Thursday, October 25, 2012

Webcast rough edges

I've noticed some rough edges on the webcast lately that might be growing pains or just experimentation. In any case, some suggestions:
• The deployment of dual anchors doesn't seem to be working very well. The framing is difficult because the camera's wide angle isn't wide enough to make it possible to fill the frame, so the resulting shot has too much air up top.
• There actually aren't enough words for two anchors, so it feels as if they're competing for the few lines of script that are available. The back-and-forth between anchors we see on professional TV isn't as easy as it looks and takes a lot of practice to sound natural.
• The framing for two anchors seems to require that the camera be pulled back far enough so the table in front of the anchors is visible. That makes for an unconventional and unprofessional look, especially when the anchors are leaning on their hands and elbows, raising their shoulders up around their necks. 
• The two-shot to one-shot transitions in the two-anchor set aren't smooth. The camera should actually move to reframe the one-shot at a different angle (if you're going to stay with dual anchors). The framing needs to be adjusted so the change doesn't feel like a jump-cut.
• The new temperature ranges in the weather segment are too much information for a graphic. I'd suggest going back to single highs and lows for each day.
• It sounds as if the producer or editor has stopped equalizing the sound between clips (listen to the anchor pitching to Jon on Thursday). That's an important step that shouldn't be skipped.
• A truncated version of the Thursday webcast was put up instead of the completed broadcast (this was fixed later). And it looks like a whole webcast was missed this week, as well. Someone should be watching each webcast from front to back and making sure the correct file is uploaded to YouTube.

The staff has been doing a great job of covering breaking news the past couple of weeks and keeping theorion.com home page fresh. I hope they'll keep working on the technical stuff while staying strong on the reporting work.

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