Friday, November 29, 2013

Video: Buildingshsu Project Promotion-thing (1998)

I’ve been going through a box of audio and video cassettes from the KSHU days in an attempt to digitize everything (the oldest of the audio cassettes turn 20 next year...) and I’ve found a few gems nestled in between projects for RTF 335 (Single Camera and Non-Linear Editing I) and packages for Cable Seven News.
About the name of that class: linear video editing is the process of selecting, arranging, and modifying images and sound in a predetermined, ordered sequence. Once a shot is on tape, nothing can be placed ahead of it without overwriting whatever is there already. If absolutely necessary, material can be dubbed by copying the edited content onto another tape but that causes a loss in generation which degrades the image and ultimately looks bad and could affect your grade. Even though the class name says otherwise, most of what we did in RTF 335 was produced in a linear fashion.

Non-linear editing arrived at KSHU around 1997 or so.  This editing style allows the user to access any frame and perform cut-and-paste type editing similar to how one would use a word processor. There are also a range of fades, transitions, and other effects that can be used though let us not forget Mr. Roe: wipes are cheese.  (Wait, that was RTF 163.  Never mind.)


Enough of the lecture. At some point late in the spring 1998 semester – after scanning Alcaldes from archives over at Peabody and having raided the Thomason Room – I took a diskette of photographs into the new non-linear editing suite and tried my hand at creating something. It was supposed to promote the original Beacon of Education: the Building of Sam Houston State University project but that program never got any further than...well, this promo. It was my first non-linear project and not a very good one: a lot of the photographs were taken from the SHSU website (hence the grainy resolution) and there’s no sound.

If anything it’s an interesting look into the archives.   Maybe.  Enjoy.

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