Archive for the ‘Techniques and Practices’ Category

Capturing the Marriage Proposal for Generations

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

A marriage proposal is a once-in-a-lifetime event that a couple will want to remember for a lifetime. Even more, a couple will want to share the event with others not only in the days and months before the wedding but even years down the road.

Imagine recreating scenes from that proposal and telling the details of it to show on cinema! The proposal would be immortalized for generations even yet unborn.

Presented here is the story of a marriage proposal made by Merrick Miranda to Katie Darnell. As you watch the story notice first the tender moments presented before the discussion where Katie and Merrick spend time together enjoying nature and each other’s presence at a scenic park with mood enhancing timeless music. Here the viewer becomes acquainted with Katie and Merrick so that when viewing their story a heart-felt joy will be experienced.

By way of interest, please notice what some may take to be a paid advertisement for a seafood restaurant.  While it may have the appearance of a paid advertisement, the purpose is in memory preservation for the couple. Ten or more years down the road seeing these things will bring back cherished memories. We are doing more than telling a story. We are capturing memories for generations.

House Audio vs Cinematic Audio

Wednesday, July 29th, 2009

There are important distinctions that exist between house audio or public address and cinematic.

House audio must be optimized for understandability in a room that has dynamic auditory characteristics. Sometimes people are coughing, children may be excited, someone may be sitting next to sound absorbing curtains while another may be sitting against a bare wall reflecting sounds, and the list goes on. To optimize understandability a public address system will therefore have a narrow band of frequencies it will put on the loudspeakers usually centered around 3,000Hz, optimum for the human voice. Cinematic audio, or audio for television, serves an audience of just a few people in a relatively small room. Under these conditions the audio is much easier to understand. This leaves room for a much wider band of frequencies enabling a more natural and rich sound.

Capturing audio from a variety of church sound systems we have noticed the practical effect of all this. The sound we typically capture from a house sound board sounds fine in a video until you compare it with audio we captured at the same event with our own microphone systems.

Please view below a sample video illustrating the differences between a typical house audio system and audio for cinema. In the video you will see a pastor delivering a wedding message to a couple during their wedding ceremony. The pastor is double miked wearing both a house microphone and one of our wireless microphones.

The video is in HD high definition so if your bandwidth is too slow click on the HD icon to switch to standard definition. Please bear in mind that this is raw video and not necessarily representative of the quality we release.

Hiding Mistakes You Made at Your Wedding

Friday, July 17th, 2009

It is extremely rare that a wedding or event can transpire from beginning to end without somebody making a mistake somewhere. What is worse is when something unfortunate happens during a significant event that you had wanted to cherish for a lifetime. Your videographer can only capture what transpires and cannot turn the clock back to have your wedding party perform their part again without the mistake. After all, your videographer is only human.  …or is he? Maybe he has abilities far beyond those of mortal man, is able to jump across tall buildings with a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet, etc.

Technology allows us to do amazing things in the edit room that just might persuade you that your videographer has abilities far beyond those of mortal man. In the example to follow we captured the lighting of a unity candle by mothers of the bride and groom. The mothers made a mistake. They were not supposed to actually light the unity candle. Their task was to light two individual candles which the bride and groom would later use during the wedding ceremony to light the unity candle. For the plain and simple video of the ceremony we will just show what happened at the wedding. However, when we develop the music highlights video, artistically composed from events of the entire day, we want to avoid triggering unfavorable memories and center on developing those which warm the heart and will continue to warm the heart ten or more years down the road.

So, what are we supposed to do? We could simply leave out the mothers lighting the candles which would be ashamed as this is symbolic of families joining. What we did was not change the story but simply remove a part of the image which would draw attention and the viewer’s eyes to a mistake. Viewers will still know what happened but at least the showing of the candle lighting in the music highlights video will not be highlighting a mistake.

Please watch the twenty-seven second video below where you will see the actual footage of the candle lighting and then you will see how a portion of that same footage was used in the music highlights video.

Closed-Captions Added to Your Video

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

At W. Cardone Productions we can add subtitling in a very cost-effective manner to the video we produce for you as well as adding it to any existing DVDs or video that you may already have.

Please contact us for a quote but usually for a half-hour video with continuous speech to be captioned, we can add attractive and highly readable subtitles for $800. For the budget minded we can usually cut that cost in half if you will supply us with the text.

When supplying text there is no need to assemble into paragraphs or any other formatting. Keep it simple since the raw text is all that we can use. Any special formatting will be discarded. However, you can include with the text a sample of text formatted as it is to be shown in the finished product. One or two sentences is all that we need.

Closed-Caption or Sub-Text Usage Overview

Thursday, April 30th, 2009

 

It is important to distinguish between the technical terms “Closed-Caption” and “Sub-Text” or “Subtitling.”

 

The term “closed” in closed-caption indicates that not all viewers see the captions—only those who choose to decode or activate them. This is distinguished from “Sub-Text Captions” (sometimes called “burned-in” or “hardcoded” captions), which are visible to all viewers.

 

For the techno-speak enabled: For all types of NTSC programming, captions are “encoded” into Line 21 of the vertical blanking interval – a part of the TV picture that sits just above the visible portion and is usually unseen. For ATSC (digital television) programming, three streams are encoded in the video: two are backward compatible Line 21 captions, and the third is a set of up to 63 additional caption streams encoded in EIA-708 format.

For those techno-challenged: What the above paragraph means is that special programming standards exist which rigidly define what closed-captioning is capable of doing and how it will appear to the viewer. If we develop closed-captioning for a video, it will be subject to those limitations. The standard for closed-captioning was written decades ago and consequently has some limitations that are today unnecessary.

With Sub-Text or “Subtitling” the sky is the limit as far as how the text will appear to the viewer. The trade-off is that the viewer cannot interactively turn off the subtitling since it is burned or hard-coded into the video. For this reason the closed-caption standard was not incorporated into the Blu-ray standard.

Here is an enumeration of some of the advantages Sub-Text facilitates relative to closed-captions:

  1. We can use a proportional spaced font which results in much more efficiency and improves readability.
  2. The font color can be defined whereas with closed-captioning it is simply white on a black background.
  3. The characters can have drop-shadow to improve readability.
  4. Older television decoder electronics had no font decenders (applicable to letters such as j, g, p, etc.) making it wise to use all capitals. This limitation is not applicable with sub-text.