News Week Production Notes 2008

31 12 2008

Since mid May 2008 I am producing a weekly video with the actual news of the week, in the vain hope yesterdays news may be of interest in the future.

We all tend to forget very quickly, maybe these short reminders of around 2 minutes length achieve to keep our memory fresh.

In this post I want to describe and document the technical background and changes throughout the productions of 2008, in reverse order.

In 2008, 33 videos have been produced, from Week 20 to Week 52. Here a chart of the length of each film:

week2008duration

Version 3.1 production notes from Week 51-52 of 2008

Background sound has been changed, from a Ting Tings loop to instrumental versions of Hallelujah (51) and Piano Silent Night (52)

Version 3.0 production notes from Week 48-50

Video is now produced in High definition (HD), to comply with YouTube specifications. Previous versions can be viewed in HQ, by adding the comand &fmt=18 to the Youtube URL.

Version 2.4 production notes from Week 43-48

intro now dynamic, with picture (43: poppies, 44: Big Ben in snow) or animated (45: US flag to commemorate Obama election). Also in 45, a converted YouTube video was used in the end section instead of a movie trailer. This should be a exception, the focus remains on movie trailers.

Version 2.3 production notes from Week 42

while trailer clip starts, foreground image of Bleiglass and window turns dark and unsaturated, to imitate lights going out in cinema

Version 2.2 production notes from Week 36-41

addition of a 8 sec closing sequence with credits & artwork of young Bleiglass

Version 2.1 production notes from Week 32-35

new ending, with visit to movies and short (10-15sec) trailer clip viewed thorugh window

Version 2.0 production notes from Week

Dynamic view through the window, image zoom (out) against window zoom (in)

Version 1.3 production notes from Week 26/2008

a new sound loop was created using Apple Garageband. Also the final title “see you next week” was further animated, it now zooms in.

Version 1.2 production notes from Week 25/2008

Still using Photoshop, the window design was adjusted, now looking more like a window and not like a picture hanging on a wall and lightning now appears being top left and not from right side.

Version 1.1 production notes from Week 24/2008

From week 24 onwards finally the new software was used: Final Cut Express 4, and with the help of LiveType, the start and end titles were animated.

Version 1.0 – News Week 20-23/2008


For these first releases I used the Apple iMovie Software. The window and each new item was pre-build individually in Photoshop.





Feine Zeichnung von Simba

28 12 2008




YouTube HQ and HD video in WordPress

13 12 2008

You can now embedd HQ and HD video in WordPress by extending the attributes of the URL, WordPress also allows you to specify the width and height of the player.

Above is a HD video and the wordpress syntax used was

youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPqcBitvscY&w=480&h=295&fmt=22

Note that the height should be set to 295 and not 270, as the YouTube control and progress bar is 25px high.

Follow this link for WordPress HELP.





YouTube video in HD quality

12 12 2008

With my video Week 48 – 2008 I started to upload the “News Week Video series” in HD quality.

YouTube has presently 3 level of image and sound quality:

normal quality
high quality (HQ)
HD quality (HD)

First of all the quality level depends on the file size, but to achieve a HD level your file format must be at least 1280 x 720 px for uplaod. Since News Week 48 I upload in this size, and the file size produced by Final Cut of this 2:09 minute long video is about 80mB.

Watching in High Quality or HD quality is another matter. You can set your YouTube viewer to allways watch in High Quality, and if the quality level is available at source it will play in HQ. But to view in HD, you must force the window, it does not start automatically in HD (yet).

So you will most likely see one of these selections at the right under the video:

hd7202

In a URL link, or through direct browser input, you can force YouTube to play the video in HQ or HD, if its available. For HQ, you add &fmt=18, and for HD you add &fmt=22 to the URL.

They should then look like this:

hd7203

As you can see on the following screenshot, the quality between “normal” and “HD” is enormous:

hd720p

Good luck.