By S. Scott Grizzle M.A
When I first started studying broadcasting and video I was given some great tips on how to help talent look their best. Over the years I have tweaked and found new tricks and best practices to help the talent but also the overall production look great.
Apparel (Color Safe)
You will see this mostly on men wearing a new tie, suit or something like that. For women it's usually a new outfit or top that hasn't been tested under the lights or no thought of how it might look. If there is any pattern that is very thin or complex then it is bad for video and the web in general. This is true for Progressive and Interlaced video. Many believe if you shoot progressive you won't have this issue. But you will, just to a lesser degree. One little trick for men is to just have a simple jacket and with women to just have some covering to help reduce the effect. The Moiré Effect can help can user fatigue. But the easiest way to not get this is to wear a simple dark but bold color.
Still with apparel is to be color safe with clothing and jewelry. Many men think i need the Power Red tie. The color red in Western culture means power and passion. These are useful traits while being in front of the camera. However your red tie may look assertive in person, to the camera the red will bleed when next to neutral colors (like your white dress shirt or your black suit jacket). The result will make your face look flushed.
There are some color safe and non-color safe colors for video. Colors to stay away from like hot colors of red, hot pink, green, yellow and purple will never have you looking your best. This is due to the bleeding and the processing of the sensors of the camera. The camera’s sensor doesn't work like our eyes or process like our brains. So with high contrast images they will need more light to process the darker colors and then process the brighter colors which may cause overexposure of those colors. If the color white is predominant the opposite will happen and the colors will be underexposed.
So to be color safe the general rule is to do more cool blues, pastels and natural tones. These colors are in the camera sensors sweet spot and in the center of the exposure settings vs the extremes of the blacks and whites. This will allow the camera to have an easier time to process which will allow the color to look good.
Since the camera sensor has been brought up and the processing it makes sense to jump to lighting. In video dark areas and shadows are bad. Most people don't really understand how much lighting is needed for a great looking production. In television production there is enough lighting that a white shirt or sign almost glows. But with more light it allows the sensor to process things faster and cleaner. There are low light sensors but those typically in the cameras you will be using for production. So you may be thinking I’m not doing a TV show. I'm doing a Webcast, Webinar or just a training maybe even just using a webcam. The more lighting you have the better it will look. However maybe you don't have the money or room for lighting. Are you out of luck? Should you give up now?
Lighting
You don't have to spend a million dollars or need lighting all over the place to achieve your goals. A few high quality bright lights strategically placed and then getting creative with some reflective boards. You can use reflector boards, white cardboard or butcher papers. This will give you the overall fill of lighting to help whiten up the overall. If you have some extra money and time i recommend adding in some gels to the lights or diffusion. This will help make the lights less harsh but still saturate the picture. You need the scene or room to be full of light not a light box. You don't want shadows or any hard lines but with some lighting you can have some fun and make the room look really cool too.
So with the extra lighting and color safe apparel there really isn't much left to cover. Really with apparel only two things left. Jewelry and makeup. This isn't just for women but for guys too. There are sometimes some jewelry that are just too shiny or reflective. As just mentioned in the section on lighting this can be good if it’s planned. But if it’s not planned it can be distracting and annoying. So the general rule for Television and video is to keep clothing and jewelry simple. Too much Bling is a bad thing. It can create extra reflections on a camera sensor so there may be a halo effect or aura look. This is because there is light hitting a sensor of a camera that is can't process and it doesn't know what to do. What’s even worse if you may not notice this on the camera if every mild but once you start encoding and processing this for the web this issue will be exaggerated and make the overall image look horrible and possibly not useable. So keep jewelry to simple and clean.
Since shiny isn't a good thing this is true about skin-tone. For any major event or broadcast a light covering of foundation will help. This will help remove any shininess and make the presenter look all that much better. Every news anchor is wearing some foundation, every politician before a major speech is doing the same thing. For a simple webinar or webcast no you don't need this but if you are putting time and money into a multi camera event it's at least something to think about.
Graphics and Powerpoints
The last few tricks or points are more of production and preparation related. The person(s) or producer running the event or show should get any graphics or power points early from the talent or presenters. This is notoriously difficult in some of the associations where the presenters want to make changes up until the very last second. But it's a best practice to be able to verify the power points work and are clean plus have time to fix before the speakers time to present. To many times i have seen a presenter walk up to a laptop with a thumb drive with their presentation and the laptop doesn't recognize the drive or the file. Now the presenter is scrambling to fix. If this is a live event this is very amateurish and you will lose viewers. I’ve also seen other issues where presenter tried to use their own laptop and the podium didn't have the correct connectors for them and again they didn't look ready and when they finally were ready the power point wasn't formatted properly for video or the screen.
Video can be tricky with power points and graphics. Not every font or animation is going to look great. It's highly recommended to keep power points and graphics simple and easy to read. Small or crazy fonts aren't going to translate well to video and it doesn't matter what size screen you have. Even on a 100 inch 4K UHD TV 12 point font is going to look to small and look like garbage plus look like too much information. A lot of people love to use crazy or cool fonts they use in Microsoft word. But fonts like Sans-Serif (without flourishes) tend to work a lot better than serif fonts that have flourishes. This will help reduce the chance of having the characters bleeding together. It's typically better to be a bit of a bolder font than a very narrow fonts which may lead to what is called jitter. This is very annoying and again leads to viewer fatigue.
With getting the graphics or power points early we need to make them monitor or title safe. The area of the video or graphics will appear is often referred to as Title Safe or Action Safe. This is roughly the 80 percent of the inner portion of your screen of your production monitor. The extra 20 percent or over-screen is to give you a presence feeling. Otherwise the video makes this weird boxed in feeling like you are missing something. It would be like icing only the very top of the cake but not any of the sides. Because looking from down you only see the top of the cake. Even if you couldn't see the cake 100 percent at the one time you would just get the feeling it's not right. It's the same way here. You want to have room to show graphics and have movement but make them feel like they are trapped in a box.
Keep Simple
If you are doing a multi-camera shoot or production then it’s very important to keep the switch of cameras simple. You don’t want to just change every 5 seconds. You need to build a scene or just wait till there is a reason to change cameras. There are some aesthetics reasons to switching and timings that should be taken into consideration also. But what is more important is the switching effects. You will probably notice a theme by now. Keep it simple. Fades, cuts and dissolves work fine. You really don’t need anything else. you don’t need to use some time warp swirling aerial cross fade to change from camera a to camera b. A simple quick dissolve is perfect. People don’t realize how bad some of these crazy effects really look to general viewership. Plus if this is for a webcast or a webshow the encoding process is going to make those look like hell. Just keep it simple.
Promotion
So now that you have all of the tips to make a good looking show here is one last one. It’s very important for audience generation to place the player way in advance. You can have a count down or have a playlist with some highlight videos running with a countdown saying when the event is going to going to start live. If people know where to go they will go there. If they go to your page and see no player they will think they got bad information and probably miss this event.
Like anything advertising and promotion is key to an event. First thing is to start building buzz. Put your player on your site and play some video’s or a sizzle reel. Blast out some out some emails. Or if you have a platform like Ustream you should really contact your account executive and start a promotion plan. Even better than that is contact them about the Streaming Media Award Winning LiveAd. This is best Audience Generation tool on the market.
Stream Early and Stream often
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