Just in time for February Sweeps, we have revamped our full closing credits, normally 40 pages of our full and mostly part time staff. This is a test, we may tweak this when we feel it’s needed. The music is the Morning Theme of Propulsion V2 from 615 Music. This was KHOU11’s early morning news theme upon the 2011 rebrand and to the Gannett/Tegna takeover in October 2014. It has a very classic 615 sound to it! It matches our branding of bubbling minifigures and hard news (the “Primary Theme” in Propulsion V2)
Tag Archives: Graphics
WHDH Getting a bit “Hot” (as in Hothaus) in the Graphical Sense?
I was watching WHDH-TV a couple weekends ago and the stingers that came across my screen reminded me of my influence…
If it wasn’t just one instance, it was another…
The Boston’s 7 News creatives are in house, so I suspect it was local. Basically if you can’t really tell, it’s heavy on wipes and keying into the next source of video.
The other thing that separates WHDH and sister station WSVN in Miami, for many years had focused on 3D CGI effects, to the point where it’s basically hit it’s peak, while WHDH over the same amount of time (late 1990s to present) focused on heavy computer-designed graphics with lots of effects (wipes, warping, etc.) Both stations share some of the graphical assets (like Watching Wall Street), but WHDH has been pretty much tame in terms of avoiding excessive in-your-face, that has still been the bread and butter of WSVN.
Also I think the people at WHDH seem to have a better grasp of the overall graphics. Both stations use VizRT (a database, graphical system) that requires both sides of the brain to execute decent graphics… WSVN has fell very short since they switch to Viz in the mid 10s. For gawd sakes alive, they still have “4:3 safe zones”, even if both stations are outputting widescreen.
#
BCOP 6 News Promo – Cassidy Hutchinson Testifies (June ’22)
It was one my best promos I produced despite voice over mismatches. The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson from the January 6th Committee hearings, was very “alarming” (was the editorial phrase 6 used) and the best use of making quick 15 second cuts. Notice the flash cut. We also added text with the “[POTUS Trump] lunged” to the steering wheel to get emphasis out.
The graphic is a PNG image, and we are doing what was typical for the early 10s, where you have the “4:3 safe zone” for standard def TV screens. The reasoning why we reintroduced this even though the station is fully 16:9? One word: Instagram. The way people are consuming media, we are certainly not going to do 45° rectangle of a resolution and if the 16:9 crop happens on Instagram, you still get the station’s logo and time for the tease.
Editing is not just cutting stuff up, it’s also an editorial decision too.
#
KVVU-TV – Fox 5 Las Vegas’ Latest Open
Fox 5 in Las Vegas has updated their graphics packages at least 3 times since a major change in early 2020. Since then, they have been sold by Meredith to Gray, which isn’t really the biggest caretaker of local media. Regardless, this station is pretty solid source for local news. Trust me, when I am in Las Vegas, I tune to 5 first before any other station. Of course this predated the new look with the awesome Propulsion Version 2 theme package from 615 Music.
This most recent update to the open just has high sex appeal, with really fast, snappy, alluring visual stimuli. It can only go down hill from here, right?
Just a reminder, this high sex appeal, is coming from a Fox affiliate! The logo originates from WNYW about 2 decades ago! Obviously the Fox 5 O&Os have ditched the logo, but it’s so ironic an affiliate can execute a really snappy, sexy eye and ear candy of a packaging. What did the O&Os do instead? Make the stations look like Sky News in Australia, or did Sky News take the O&O look from the states?
In case you want to see choppier version, but you can still get to see the sassiness
This is the best looking Fox affiliate in the country.
20 Years Later… Graphics Artists Learned about TV Burn-ins…
In the late summer of 2001, the graphics artists at the Fox News Channel introduced a new “bug” (industry lingo for the logo that’s featured in the lower third of an older TV set) to basically confirm what never had ever been confirmed before it. TV Sets can burn in. 
It was well known for computer related screens that if a certain type of text would appear in the same area for hours and days on end, that the bulky cathode ray tube screens would burn in. In fact over time, near the end of CRT TVs, “flat screen” which means no bulging or rounded curves on the corners, this effect was less harmful.
But the issue began for many Fox News Fanboys (and maybe some fangirls) when the network launched in 1996, nearly 5 years after major TV operations moved to Paintbox, Chyron’s iNFiNiT!, or Pinnacle’s Deko, and the advancement of Adobe’s Photoshop and the popularity of Apple’s Macintosh systems, this lead to the first time in television history that modern computer generated graphics would appear for longer periods of time. As a result, many reported burnins, and as a result Fox News Channel, created a 2-dimensional cube of it’s iconic logo that would rotate slowly, on a 10 second cycle.
Sometime in the last few years, FNC dropped the cube, and returned to a “static bug” on the lower third. The Fox Business Network would launch in 2007, but didn’t have a bug that would rotate, other than some glow effect. FBN shared FNC’s look in late 2018 or early 2019.
Can LCD or OLED flat panels be burned in? The answer is yes. And it can cost you money, even News Corp’s money. When Fox owned WFXT, they built them for all intensive purposes a new facility for their news in 2003. Three years later, Roger Ailes had ran the O&Os and introduced the O&Os the cube logos for their stations to mimic FNC. They paid $10 million in 2001 dollars to build out the expansion (2001 was the time of the project, while the fall of ’03 when they launched it.) News Corp is known to be stingy, but they kept their flat panels in their newsroom studio, even when the news wasn’t on, so you could see the old horizontal logo when the logo changed in ’06. The Beacon Street Studio also got damaged from the lack of proper brightness controls or just for the love of god turning the screens off when there’s no news programming!
In short: FNC’s and FBN’s creative people should research maybe doing a “dark mode” for their crazy primetime yakkers to prevent this from happening and prevent what happened 20 years ago to happen again!
Notes: A CBS This Morning Clip with a WCBS-TV Crawl
I am not sure for how long CBS News decided to upload clips directly from WCBS-TV’s air over the CBS Network feed. For at least a while the videos on YouTube show the morning news crawl from CBS 2 than a raw feed that the affiliates pick up.
I say all this ‘cuz I thought it came off from WBZ-TV’s air. Mostly because Channel 4 up here for many years typically ran a small crawl, skinny, and a Highway Gothic font. And if I remember right… the eye could spin around in 1D fashion. The font used on the CBS O&Os is actually Gotham, that’s almost identical.
I believe up here, the news crawl is a little bit bigger in size.
*