most of the video-sharing companies that challenged YouTube two years ago have been restructured or switched business models. The most recent evidence came Saturday when TechCrunch reported that AOL will shutter the company’s lightly trafficked video-sharing service, AOL Video Uploads.
Red EPIC raises the bar
The new Canon EOS 5D Mark II is flat out amazing. This video from Vincent Laforet is sick for all the right reasons.
But this announcement today from Red, well, it’s straight outta crazytown.
