Obama election sells many more newspapers

Barack Obama’s historic win is driving the sale of lots of newspapers. This is what it looked like in the LA Times’ lobby on Thursday, Nov. 6, 2008.

–Myung

History in the making…for some

Barack Obama’s election victory was historic as he won by a landslide — in electoral college votes. If you compare the popular votes, a good portion of the country just didn’t buy what he was selling. Residents in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles read excerpts of Obama’s election night speech and talked about what resonated with them in this video I shot for the Los Angeles Times.

–Myung

How to cover a jump-cut or “the poor man’s second camera”

You’re editing a video piece and you’re faced with a static talking head or you’ve edited that talking head and now it’s full of jump-cuts. What do you do? By shooting HD and editing it on a standard definition timeline, you now have the extra resolution and the ability to zoom in on the talking head allowing you to hide the jump-cut or adding a little visual variety to a static shot.

This works best if you shoot the talking head as a medium shot so you can zoom in tighter during editing .

These instructions are for Final Cut Pro. There will be some similarities with Final Cut Express.

You need to shoot your project in HD. Capture and edit your sequence in HD like you would normally do in Final Cut Pro.

1. Once you have completed your edit, you need to create a new sequence – File_New_Sequence or Cmd-N.

2. Control-click the new sequence to change its setting to standard def.

3. Click on the bottom, left – Load Sequence Preset.

4. Select DV NTSC 48 kHz Anamorphic. Once you’ve completed this step, go back to
your edited HD sequence, copy all and paste it onto this SD timeline. Lower-thirds and some graphics may need a little tweaking. Now you’re ready to add different zoom levels to your shots

5. Double-click the footage you want to modify. It will show up in your Viewer.

6. Click the Motion tab. You will see that the footage is at 50-percent. That means you have at least another 50-percent of adjustment.

7. Adjust to size. I like to make the change noticeable so I’ll take it up to about 90. Use the slider or enter numeric values. You can go slightly over 100 (110-125) and it looks fine as long as it’s for the web.

Instead of copying and pasting in step 4, you can just edit your entire piece in SD at the very beginning. Up to you.

Render it out, compress it, get it on your server and share your video with the world.

–Myung