News story text in documentary

I am making a documentary with Final Cut Studio 2 and a Sony Z1 (DV CAM mode). MAC Book Pro 2.4 Intel, 4 gig RAM.

I want to show a number of articles that I have seen on the internet--Yahoo news, NY Times etc. What is the best method to obtain the greatest text clarity? I want the camera to zoom and move over the articles as is often done in documentaries. I have used the Command+Shift+4 method on the Mac to copy the stories (PNG format) and then inserted them into the Timeline. I have moved the articles with keyframes to simulate camera movement. The articles look fine until I move them or zoom in, then it looks cheesey?the text is not as clear as in well-produced documentaries.

What is the best workflow to get a sharp picture as the camera moves over text? I don?t mind jumping through hoops to get the BEST result. Is the problem that I am not working from hard copy of the articles?

> The articles look fine until I move them or zoom in, then it looks cheesey?the text is not as
> clear as in well-produced documentaries.

Most internet downloads would not be large enough for you to do any zooms on, especially densely packed text like articles. Do you actually have the rights to the articles?


www.derekmok.com

Derek:

There is a good deal of music throughout the documentary. All is being used legally.

I have NOT aquired the rights to any newspaper articles that I show. Like many, I am not sure where "Fair Use" ends and stealing starts when it comes to brief excerpts. I planned to do a final review before release regarding such issues.

Are you thinking that with the rights I could obtain higher resolution copies from the publishers? One option I wondered about was printing the articles as text, then scanning them at a high resolution......I dunno.

You'd have to scan them at a higher res in order to pan and zoom. No way you could download. Besides it would look more like a newspaper article if you got the real thing and scanned it rather than get it off the internet.

As for rights you simply write the newspaper's holding company and beg.

Michael Horton
-------------------

you could also try a screen-grab software such as (the affordable) iShowYou.

[store.shinywhitebox.com]

this is what a lot of people use to make training videos, so they have to zoom in & out.

i have it, but never do the zoomy thing, do don't know!



nick

>Like many, I am not sure where "Fair Use" ends and stealing starts when it comes to
>brief excerpts.

[www.lafcpug.org]

Although not a legal definition, but on paid projects, usually not, as you are making money off someone else's work.

For student/non-profit projects/family videos.. It can be a very fine line, and a whole lot to read up on and laws vary from state to state, country to country. However, if you are using copyrighted works, you are likely to run into distribution issues further on down the line (which also includes almost any form of broadcasting).

You'll need to consult a lawyer who specializes in copyright laws to explain the various charters more clearly and precisely.



www.strypesinpost.com

The questions about rights are important ones. If this is a paid job, consider getting some standard legal language that indemnifies you against any copyright-infringement claims. "Don't shoot me, I'm just the piano player," basically, except in legal-ese.

As for the how, there are two ways. New York Times reprints are available for a very reasonable fee; these can be scanned at high resolution and used as stills. Depending on how you want to use them, you might make your workflow and your life overall a bit easier by taking a cue from Errol Morris, and using cuts of extreme close-ups of the reprint ? a word or phrase here and there ? rather than doing a camera move over them. You could scan the whole page at high resolution, then use Photoshop to chop out 2K chunks of it as stills.

If you're stuck using Web pages, go download a GREAT little program called "Paparazzi!" (The exclamation point is part of the name.) It lets you render out a Web page as a PDF, which can be scaled in Photoshop to any resolution. The graphics and images fall apart, obviously, but the text scales limitlessly. Once you've got PDFs, you can treat them like high-resolution scans, rasterizing them in Photoshop to absurdly large sizes, then chopping out 2K stills to use in your timeline.

I've used this trick several times. It's tedious as all get-out, but that's why the good lord gave us assistants.

Speaking of which, does anybody know anyone who's looking for a job as an assistant editor? My last one stormed off shouting something incoherent about not making any more damn stills.

>Speaking of which, does anybody know anyone who's looking for a job as an assistant
>editor? My last one stormed off shouting something incoherent about not making any
>more damn stills.

[www.lafcpug.org]

But Mike will kill ya.



www.strypesinpost.com

The most common way to handle text from documents or newsprint is not to use the document itself for legibility, but rather simply as a background, and then add the quotes from the page as an overlay in large, legible type, usually black on white, or whatever color the document is.

BTW, there is no legal or copyright restriction on quoting from a newspaper or other publication (with attribution). Copyright restrictions are on reproducing a document, which is one more reason not to use the document itself in full as text, even if you could do it decently on video, but as a piece of background. Headlines can be displayed and quoted with attribution without copyright restrictions.

I work on a lot of documentaries in and around PBS, and we have never ever tried to use an article without licensing it from the publisher. I wouldn't want to get into a legal battle over this, so unless you have consulted a lawyer and are certain that you are within the law, I wouldn't try it for anything that will be distributed or broadcast. The fees you would pay the lawyer for consultation might end up costing as much as the licensing (depending on how many headlines you use) so it may not be worth it.

For the doc I'm editing right now, we are using a few headlines and have discovered that the NY Times and Washington Post are about 5 times more expensive than the LA Times. So if it is a biggish news event, it will be worth your while to inquire about licensing fees with different publishers and then do your research accordingly. And if you've never done this before, be aware that the fees are definitely negotiable. Give them your sob story about how you're making an educational documentary and there will not be any profits for you from distribution, whatever you can think of.