Video Critique: Harry Potter News Package

Looks pretty good. I'm tired, so I'm not in the best state to judge, but the one thing I notice now is, that you could have possibly mirrored the musical theme at the end, with the same theme playing for a few seconds at the beginning.

 

Good job! I see a lot of improvement from the last one you posted.

I think it's 90% what you'd see on the 6:00 news. A few small suggestions, though:

Your voiceovers are a bit hard to hear over nat sound sometimes, maybe knock the background noise down 5 or 6 decibels and that should do it.

When you were on camera, you were kind of dark compared to the background, when you should really be brighter to sort of pop out. A lot of the journalists I work with use a sun gun mounted on the camera, I think that would help (don't use it at full power, but you know. )

But yeah, it was good! Better framing than last time for sure, better camera movements, good!

 

Audio was the biggest problem for me, the background noise needs to be dampened and in some cases the audio from shot to shot should be blended. Also when the reporter is in the foreground the shot was too dark. Otherwise it was very good.

 

I would agree that this video was done better than the last. Keep up the good work.

The audio is the main issue. I'm not sure if it is necessarily that the background noise is too loud, it's just that your voice over needs to be much louder. Maybe using a normalize filter on the voice over track might help you out a lot.

When you come on the screen, it isn't just that you are too dark, but it looks like you are also out of focus. If you camera has a way to lock the focus in or - better yet - a manual focus, do that.

Just out of curiosity, what programs are you using to put this together?

P-Worm

 

You may want to look into color correcting your footage a bit. You can do this in Final Cut Pro fairly easily, but if you want to step it up a notch (a BIG notch) you can give Color a whirl.

P-Worm

 

Just out of curiosity, what camera are you using?

 

Oh! Extra points for that, then. Isn't this for a college class? Seems like they should give you an over-the-shoulder camera, at least a DSR-300 or something.

 

I thought it was good. No suggestions apart from the ones stated above. They were good ones.

Nice job. Felt like I was watching the 10:00 news.