One of the best ways to suggest credibility and news worthiness is to build your informational video around a news-style setting. In this blog, we’ll give you some tips to save you time and expense in making that happen.

BizVid Communications is a video production leader, located in San Diego, California. While we will use an actual news set that we customized for our client, Global Check, to illustrate our points, a simple chair or chairs configured around a table or counter will do. In those instances it may come across more like a news interview setting instead of a news desk, and that’s okay. Your “on-camera” talent should take on a more demonstrative, factual tone in their delivery, rather than a light, conversational approach. This suggests that the information they are delivering is newsworthy and worth the viewer’s immediate attention. Read more →

Today we are going to learn how to create a title known as a crawl…similar to what you will find in a television newscast where the information crawls across the bottom of the screen.

First is to position your mouse on the menu bar on the word “title.”  This activates a drop down menu where you  are given three choices.  For the purpose of today’s lesson, we’ll choose default crawl.  Once selected, a new title box appears and this is where you will give a name to the title you are creating.  For our purposes, we will call this ‘tornado” since I am going to type a tornado warning for our fair city.  Click okay to bring up the Title Pallet. It is within this pallet that the title creation takes place.  Here we can choose font size, font color, crawl options and things like that.

In the tool pallet, select the “T” which stand for type tool.  Then, place your cursor in the workspace and begin typing the text that you want to crawl across the bottom of the screen.  In this case I will type “TORNADO WARNING FOR THE CITY.”

In our example the font is too large. To reduce the font size, select the font size box and type in 50%  then click outside the box.  Doing so reduces the font to 50% of the original size.  Next to change is the font style.  Our font of choice will be Aaron.   Click it and the change takes place.  Next, is to position the title in the lower third of the screen and to do this, place your mouse over the arrow in the tool pallet to activate the selection tool.  Then click and drag the crawl anywhere on the screen.

One last item of business is to give instruction as to how the crawl is to come on and off screen.  Click on the roll/crawl options box and check the two boxes: start off screen and end off screen and we are done.  Click the X at the top right to save.  When you do, the title appears in the project pallet and is ready to bring into the timeline.  Click and drag the title into the timeline and there you have it.  Render to play.  To speed up or slow down the title crawl, expand or reduce the length of the clip.  You have learned the simple way of creating a crawl.  Congratulations.

Bill Gruber, partner in BizVid Communications, recently returned from Orlando, Florida where he was a volunteer at the Student Television Network Affiliate Convention. The convention is an assemblage of middle and high school students from around the nation, from schools with film and broadcasting programs.

This year’s theme, “U CRE8 THE MSG” brought outstanding training by industry professionals, dynamic national contests, and many opportunities for students and teachers to network with their peers and celebrate their passion for production.
During the three day event, the kids are challenged in a variety of ways. There are numerous contests such as “Live Reporting” where they have 45-minutes to write and produce a story; “Documentary” to be written and produced in 10-hours and “Music Video” which is an 8-hour exercise…to name a few. There are enrichment sessions like “Anchor Tips;” “Auditions: Getting it Right” and “Copyright Law for Student Media” to name a few. And this year’s keynote speaker was Natali Del Conte Morris a host on CNET-TV and a contributor to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.

Next year, the STN convention will be held in Dallas, Texas.