Creative Media Productions - Frequently Asked Questions

1. How effective is a production?

In order for a production to be effective a large number of questions have to answered. Who is your audience? How do they learn? What do they already know about the subject? What is it you are really trying to tell them? Do they want to know this? You need to inform your audience but not underestimate their knowledge on the subject.
Creative Media Productions has put together a Program Planner that will help you answer these questions. Contact us for a copy.

2. Who could use a production?

Almost anyone wishing to communicate to another group or organization can use video production. The most important question to ask is: is this the best method of communication to use for this person or organization? Video production is a very powerful tool, but it is not always the only way to communicate to every audience.

3. What does it cost to produce a video?

There are a large number of variables that come into play for each project. These variables include the number of shooting days, talent, music needs, amount of editing needed, graphic and/or animation requirements and project specific packaging requests. Although budget is a very real concern, it should never be your first consideration. Productions have been done for a small budget, but they don’t necessarily communicate to their intended audience. When considering a production, it is far more important that you actually connect to you audience. If it costs more than you have budgeted, sometimes it may be best to wait until you have sufficient funds before proceeding.

4. What are the benefits of a production?

The most important benefit is that in a very clear and succinct way, you get your message out. The whole idea is to let people know about you, what you’re doing or what you have that they need. A production can bring an emotion to a boardroom that would not otherwise be there. If your audience relates to your production then they will gain the knowledge you are presenting to them. Without having to say so, your clients will get a feeling that your company is offering a fair deal or is a company they wish to do business with. Because companies are busy, they have a limited time to hear presentations. A production can give them a brief history and show a milling process for example, all in a minute. This allows more time to present in person and move towards a close, all within a one hour meeting.

5. If I use a computer to edit my project, can I get it to VHS or DVD?

At Creative Media Productions we edit on computer and output to whatever format is required. We record the necessary materials on Betacam SP, the broadcast standard video cameras. We then digitize the raw footage and edit in the computer. This is called non-linear editing. The advantages of digital editing are many: no generation loss, instant removal or addition of material, and is much quicker than linear editing, to name a few. When the project is finished, it can be outputted to DVD (recommended) or VHS, or any other format that you require. (See the following discussion: What are the advantages of using DVD’s)

6. Can I take information from a variety of sources (VHS, BetacamSP, Hi8, 8mm, Slides, Stills, CD, DVD, PowerPoint, Film), edit it, and then bring it all together onto one medium?

Yes. This is one of the many benefits of editing a project on a non-linear editing system. Raw material takes many different forms. Once gathered, it can be digitized and entered into the computer.

7. Why should I put my video production onto DVD?

DVD is quickly becoming the digital video distribution format of choice. Its broadcast quality, large storage, and multimedia interactive capabilities have made DVD the accepted next generation video medium. The disc has enough storage space for seven hours of CD-quality audio or several hours of high-resolution video production. The concept of delivering videos on DVD has undeniable appeal. No more grainy images for your sales staff, trade shows or training programs. Broadcast quality video burned to DVD gets you broadcast quality presentations. Easy to use and considerably smaller than VHS tapes, it is becoming the format of choice.

Playback for a DVD is accomplished by using a DVD Video Player, a Laptop Computer with a DVD drive or a DVD-ROM player in a computer. Most businesses have the capability to play a DVD right at the office, making it a preferred format for playback. A salesperson’s laptop can become their portable office and DVD player. A DVD disc is cheaper to manufacture, occupies less shelf space, and never needs rewinding.

Your corporate video production could be divided into index chapters allowing the viewer to jump to selected parts of the video that holds value for that particular viewer. Various product categories could be assessed quickly without the need to view the complete catalog. Navigation through the catalog is easily accomplished by specifying chapter points on the DVD disc that launch the footage for each product. Imagine giving a presentation with the ability to access information on the disc instantly, no fast forwarding or rewinding of a tape to find the information. Training could then be tailored to the needs of the audience. The DVD disc could also have a link to your web site to give additional information or updated pricing. To present effectively, one needs on the fly, instant context-sensitive access to any point on the footage. Unlike a VHS tape, a DVD device can be mounted on a network for distribution from a single point. DVD makes significantly lower packaging and postage costs.

8. What are some of the advantages of using DVD as your final presentation vehicle?

Technology is changing rapidly. The next generation for presenting video production is here. Companies should now be considering putting video production onto DVD. DVD is a very powerful economical format to deliver your message. Here are a few of the reasons:

Updateable - As company information changes, the authoring process makes it easy to add or delete materials.

Interactive - This allows your clients or audience to directly select a specific area of interest without having to rewind or fast foreword. Not only is time saved but also the information can be easily updated. Great for sales, newsletters, tradeshows and training.

Multi-lingual - It is possible to create any number of language tracks that will help you expand your reach into a global audience.

Amalgamate - A greater number of productions or information can be copied to DVD eliminating the need for bulky VHS tapes.

Durable - DVD’s last longer than VHS tape and do not degrade or breakdown. Experts do not know how long the shelf life is but speculate 25 or more years.

Portable - DVD’s are easy to carry, store and play. In today’s business world, most offices have a DVD player built into their computer. For sales staff on the road, all that’s required is a laptop computer with a DVD player to present their information. And of course the laptop has many other uses for the salesperson.

9. Glossary of Production Terms*

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Analog - (1) Adjective referring to the use of information in a continuous, rather than discrete (digital) form. For example, an analog telephone transmits and receives voice transmissions as a continuous voltage type of wave. (2) The world as we experience it is primarily an analog world. Any kind of information (e.g. sound speech, pictures) is transmitted in continuous waveforms that the human senses are able to receive and to understand.

Betacam - A portable, professional camera/recorder analog videotape recording system using 1/2-inch tape cassettes. Betacam was developed by Sony and is marketed by them and several other manufacturers. Some digital versions exist such as the Digital Betacam and Betacam SX.

Betacam SP - A superior performance version of Betacam. SP uses metal particle tape and a wider bandwidth recording system.

Captioning Service - A business that encodes closed (or open) captions into a TV program.

CD - (Compact Disc) - This is a mass marketed 13 centimeter, laser-encoded optical memory storage medium, on standards owned and laid down by Philips and Sony. It contains up to 650 Mb of data. Since the original music coding standards, other standards have been developed for data storage such as the CD-ROM, CD-I (a Philips interactive CD standard) DVD etc.

Colour Correction - A process in which the colouring in a television image is altered or corrected by electronic means.

Component Video - Most home video signals consist of combined (composite) video signals, composed of luminance (brightness) information, chrominance (colour) information and sync information. To get maximum video quality, professional equipment (Betacam and MII) and some consumer equipment (S-VHS and Hi-8) keep the video components separate. Component video comes in several varieties: RGB (red, green, blue), YUV (luminance, sync, and red/blue) and Y/C (luminance and chrominance), used by S-Video (S-VHS and Hi-8) systems. In other words, (1) separate color video signals that have yet to be combined. (2) video signals carrying separate colors on separate transmission wires.

Composite Video – (1) Utilizing only one transmission wire for transporting three-color video signals. NTSC video is an example. (2) Video (picture) signal with the sync (timing) signal combined. (3) Utilizing only one transmission wire for transporting colors that are combined (encoded) with the brightness components of the picture.

Compression -1. The process of electronically processing a video picture to make it use less storage or to allow more video to be sent down a transmission channel. 2. The process of removing picture data to decrease the size of a video image. MPEG-2 incorporates compression.

Digital - (1) Any kind of analog information (speech, pictures, text, etc.) that can be scanned and transformed into binary digits. (2) A way of storing, converting, and transmitting data in binary numbers (1s and 0s.) Analog data must be digitized (turned into digital data) before computers can do anything with it. Basically it refers to information in a discrete, rather than continuous (analog) form. Digital signals are virtually immune to noise, distortion, crosstalk, and other quality problems. In addition, digitally based equipment often offers advantages in cost, features, performance and reliability when compared to analog equipment. This process virtually eliminates generation loss as every digital-to-digital copy is theoretically an exact duplicate of the original allowing multi-generational dubs to be made without degradation.

Digital Audio Tape - (DAT) - DAT is currently the standard professional digital format for 2-track digital recording. DAT was sold to at the consumer level but wasn't a commercial success. As digital recorders have no tolerance for clipping, using a DAT recorder takes a slightly different knack. The results can be worth it; however, as the DAT format offers the same resolution and dynamic range as CDs. Digital recorders can record for up to 3 hours on a tape.

Digital video effects - manipulation of a TV image or any portion of it in a manner that affects its shape, size, orientation, or position on the screen.

Digitize - (Digitise, Digitization) - To turn information from an analog format into a digital format. Modems and a fax machines do this (as a fax machine also has a modem.)

Dub - A duplicate copy made from one recording medium to another.

DVD - (Digital Versatile Disk) - (Previously called Digital Video Disk) - It's a comparatively new type of CD-ROM that holds a minimum of 4.7GB (gigabytes), more than enough for a full-length movie. The DVD specification supports disks with capacities from 4.7 GB to 17 GB and access rates of 600 Kbps to 1.3 Mbps. These are backward compatible with CD-ROMs. This means that DVD players can play old CD-ROMs, CD-I disks, and video CDs, as well as new DVD-ROMs. Newer DVD players can also read CD-R disks. DVD uses MPEG-2 to compress video data.

DVD-R - A rewritable DVD.

DVD-RAM - A rewritable DVD.

Enhancing - Improving a video image by boosting the high frequency content lost during recording. There are several types of enhancement. The most common accentuates edges between light and dark images.

FireWire - (a.k.a. Firewire) - The term used to describe the connection between Digital Video (DV) cameras/players and DV capture cards. You need Firewire if you want to work with DV and remain lossless. Firewire or IEEE 1394 is the standard for transmitting compressed video data used by DV format digital videocassette recorders.

Generation Loss - When an analog master videotape is duplicated, the second-generation copy is usually inferior in some way to the master. This degradation appears as loss of detail, improper colours, sync loss, etc. Limited frequency response of audio/video magnetic tape and imperfections in electronic circuitry are the main causes of generation loss. Higher performance formats (such as 1-inch) exhibit much less generation loss than more basic formats. Digital formats make generation loss negligible because each copy is essentially an exact duplicate of the original.

IEEE 1394 - Serial Interconnection Bus (iLink) - (a.k.a. FireWire Bus) - IEEE 1394 is a high performance serial connection. A high-speed serial digital interface standard enabling data communication between the digital STB and DVD Players or D-VHS recorders. Transmission speed is scalable from approximately 100 Mbps to 400 Mbps.

JPEG - (Joint Picture Experts Group) - A standard for the compression of still graphics (particularly pictures.) With video compression, the standard is most often MPEG. Like the MPEG standard, it includes options for trading off between storage space and image quality.

Key Light – The term used to describe a subject's main source of illumination. When shooting outdoors, the key light is the sun.

Lavaliere Microphone – Small microphone worn around the neck or clipped to clothing. It can be hard wired or radio transmitted.

Linear Editing – Editing using media like tape, in which material must be accessed in order (e.g., to access scene 5 from the beginning of the tape, one must proceed from scene 1 through scene 4). (See Nonlinear Editing)

MPEG (Motion/JPEG) – MPEG is a digital compression standard for moving video images that allows the images to occupy less memory or disk space. Like the JPEG standard, it includes options for trading off between storage space and image quality.

MPEG-1 - Standard for coding of moving pictures and associated audio for digital storage media up to about 1.5 Mbps. Its quality is comparable to VHS video (which is what most North Americans have in their homes.) This standard is designed to work at 1.2 Mbps, which is the data rate of CD-ROMs, thus the video could be played from CDs. The quality however is not sufficient for TV broadcast.

MPEG-2 - Standard for coding of moving pictures and associated audio, typically using the 4 to 9 Mbps bandwidth range (but can produce data between 1.2 and 15 Mbps.) It provides broadcast-quality video and includes separate specifications for audio and video. This is sufficient for all the major TV standards, including NTSC and HDTV.

Multimedia - When different types of media are combined in a presentation such as video clips, text and audio bites. Applications include presentation, editing, interactive learning, games and conferencing.

Noise - A general term used in electronics to indicate any unwanted electrical signal, unrelated to the original signal. Video noise is generally manifested as snow, graininess, ghost images or picture static induced by external sources such as the power-line grid, electric motors, fluorescent lamps, etc. In audio, noise is generally manifested as hiss and static.

Nonlinear Editing - Nonlinear refers to not having to edit the program in the order of start to finish to keep the continuity of the program intact. Thus if you change one part of the program, it won't effect the impact of the flow into the next segment of that show or program. Its main advantages are: 1. Allows you to reorganize clips or make changes to sections without having to redo the entire production. 2. Very fast random access to any point on the hard disk (typically 20-40 ms)

NTSC - (National Television System Committee) - The NTSC is responsible for setting television and video standards in the United States (though it's the standard used in Japan, Canada and Mexico.) (In Europe and the rest of the world, the dominant television standards are PAL and SECAM.) The NTSC standard for television defines a video signal with a refresh rate of 60 half-frames (interlaced) per second. Each frame contains 525 lines (486 are visible, the rest are part of the VBI) and can contain 16 million different colors. The NTSC standard is incompatible with most computer video standards, which generally use RGB video signals. However, you can insert special video adapters into your computer that convert NTSC signals into computer video signals and vice versa. When someone refers to a television signal as a "NTSC signal" they're generally talking about an analog signal used throughout North and Central America (and/or Japan.)

Offline - When a computer is not connected to another computer and/or network. Also refers to video editing.

Online – When a computer successfully connects through a network of some kind, to another computer or computers. . Also refers to video editing.

PAL - (Phase Alternating Line) - A video signal standard. It's the analog TV format used in most of Western Europe. It's used in other major areas such as China, India, Australia, Western Europe and South America. Its analog TV's counterpart used in North America is NTSC. It uses 625 lines (575 are visible) and has a 50 Hz Frame Refresh Rate. PALplus is the highest quality process for analog transmission.

PIP (Picture In Picture) - A digital special effect in which one video image is inserted within another allowing several images to share a single screen.

Post Production - All production work done after the raw video footage and audio elements have been captured. Editing, titling, special effects insertion, image enhancement, audio mixing and other production work is done during post-production.

Rendering - When a graphics program creates the image you've specified.

Resolution - Measure of a picture's detail; horizontal lines of resolution in TV are counted across the screen (in a test pattern) and vertical lines of resolution, from top to bottom

SECAM (Sequential Couleur A'memorie) - The video standard used in some European and surrounding countries. In countries using the SECAM standard, most video production is done using PAL and converted to SECAM prior to transmission. (See NTSC and PAL)

Signal-To-Noise Ratio (S/N) - The ratio in decibels (dB), of an audio or video signal, between the signal's maximum peak-to-peak signal voltage and the measured voltage of what remains when the signal is removed, (i.e., the ratio of the signal to that of the noise). In video, the higher the ratio, the less snow is visible. In audio, the higher the ratio, the cleaner the sound.

Snow - A general term used to describe interference in a video image. It manifests as random coloured or black and white dots.

Special Effects - Artistic effects added to a video production in order to enhance the production by creating drama, enhancing the mood or furthering the story. Special effects may vary from the limited addition of patterns or the mixing of several video images together, to sophisticated digital effects such as picture compression, page flipping and three-dimensional effects.

Sweetening - Improving the quality of an audio or video signal electronically by perhaps adding sound effects, captions, laugh tracks, etc.

Timeline - In nonlinear editing, the area in which audio and video clips are applied, typically giving duration in frames and seconds.

Time Code - A time code window along side of the video window can displays the total running time of the program, and the time it’s played so far. A digital code number recorded onto videotape for editing purposes. When decoded, the time code identifies every frame of a videotape using digits reading hours: minutes: seconds: and frames. Each individual video frame is assigned a unique address, a must for accurate editing.

Tele-Prompter - A device for displaying large, readable text on a partially transparent screen for video production. The tele-prompter uses a monitor mounted under the camera lens, facing up, and a mirrored glass, which reflects the monitor's image toward the talent. Since the camera shoots through the mirrored glass and the mirrored glass is transparent to the camera, the talent can look directly into the camera lens as they read the script from the glass.

Tracking - The angle and speed at which the tape passes the video heads. Due to small differences in head-to-tape alignment between VCRs, it is sometimes necessary to adjust the tracking control on a VCR when playing a tape recorded on another deck.

WAV - The format for storing sound in files developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. Support for WAV files was built into Windows 95 (and its upgrades.) WAV sound files end with a ".wav" extension and can be played by nearly all Windows applications that support sound.

White Balance - An electronic process used in camcorders and video cameras to calibrate the picture for accurate colour display in different lighting conditions. (i.e., sunlight vs. indoor incandescent) White balancing should be performed prior to any recording, typically by pointing the camera at a white object for reference.

*(Referenced from Videonics Video Glossary and The Online ITV Dictionary)