Tech Know Episode 304 Intro Remake

To better understand how Eric Franks does his read on the Tech Know Show and how Charlie Burket does the editing, I thought I would remake the beginning of Tech Know show 304.

Note: I am missing the audio bed and sound effects, I still have not purchased the Digital Juice products yet. I also have not tweaked the audio yet either.

I learned a ton of stuff from both Eric and Charlie. I gotta say Charlie has the more time consuming process of the two. Editing that 50 second spot took hours! I am sure Charlie could hammer it out much faster than I can.

This started out as a test to see how well my laptop teleprompter using free software would work. I think it appears I am looking into the lens when I am actually looking at the laptop right below the lens. Does this look like it to you?

I am 6′ 3″ so I couldn’t use my tripod to get the camera to my eye level so I used the shelves and put the camera and laptop on blocks.

I learned:

• Smiling more than you think you should is a good thing
• Reading it a little slow and hitting the words you want the viewer to take in is a good thing
• Squinting to see the teleprompter is not a good thing.
• It is a good thing to get the read just right and then edit around the timing of the complete audio track (thanks to Charlie for this).
• I was a little out of focus on my last test I published (thanks Charlie for this)
• Bouncing my head up and down is not a good thing – nervous habit?
• Charlie loves to have movement is all b-roll no matter what it is!

I need to learn:

• Keyboard shortcuts on Vegas to make my editing life better.
• I have to play with the smoothness parameter on the event pan and zoom, but I think it looks pretty good in this test.
• I need a better preview window on Vegas, working with the AVCHD files suck because you have to put it in draft mode to get the audio to sync and when you do that the preview window looks like crap! Anyone have any suggestions on this? I have a very fast computer that is 5 months old with dual graphics cards in tandem.
• I placed all the b-roll on the top “Text” layer, I am sure that is not right – but it worked. I need to know what is correct.

I am looking for comments on how to improve my editing skills, any comments are welcome.

Please keep in mind that I have spent $2,000 on creating these videos, I still need to buy stuff from DJ too so I can’t spend too much more $.

So I am thinking of using the same jump back intro and audio bed for my new show, I just need to figure out how much it is going to cost.

I am doing online training videos for property related web sites. My target audience is real estate agents and property managers to better improve their sites. Just like DJTV I will be pushing my property templates that they can use to get their sites looking more professional.

I am using SnagIt 8 for the screen captures. I think I have it set to 15fps and I am not sure how to change that to 30fps.

Some of you might be wondering what is up with the solar blog. Well this is my play site and not where the training videos are going, I could find another place for it so I stuck these posts here.

Here is the video below, just click anywhere to play it: