Monday, September 23, 2013

Plugged to Death

The Importance of Media Training
by Sean O'Grady


Watch the Video
Product and sponsor promotions occur nearly every day on television and radio station across the globe. It's an inescapable part of the news business; a facet anchors and reports reluctantly accept.....except when an interviewee goes "Plug-Wild," as Mets pitcher Matt Harvey did on The Dan Patrick show last Wednesday.

The video of the Over-Plugged interview, shown here, is not only hard to watch, but also tough to stomach.

About a minute into the sports interview Harvey abruptly tells Dan Patrick he's called into the program to talk about his sponsor, not his throwing arm.

What ensues is a baffling exchange. One that casts a negative shadow upon Harvey and his sponsor. What's sad is all of this could have been easily avoided with a minor dose of media training - a topic we at Firstline know a thing or two about.

To avoid a Harvey-like interview meltdown our team of former television and radio news anchors recommends the following:

1. Be Positive and Smile during interviews. It comes across...even on the phone or radio.
2. Answer each question in an accurate, brief and clear fashion.
3. Subtly insert your sponsor or product plug into the response of one of your questions.
4. Website shout outs, phone numbers and thank you's always work well as closers on final questions.

Overall, our team recommends that anyone who is about to participate in a television or radio interview spend a few moments media training with their staff or PR professionals. Even the most experienced public speakers are sure to benefit from the practice.

You can learn more about the interview by watching the video above or by reading Mike Oz's report on Yahoo! Sports.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Revving the News Engine

The assignment was pretty standard - create two stories and a b-roll reel in four hours while on location.
by Sean O'Grady

No problemo! After all, TV news crews do this all the time. They roll up their live trucks, swiftly grab their b-roll and soundbites and then the photog ingests and cuts while the reporter writes, voices and applies his or her beautiful makeup. If all goes well, they dial in their live shot, feed their footage and make their deadline.

But what happens when you don't have a Live Truck.....must continuously shoot an entire four hour event....and still need to make a made-for-TV-news deadline?

Well, that's part of the reason why we call ourselves a "Creative" agency.

In order to successfully create our three stories, stay within budget and meet our broadcast deadline the Firstline team keyed in upon two areas to help our clients save time and dollars: Ingest & Distribution.

Ingest:
The TV News model mentioned above benefits from speed. The process is streamlined. The team shows up, shoots basic b-roll, conducts one or two on-camera interviews and then they're out. All-in they've shot a maximum of about 30 minutes of footage.

Not so with continuous coverage. Four hours of HD footage and interviews, even at 720/60p, translates into well over 100 GBs of footage. In short, it's an ingest nightmare. An editing team could easily lose hours in the AVCHD conversion process alone.

To combat this issue our teamed opted to use ATOMOS Samurai digital recorders. These puppies saved the day. The Samurais encode directly into Apple ProRes, meaning no AVCHD conversion or ingesting. What would have taken hours turned into a 5 - 10 minute drag and drop process from the Samurai cards directly into external hard drives and then ultimately to our two field Final Cut Pro 7 edit stations.

The Samurai is an outstanding field production tool. You can learn more about it here.

Distribution:
No Live Truck means no satellite feed. To overcome this our team opted to use HighTail.com for delivery to news stations and a mobile hotspot for upload. Wireless Internet is no substitute for a solid T1 land line, but we found we could obtain a 17 MB upload speed when we placed the hotspot outside without any overhead obstructions.

The Samurai drives saved us time. HighTail spared us costs and the end results was two stories and a b-roll created on time and on location.

Not bad for a day in the park.

You can learn more about Firstline Creative and our News Engine teams by visiting our website: www.firstlinemedia.com