Some of you might have noticed clumps of my hair laying around the newsroom. I was tearing it out last week trying to get Susie Cable's in-depth up on the Web and helping 415 students out with their Web packages. But good news, things are back to normal, Sigh, and my head thanks me.
Producing an in-depth for the Web was a sheer act of determination. I spent several hours building two small layers, that were later integrated into a div tag, webifing newscasts, editing, linking, building a slideshow and coding the stuff into a workable, integrative Web site. And let me tell you, Blogger doesn't allow for much creativity, but I did my best and it turned out pretty cool.
Two things I've learned: div tags are not easy for me, and we need to find a better way to webify Final Cut files. To stress the Final Cut issue, TV 1 and TV 2 students currently edit and save their stories on Final Cut, a super program capable of much more than iMovie. Yet, iMovie is needed. It's a complicated issue, but I'll simplify by saying that the Final Cut QuickTime movies are just too big and iMovie QuickTime files are just right. Thus, the long and tedious process of exporting and importing and exporting again. With two four-minute newscasts, two other interview clips and one slideshow (that had to be imported into Final Cut), I spent an hour on just exporting and importing and converting. Ouch!
I survived the process and did well, but I must say my final product is no better than a lot of my classmates.
Some of their tricks of the trade include:
- Webify a package by putting a still shot of an interesting B-roll in front of the anchor intro.
- B-roll can be jazzed up with good voice over, like what Matt Rodriguez did on Jake Yadrich's story.
- Pull quotes can be made in Photoshop. (Save as gif, for better quality.)
- Ellyn Angelotti is webifing the print story by breaking parts of it up, posting those on separate blogs and linking from the main story page. It eliminates scrolling, and I'll be interested to see how it comes out.
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