A Guide To... Putting an image on to the Vision Mixer

As I said in my last blog, we had a problem with all of our green screens being deleted in some way. In this blog I will tell you how to put an image on to the SD card for the Vision Mixer and I also have the pctures of our backgrounds on here so you can take them from here whenever you need to. Lastly, we now have no backrground for WINOL Life so a new one will have to be made if you carry on with it next year. You may want to make a new background for everything so that they all link. These are not perfect, especially the WINOL bulletin background as that is only a captured image but it was OK for our last bulletin as we had no time to make anything else.

"So, my only idea for making sure that we had a background for the following day would be to look though all our tapes of WINOL to find a spot where there was no-one being filmed and just an empty room with our background. It took five tapes but I finally found a tiny spot, about three seconds long that had no-one and nothing in. I captured this, grabbed it, then saved it to the desktop.

To get the picture on to the SD card you have to open it in photoshop. You then have to change the image size to 720x576 pixels. You then need to save this as 24 bit.bit map or 24 BMP. Put in the SD card and move the background in to the file marked, 'images' and you're done. When it is put into the vision mixer it should download properly. My next blog will have the Sportsweek and WINOL backgrounds in for any future use, best to back everything up."

Hope that is OK. Here are the pictures of the backgrounds for WINOL and Sportsweek but please keep in mind you may not be able to drag them straight on to the SD card, you may have to go through the above process. Also there is no photoshop on the computers in Tab9 but there are in the MMC if you can nab a computer.

WINOL - 7 December

Au revoir my beloved WINOL. My very last show and it was much more emotional than I first thought. For the last 11 weeks I have been counting down the shows as things have gone wrong every week and I was not enjoying WINOL as much as I used to. I expected to just feel relief when I finished and we packed up the studio but it does feel a bit like the end to an era. I have been on production for WINOL for the last three semesters and I have learnt so much. I know every part of the gallery and the studio and I really do hope that this will not be the last time I am in a studio.

The show went well, Dan directed, I was on the sound board, George vision mixed and Justina was on autocue. I think it is quite ironic that I was on the sound board and enjoying it when only three weeks ago I dreaded it. The show went so smoothly, everyone was relaxed, happy and calm. The packages were great, and the presenters did really well too. It felt bittersweet because we were all tired and just waiting for the end but on the other hand I felt quite sad that it was all finished. My three semesters have flown buy, it feels like only yesterday that I was working with third years before me on their last WINOL. The only advice I can give to anyone working on WINOL is; enjoy every minute. From the complete lows to the ecstatic highs, enjoy everything because it will all be gone in the blink of an eye.

The only problem we had this week was that our green screen was no longer on the SD card and ALL of our work had been deleted from the computer in the studio. When I say ALL I mean absolutely everything, even the routes and backgrounds to the files were deleted. Suspiciously Media still had all of their work on the computer though, and in fact had more work; plastering the entire desktop. I worked on getting back the green screens whilst Jack focused on putting the beginning sequence together.

Luckily on the Tuesday I found all of our music for the opening sequence in ten second parts which helped Jack as he then only had to find the video of the opening sequence and put the two together. I remembered that Chris had saved the Sportsweek background on Flickr so after trolling it for a while I found the background. The WINOL news bulletin background was completely lost though. I realise that this is partly our fault as we should have backed everything up but I do not think it entered any of our minds for a moment that we may loose all of our work.

So, my only idea for making sure that we had a background for the following day would be to look though all our tapes of WINOL to find a spot where there was no-one being filmed and just an empty room with our background. It took five tapes but I finally found a tiny spot, about three seconds long that had no-one and nothing in. I captured this, grabbed it, then saved it to the desktop.

To get the picture on to the SD card you have to open it in photoshop. You then have to change the image size to 720x576 pixels. You then need to save this as 24 bit.bit map or 24 BMP. Put in the SD card and move the background in to the file marked, 'images' and you're done. When it is put into the vision mixer it should download properly. My next blog will have the Sportsweek and WINOL backgrounds in for any future use, best to back everything up.

That was my feat for this week. Getting our green screens back and having them working in time for our bulletin at three.

Please find above my very last WINOL Bulletin show. Enjoy.

I wish good luck to everyone that is carrying on with WINOL or just starting. I hope I have guides that are relevant for you on my blog. Such as my OB Kit and Tricaster post and my next one with the green screens in. Best of Luck.

WINOL - 16 November

This week mostly went to plan. We started rehearsing later than normal and so there were some points we were not as sharp on as we could have been. We did manage to start recording at three but there was a lot of post production for Jack.

William decided about 2pm that we were going to have Rebecca Gray, our News Editor as an in-studio guest to talk about unemployment in the UK. She did break it down locally eventually but Angus said that we should have started with that as there were a lot of statistics. I think she did really well though as this was decided very late in the day.

We should have had another camera on Rebecca too. I was on vision mixing so I only had the choice of a two shot. We should have had the two shot, a shot just on Rebecca and a shot just on Gareth. This would have made it a little more interesting.

George, our director was great this week. Especially with the late changes he took them in his stride and worked really well.

We had two reporters in Estonia this week. Justina Chlad and Aimee Pickering. They did really well in getting some footage for us and sending it back to us. They had an angle and a story they wanted us to follow but somewhere in communications this was lost. We reported that Shira Pinchuk was in Estonia to win an award for her documentary called, Karet. This was a fatal error on our part as Shira was not there to win an award but to simply showcase her work to other artists. We also did not accredit Justina or Aimee for their part in the story when I think we should have as they were acting as foreign correspondents.

Angus said that we were right to put in a story about the Estonia Festival. This is because it is something positive for our university and so we should support it. This is the same as putting in a story our editor wants no matter how much we may disagree with it.

We messed up a couple of times in the gallery. I very stupidly clicked on to VT in the middle of a link. I have no idea why I did this and it annoyed me greatly. I normally know exactly what is going on and am compeltely confident, if a little nervous. I am putting it down to only a 30 minute rehearsal as I was not confident at all and was actually a little flustered.

No WINOL next week due to rehearsals for our big November 30th production. I will of course keep you updated with this too.

Critical Evaluation of Winol - 17th November

I loved Winol this week. This week everyone reproduced their packages, making them better. This meant that there were no new news stories. We produced four or five bulletins with everybody swapping and learning roles in the Studio and Gallery for each one. However we did produce a documentary style bulletin of the student demo of last week. It is really great to watch so head over to winol.co.uk if you want to watch.

I have already learnt how to do the script, auto cue and the VT's but this week I learnt how to present, vision mix and PA. Look out for a blog soon on 'how to' do all of these different parts of production. I've always said that I do not want to be in front of the camera and that I would be no good at it because I do not think that my voice is very good. I was pleasently surprised, however that I loved it. I was relaxed and laid back and the auto cue wasnt half as hard as I thought it would be to read. I defintely think that everyone should give it a go.

Vision mixing was a bit harder than the rest as I had to pay attention to when the VT were coming on and what camera we were going to next but I loved doing this too. I do not think that when I did it there were any black holes but I did realise that I needed to press the green screen button a second quicker than the button for camera 2 as they were coming up a bit weirdly.

I have always dreaded doing PA as I'm not that great with numbers. As in if a package is 1.13 I find it a little hard to get half way etc. However, you guessed it, I enjoyed this too. It was not as hard as I thought it would be to coutn and I got them all correct with the help of the stop watch on my phone; who knew that was one there. The package timings wern't correct for a few of the packages though and this meant that when I told Charlotte, the director, to count down she was about 5 seconds late. This can be corrected if the timings were perfect and the people doing packages left some time at the end so it did not go to a black hole.

Overall though I really enjoyed Winol this week and can't wait to get back in to the Studio next week.