Feedback on Sports intros, please

[futball8]

Hello all,

I just finished high schoolspringsports preview shows for local cable – any comments,constructive criticism, ideas, suggestions would be great. Thanks!

All shot with consumer cam (Canon FS200), ghetto lighting, green screenfootagekeyed in FCP 6, final editing compositein PPro CS3.

All three projects were completed intwo days.

Baseball: http://www.srcn-mi.com/node/123

Track and Field:http://www.srcn-mi.com/node/121

Softball: http://www.srcn-mi.com/node/122

Thanks!

[pseudosafari]

I prefer the flip used between players in the baseball one to the ones used in the track and softball videos.

The keying was well done.

Sound: maybe it’s the internet, but it was a bit raspy when volume went up, and the music was a bit loud in spots (ie the coach’s interview in the baseball video).

(I’m by no means a pro, though.)

Other than that, looked great to me!

[composite1]

Futball,

I’m with Pseudo on the ‘flips’ working with the baseball intro only. The drawback using the more dynamic transitions is that it quickly looks ‘gimmicky’ and gets old fast. Another thing was the images of the players and coaches were really small. The should be larger to be more identifiable. Lastly, when you get to the coaches commentary the whole thing was begging for you to cut to B-Roll of the players in action. Even if you may not have stock footage from their last season, shots from their current practices would have broken up the ultimate ‘blah, blah, blah’ from the coaches and emphasized what they were talking about.

Music and mographics wise, I didn’t have any problems with what you selected. The only thing I would have changed would have been to recolor the graphics to their school’s dominant color. The blue worked for baseball, but that green and orange were getting on my nerves. The music choices were just fine for sports and gave your spots the ‘ESPN’ feel to them. It was a shame that you had cut the mographics so to the music so well but didn’t continue that with B-Roll like I talked about earlier.

Sound wise, it was a tiny bit muddy in spots but you would have caught that only if you had a ‘second pair of ears’ to listen to your tracks before you did a final output. Overall I think you did a good job. With B-roll, no gimmicky transitions and some minor tweaks to the graphics and sound these spots will be nearly indistinguishable from far more expensive setups.

[futball8]

Thanks for the feedback guys – anyone else?

Composite1 – I’ve always had a terrible time with the team color – cardinal red. It always seem to bleedinto everything else I put it next to. For instance, if i re-color a motion background tobright red, it will bleed into my keyed footage and sort of blur the lines between the two. Once it get out on the localTV channel, all red edges are blurred and indistinct. Thanks for the input concerning b-roll – will definitely implement that next time.

[composite1]

“I’ve always had a terrible time with the team color – cardinal red. It
always seem to bleedinto everything else I put it next to.”

Futball,

I hear you. Red can be a pain, bright red alone is asking for trouble. If you’re using Phoshop or AFX you might try a gradient mask and have red on one end and the team’s second color on the other. You’ll definitely want to bring down the saturation on the red (just don’t make it pink!) so it won’t bleed. Another thing is to select for NTSC safe colors. If your NLE has built-in scopes, you can check to see if your red signal is out of parameters and you can adjust it from there.

[XTR-91]

Very nice intro and graphics composition. However, as Composite said, the flips become abit ‘gimmicky’ and monotonous. Somewhere close to the last part contains a nearly two-minute talking head, though once again, the graphics contribute a lot. All videos seemed to be patterned in this way. I wouldn’t classify this sort as a “boring” talking head, but comes close to what people would classify as “too long for what it is”. It mostly depends on your audience, though. If it’s all local, the students/viewers would be more interested. You’d have less probability to an open audience (e.g. strangers who normally wouldn’t consider).

[Grinner Hester]

Even with a consumer camera, you’d be amazed how far some good lighting will go for ya.

[composite1]

“Even with a consumer camera, you’d be amazed how far some good lighting
will go for ya.”

Amen brother!

Even some of the $150 to $300 ‘happy cam’s’ or Flip types get a surprisingly good image that Grinner say’s would go pretty far with proper lighting. Just merely having a reflector or a bounce card in the right place can make a significant difference.

[Author]

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