Oct

10

Making Videos: Close-Ups Are Your Most Important Shot

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

In video and film production, shots are classified as wide, medium, or close-ups. That sounds very basic, and it is! If you are learning to make videos, thinking about how to view scenes in wide, medium or close shots is about like someone learning the ABS’s before learning to read.

A wide shot shows the entire scene, the close-up concentrates on a small detail and a medium shot is somewhere in between. Sometimes the precise definition depends on who is doing the defining.

All three are important but the close-up is by far the MOST important. It is also the type of shot most ignored by novices.

Most new video producers overuse wide shots and completely ignore the close-up. This mistake leads to boring videos that don’t draw in the viewer. Adding close-ups will greatly enhance the watchability of your video.

Especially with internet video, close-ups need to be frequent. That’s because someone watching video on the internet is probably staring at a tiny viewing area, not a wide-screen TV that fills the living room.

Watching internet video means that if you really want the viewer to SEE something, you must fill the entire frame with it. If you expect viewers to get a decent look at those earrings you are selling, you cannot just show a wide shot of two people on a couch wearing the earrings. The earrings would look like nothing more than a stray pixel!

Instead, zoom in there and get a tight shot that fills the frame with the earrings. Then the viewer can see the detail and beauty. Next time you are watching QVC or looking through a catalog, notice that almost ALL the product shots are close-ups.

There are two ways to get a close-up. One is to have the camera a distance away and zoom all the way in. The other is to place the camera very close to the object and use the wide angle setting. (Zoomed all the way out.) On most video cameras, this will kick in the macro-lens feature. Macro is what enables you to focus on something that is very close to the lens. Without macro, an object has to be quite a distance from the camera to be focusable.

Believe it or not, the second way will probably work better. Now this depends a bit on what kind of video camera and lens you have but in the majority of cases it is true.

Macro is very common on video cameras and it is a FANTASTIC feature. It lets you get extreme close ups, with the cameras as close as one inch. If you are that close, even an tiny object the size of a postage stamp will fill the frame. Now THAT’S a close-up!

Next time you are watching TV, notice what effect close-ups have on the storytelling. Chances are, the details and emotions of the story are told using close-ups. If you really want to see the anguish on someone’s face, you need a close-up, not a wide shot from across the street!

Close-ups also tend to be more interesting shots because they often give the viewer a perspective they don’t normally see. Anytime you give the viewer an unusual perspective, you have added to the visual interest and entertainment value of your video.

Bottom line is, make sure and use lots of close-ups in your next video!

Thanks for reading video production tips.
Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal

If you want to learn how to make video you will find all the free information you need at Lorraine Grula’s blog, www.VideoProductionTips.comArticle Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/making-videos-closeups-are-your-most-important-shot-1324329.html

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Oct

10

Lighting For Video – Using Compact Fluorescent Lights

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

Quality Lighting is one of the basic cornerstones of quality video production. Any picture, video images included, are really nothing BUT light, so how your light looks will largely determine how your shot looks.

One of the newest ways to light your video production is to use the new, energy-efficient bulbs known as compact fluorescent lights. I believe there are many reasons why compact flo will soon become the bulb of choice in video making.

Compact Fluorescent lights (compact flo as they are nicknamed) are becoming popular as the new “green” way to light your home. You can find the bulbs almost everywhere now. Even before home use of compact fluorescent bulbs became popular, compact flo were being used more and more in video production. They have several distinct advantages over traditional video lights. The advantages add up to saving money and having an easier time during production.

Traditional video lights are usually tungsten halogen. They get HOTTER than a firecracker. You can easily burn your fingers on them. I even burned a hole in the wallpaper once when I bounced the light just a little too close to the wall. Oops.

Compact Fluorescent lights on the other hand do not get hot at all. They stay very cool and are much easier on the eyes. That feature, in and of itself, makes me want to buy some. Sitting under tungsten halogen lights is so hot as to be dreadfully uncomfortable. anyone sitting close to them will be sweating up a storm unless the room is very cool.

Plus, if you look directly at the burning light bulb, tungsten halogen are so bright they leave spots. These kind of bulbs heat up the entire room FAST. That leads to having to crank up the air conditioner, assuming it is not a noisy one. If it is noisy, then it stays off so you get better sound and everyone just roasts. No fun! Tungsten halogen produce almost as much heat as they do light!

In addition to staying cool, compact flo lights also use less electricity than any other kind of light bulb. (They don’t waste any energy producing unwanted heat!) That’s one of the biggest things that make them a “green alternative.” Compact fluorescent light bulbs crank out an amazing amount of light for the wattage used compared to other kinds of light bulbs. You can get by with using about half the wattage you might normally need.

The light given off by compact fluorescent is nice, soft and diffused. The ones I have used are all colored balanced in the blue range, similar to sunlight. Standard fluorescent bulbs give off a green light so that is a big difference there. Compact flo would fit right in with sunlight and not mess up the white balancing of your camera like an orange tungsten halogen would.

Every compact flo light bulb I have ever seen is already diffused for you by the addition of white paint to the inside of the glass. That does not mean you never need to add supplemental diffusion but right out of the box you have some nice diffusion.

All-in-all, I think compact fluorescent lights are a fantastic addition to the world of video production equipment. I bet that guy whose wall I burned a hole in would agree.

Thanks for reading Video Production Tips. For more information on lighting and other video production topics, please visit my blog.

Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal

If you want to learn how to make video you will find all the free information you need at Lorraine Grula’s blog, http://www.VideoProductionTips.comArticle Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/lighting-for-video-using-compact-fluorescent-lights-1324345.html

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Oct

10

Video Production – White Balancing and Color Temperature Explained

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

If the color of the video you shoot is messed up, chances are high that the problem is either with white balancing the camera or the “color” of the light you are videotaping in.

These two things are a bit on the technical side when it comes to making video but they are not really that hard to understand. White balancing and color temperature are intricately related and any discussion of one will include the other.

White balancing is an adjustment you make to the camera that tells it what kind of light you are recording in so that the camera records video the correct color.

Small, automatic cameras always have automatic white balancing so you do not need to worry about it, but larger video cameras have manual white balance control which gives you better quality. Now a small automatic camera can easily be overwhelmed by different colored lights and not be able to handle it, but outside of changing your light, you would have no control over the situation.

WHY DO YOU NEED TO WHITE BALANCE?

Different types of light are different colors, and these differences are measured on what’s known as the Kelvin color temperature scale. Color temperature has no relation to any HEAT that might be given off by the light, rather it is about where the light falls on the color spectrum.

The camera needs to adjust itself, called white balancing, in order to shoot proper color. This might seem strange, because light generally looks white to us humans, regardless of its source. We do not see sunlight as blue, florescent light as green, or incandescent as orange, but they are.

Cameras see the light as it is truly colored but our brains and eyes sort them all out as white or else we’d feel like we were on a permanent LSD trip. (Wow man, everything is soooo colorful.)

Color temperature is the technical term for measuring the color of light. The Kelvin Temperature scale is used. Standard sunlight is about 5,400 degrees Kelvin. Shadowy sunlight is “colder,” about 7,400 degrees.

Tungsten halogen TV lights are orange and come in at 3200 degrees kelvin.
You do not really have to know these exact values to adjust your camera.

Most cameras white balance by pointing them at a white card that is reflecting the light being shot under. Then a button is pushed and the camera reads the white and adjusts all other colors relative to the white.

It is important to re-white balance your camera every time you change light sources and of course, every time you turn it on.

One advanced tip is to white balance on a card with a slight blue tint and you will get a nice warm orange. Not orange enough to look distorted, just orange enough to look inviting.

You can do the reverse by balancing on a slightly orange card. This gives you a blue tint, which might just be what you need to make that Christmas scene shot in July look cold.

To play it safe and get the truest color, it is best to shoot in one type of light. Mixtures can throw a camera off. For example, if you shoot inside under incandescent light your windows will look overly blue. Sometimes that can actually look nice, but often it looks horrible.

If you go outside to shoot without changing your white balance setting from taping indoors, your video is likely to be very blue.

If your camera has a manual white balance, use it every single time you change light. Also change it as the day lingers, because sunlight in the evening is much bluer than sunlight at noon. If your camera does it automatically, cross your fingers and hope for the best. Most do amazingly well.

One great feature to look for in more advanced video cameras is the ability to set white balance presets. They can help you change your white balance quickly, without having to go through the typical routine with the white card.

I hope this information helps you make better videos!

Lorraine Grula
Internet Video Gal

If you want to learn how to make video you will find all the free information you need at Lorraine Grula’s blog, http://www.VideoProductionTips.comArticle Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/video-production-white-balancing-and-color-temperature-explained-1324383.html

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Oct

10

MG WAY Corp’s Rss Feeds Generator the Service that is in Demand

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

It took just a little time for XML to become very popular format for information sharing across Internet. It is a standard practice now for major web resources to deliver their data in the form of RSS.

RSS is a family of web feed formats, specified in XML and used for Web syndication. RSS is mostly used by news websites, weblogs and podcasting but the tendency shows that everybody is trying to keep his information as RSS.

Web feeds are widely used by the blog community to share the latest entries’ headlines or their full text, and even attach multimedia files. Since mid-2000, use of RSS has spread to many of the major news organizations, including Reuters, CNN, PR Newswire, Business Wire, and the BBC.

Using RSS helps you to feed yourself with all kinds of information instead of constant surfing the internet for needed content. It can also help you generate unlimited content for your websites very effectively. To gather data wanted you obviously need a program or service, which can help you, generate RSS feeds on a given topic.

MG WAY CORP has developed a tool called RSS FEEDS GENERATOR which serves as a producer of various rss feeds from over 30 search engines and services such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Feedster, Blogdigger, Icerocket and others

It’s very simple to use. First, you need to specify the type of rss feeds you want to get whether search results feeds, news feeds, blog posts feeds, images feeds, media files feeds, tags feeds or others. Then you choose the services providing such information and after all you enter up to ten keywords for feeds generation. In a second you will get a list of quality RSS feeds you are interested in, separated by categories. Now you can put all those links into your RSS reader, use them in rss parsers, content generation scripts, blogging software or somehow else.

This is a simple tool for information processing in the form of rss feeds for people who get everything they need from the World Wide Web for business matters or for personal use. The thing is that rss feeds exchange is one of the steps for consolidating and regulating of data sharing across the Internet. The usability of RSS FEEDS GENERATOR can’t be overestimated. More over it is FREE for everyone to use.

Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to Internet Business, do please browse for more information at our websites.
http://www.allhottips.com
http://www.bookstoretoday.com

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/mg-way-corps-rss-feeds-generator-the-service-that-is-in-demand-1322678.html

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Oct

10

Search on Google for Pixel sites everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

Not a day goes by when I don’t get an email or see a site pushing yet another pixel advertising site but are these really a good advertising venue or is everyone just jumping on the band wagon expecting to make a few quick bucks or even get rich.

A search on Google for pixel sites gives 22,7000 results. The rage started when a 21-year-old from England launched an advertising site where you paid $1 per pixel of advertising and the page was divided into 1,000,000 pixels. The advertising sold out and the guy made a cool million dollars! And get this the last remaining 1000 pixels were sold on ebay for a staggering $38,100!

The original site – The Million-Dollar Homepage was launched on 26th August 2005. The guy then emailed all his friends and told them to pass on details of his site to their friends and so on…and then he sold his first 400 pixels for $400. At this stage the site was getting around 100 hits a day so he started to contact the press. An IT news site picked it up and ran an article resulting in 2000 hits an hour, it got ranked by Google and the hits went up to 35,000 a day.

And as the ball started rolling the visitors to the site increased, more pixels were sold, the guy made more money and the press interest increased. The site was getting over 100,000 unique visitors in 2 days and the UK nationals ran stories on the site. Then the story found its way into US papers, TV appearances followed and so on…. Publicity generates publicity. The site was getting hundreds of thousands of unique visitors and advertisers were seeing a good click through rate for their adverts.

Further TV interviews and radio interviews followed, Reuters ran an article on the site, as did the Wall Street Journal. With the last few remaining pixels auctioned on eBay the guy made is million dollars on 11th January 2006 – less of course any costs he incurred.

And then of course, the site was hacked and money demanded (which the FBI are currently investigating) but even this led to more media interest.

By the end of October 2005 hundreds of copycat sites had started to spring up. Now there are thousands of them if not more. Have you visited any of these – most have no adverts on them, no traffic and no one in their right mind would choose to advertise on them.

So why have thousands of others thought they could hop on the bandwagon and make a quick $1,000,000? This guy had an unprecedented level of media attention, driving thousands and thousands of visitors to the site.

Even the guy behind the Million Dollar Home Page pixel site acknowledges that it is not a lasting business idea but a novel one off idea. There is no long-term business concept and it will only work once. How long it will take those jumping on the pixel bandwagon to realise this – who knows!

Did you find this article useful? For more useful tips and hints, points to ponder and keep in mind, techniques, and insights pertaining to Internet Business, do please browse for more information at our websites.
http://www.allhottips.com
http://www.bookstoretoday.com

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/search-on-google-for-pixel-sites-everyones-jumping-on-the-bandwagon-1322682.html

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Oct

10

Tech Tips 101 – How to Speed Up Windows XP the Easy Way

Posted by thegeek | Posted in Tech | Posted on 10-10-2009

Windows XP was introduced as an upgrade to the older Windows 98 systems and this meant a sort of increased speed and reliability on the end user. Alas, Microsoft once again made claims that it could not live up to. Soon after its release, many users were complaining about slow downs and crashes on their brand new Windows XP machines. While it was understandable that an initial release tested on many different forms of machines were bound to give problems, the months and years following that and tens and hundreds of security releases and software updates still saw some of the same problems remain. But we cannot just point the finger and Microsoft and be done with it.

We have to understand that there are many factors involved and that the end user must hold some of the blame when it comes to the problems faced in Windows XP. This article will discuss the ways in which anyone can speed up Windows XP the easy way. Because of the complicated nature of the new operating system, there has to be a level of diligence when watching over the day to day operations of the computer and the OS. For one, disk defragmentation is a good recommendation for those who seem to experience high levels of computer slowdowns in their day to day use of Windows XP.

Because of the complicated nature of the OS and the fact that programs are installed causes the matrix to be confused in certain times, especially with bad shutdowns and program crashes. Information will eventually get fragmented and Windows will have to search and defragment the data whenever the end user tried to execute a program. This slows down the operation to unacceptable levels and this requires that the end user defragments the disk drive at least once every 2 weeks. This we, there is assurance that the hard disk is not fragmented to unacceptable levels. Also, always update the Windows XP system, turning on automatic updates will ensure that your version of Windows XP is up to date with the latest features.

This will prevent problems like mismatched software or no compatibility with new programs or even hardware devices that you have just purchased. Think about purchasing cheap memory upgrades or even reconfiguring your CPU to optimum levels. Delete programs that you are not using and bring up the task bar to see what programs are unnecessarily eating away at system memory just by staying in the background. One more way to speed up the Windows XP is to download a reliable registry cleaner and start to ensure the health of the registry. Bad keys, command lines and zero values left behind by bad installs and malware are the root causes of Windows XP slowdowns and you can avoid all this and speed up Windows XP the easy way by just getting a reliable registry cleaner from the internet.

With these tips, you can increase the speed of your XP machine, hassle-free, and cost-free. All you need to do is download a program, and keep a regular maintenance routine.

Click Here to improve computer performance. Logan Albright helps thousands of people optimize their computers through a proper computer check up. He is an authority on troubleshooting computer problems at http://www.pcaholic.com .Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/computers-articles/tech-tips-101-how-to-speed-up-windows-xp-the-easy-way-1322695.html

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