Is there a way to cover a scrolling news crawl?

[Ben Hardy]

Recently, NBC Nightly News ran a 2-½ minute spot on the restoration of a local High School here in New Orleans that was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. They have given us permission to reproduce the piece and put it on the High School’s web site.

The problem is, that the local NBC affiliate ran the piece later (as for some reason it wasn’t broadcast in the Central Time Zone by NBC) and they inserted a scrolling news crawl in the broadcast.

Is there a way (Premiere, Vegas or some other program) that I can “cover” the crawl? Perhaps with just a black horizontal bar or by some other means.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Ben Hardy
H & G Recorded Productions

[Joe Lawry]

Scrolling at the bottom? yea just crop the bottom part of the frame.

[Stephan Ahonen]

A lot of news organizations will allow you to order a copy of the package, which should be minus the crawl and higher quality. But if you're just going to the web you can just crop off the bottom, you don't have to worry about broadcast resolution standards.

[Ben Hardy]

Thanks Guys, for your help.
We did as you suggested and cropped the bottom of the clip. I tried rendering in both QuickTime and Windows Media, but the video quality was about the same in both, rather poor when compared to the original broadcast video.

http://www.warreneastoncharterfoundation.com/nbc/

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Ben Hardy

Thanks Guys, for your help.
We did as you suggested and cropped the bottom of the clip. I tried rendering in both QuickTime and Windows Media, but the video quality was about the same in both, rather poor when compared to the original broadcast video.

http://www.warreneastoncharterfoundation.com/nbc/

Why not leave it as is, except do an overlay on the scrolling part with some kind of acknowledge to the contributing network.

[Andrew Dean]

quicktime and windows media are just containers for video. The quality of the image is dictated by the codec you use and the settings it is at.

The video you posted is aac/h.264. This is a nice codec set, but you have the data limited to 213kbits/second. As you increase this, the quality goes up. (and so does the size).

For the content of that clip, i dont think that super crisp video is necessary. Keeping the file size small might be intentional and appropriate. However, if you are interested in experimenting to get better quality, here are a couple suggestions (besides just cranking up the data rate):

You covered the text scroll nicely, but you have a black frame all around the video. It wont amount to much, but that frame is taking up data. If you cropped in to reveal just the picture, that might allow a tiny bit more data for the video itself.

When compressing, (assuming you have the option in your editing app or you have quicktime pro), you can go into the "custom" settings and allow for the clip to be a nonstandard size, like 307x204 (this is the actual image area of your clip.) If thats what you cropped to, then you'd choose the image size as "current". Sometimes if you are encoding a small resolution version of a movie and opt for the default frame size, you'll actually be scaling the video up a tiny bit in one dimension, which just adds mush.

If you do decide to crank up the data rate and make a 10 meg version, you might want to keep the 4 meg version for people without broadband.

Otherwise, the footage was very watcheable for web video. A good job, and an interesting school.

-A

Originally Posted by Ben Hardy

Thanks Guys, for your help.
We did as you suggested and cropped the bottom of the clip. I tried rendering in both QuickTime and Windows Media, but the video quality was about the same in both, rather poor when compared to the original broadcast video.

http://www.warreneastoncharterfoundation.com/nbc/