Basic Television Terms - A Video Dictionary (1977)

Panning. [Music] Panning. Panning. Panning. Tilting down. Zoom in. to the title card. Basic television terms, a video dictionary. Got it. Okay. Hello, I'm Leonard Nemoy. If you know me, it's probably from the acting I do in front of television cameras. But this time, I'm going to be behind the camera and you're coming with me to see how television is produced. Number 11. Three. Get me Lynn. Please keep two over one preset. I'm doing it differently. Andrew and John will be three radio effects ready to black eyewitness news with Stan and Lyn Joiner. Joe and Wayne Walker with sports. Let's say there are two kinds of television production. Big budget television and little budget television. Big budget television is the kind used for most broadcast television with big studios, big cameras, and big crews. Little budget television is little cameras, limited facilities, and small groups of people working together. Little budget television is the kind of production used for education, industry, law enforcement, sales work, just about any field you can name. [Music] A lot of people are already working with television, so let's start by seeing who does what. In big budget television, there are large crews starting with the producer. That's the person who supervises production, bringing people together and making it all happen. And you have writers and production assistants. Then there's the director who directs the camera people and chooses what to show on the screen. Sitting next to the director, you usually find the technical director who actually pushes the buttons and supervises the technical work. Out on the studio floor is the floor director who stands beside the camera and relays the director's instructions to the people in front of the camera. We may come out. Here we go to one. And then there are the engineers. Maybe knock the coma down a hair. Yeah. They set the lights. They run the cameras. Okay. They supervise the video or picture and the audio or sound. They run the videotape recorders and later they work with the producers staff to edit the video tape. Keep it way under. Still playing. Still playing. Sneak it in again. Little budget television has little crews. The equipment is designed so that almost anybody can operate it and so that production can be done by as few people as possible, maybe even one. But no matter which way you're producing your television, little or big, the steps you follow are the same, beginning with [Music] pre-production. You may start with a treatment, a short outline of your idea, describing it as you might see it on your television screen. Or you can start right with a script which usually has picture directions on one side of the page and sound directions on the other. This is a story board, another kind of script. It has picture and sound directions and above them drawings which indicate the shots to be used. [Music] Shots are described in different ways. The most common is apparent distance between the camera and the subject. Here, for example, is a long [Music] shot, a medium shot, a medium close-up, and a [Music] close-up. When you're actually directing television, however, you usually say wide shot instead of long shot because it shows a wide angle of view. And this is usually called a tight shot instead of a close-up. Almost all television cameras are equipped with zoom lenses that zoom in or tighten and zoom out or widen. Sometimes shots are identified by camera movement. This, for example, is a panning shot when the camera pans to the right or the left. A tilt shot when the camera tilts up or [Music] down. This is a dolly shot when the camera dollies in towards the subject or dollies back away from the subject. [Music] And this is a tracking shot when the camera tracks or moves with the subject. Shots can also be identified by function. An establishing shot, for example, is a shot which establishes the location or mood of a scene. An insert shot is a shot made for inserting into previously taped material. Usually, it's a close-up or a cutaway to graphics. And finally, shots may be described by what they show. Here's one of the most often used shots in television. It's called a talking head shot, and it's a shot of a head talking. Okay, so if you've got your shots ready, your program or tape planned, it's time to move to production. [Music] All production is either live or taped. Live is when the television program is seen as it is being made. Taped is when a television program is recorded for later or repeated [Music] viewing. All production is either studio production done in studio or location production done outside a studio in the real [Music] world. All production is either multiple camera system or single camera system. In multiple camera system production, you have two or more cameras in operation at the same time. Preview monitors show what each camera is seeing. If the cameras are in a studio, the preview monitors will be in a studio control room. Pretty nice week. That's the weather. Have a nice evening, Andrew. I think I can live with that, Joe. Thank you very much. I do wish I knew the outcome of those three games coming up. If the cameras are outside a studio on location, there may be a portable control room called a remote truck or a video van. The director and technical director will have a video switcher to cut from camera to camera. [Music] Single camera system production involves taping much as a movie is filmed, setting up one shot at a time with planning for later editing together of shots. Single camera systems often use portable videotaping rigs. Roll tape. Do it. The big budget rigs are called minams and the small budget rigs are called portaacks. Both are designed so that the camera can be handheld. Some systems are so light that a single person can carry both the camera and the videotape [Music] recorder and a microphone can be built into the camera so that production can become a oneperson [Music] operation. Another special system is the character generator. The character generator electronically generates numbers and [Music] letters. Of course, no matter where it comes from, all picture and sound ends up on vide tape. Videape records it and can play it back immediately after recording. Hi, I'm Peter Marshall, one of the hot ones here on channel 5 this season with a big variety show. Video tape comes in different sizes. The bigger the budget, the wider the tape, with 2 in being the widest. And video tape comes in different containers, including open reel and video [Music] cassette. Videape is recorded and played back on videotape recorders or VTRs, which come in big budget sizes. and your convenient small budget sizes. Now, once you've planned, directed, shot, and recorded your tape, you're ready for post-p production, which is a time when programs and tapes are edited. There are three kinds of video editing, real time, mechanical, and electronic. [Music] Realtime editing or instant editing is where you're working with a multiple camera system and you edit the program just by switching from camera to camera while the action is happening. And videotaping it as you go. Mechanical editing is where you actually physically splice two video tapes together. Very cheap, very primitive. Electronic editing is where you electronically transfer your [Music] shots, copying them from one or more video tapes onto the edited videape, the one on which the final program is being assembled. The place where one shot is joined to another in television is called an edit. Assembly edits are edits where shots are added one after [Music] another to assemble a program. An insert edit is where one shot is inserted into the middle of another shot or shots. already on a [Music] tape. A switcher is also called a special effects [Music] generator. Because television codes its picture as an electronic signal, television pictures can be mixed together much as sound is mixed. For example, you can just fade a shot away. This is usually called a fade to black or a fade out. If a shot begins as a blank screen and slowly appears, it's called a fade in. If the first shot is faded out and the second shot is faded in at the same time, it's called a dissolve. [Music] If two shots are kept on the screen at the same time, it's called a [Music] superimposition. If an image or bit of graphics is superimposed, it is said to be supered or [Music] keyed. And this is a special kind of superimposition called chroma keying. In chroma keying, two shots are combined without overlapping in the frame. The special effects generator also produces trick transitions such as a crosswipe, a curtain wipe, an iris in, and an iris out. And here's a special effect you can do without a special effects generator. Just point your camera into the monitor that shows what the camera sees and you get video [Music] feedback. After editing, you may want to copy a television image on movie film. So, you use a special movie camera like this one to make a kinoscope or kiny filming it right off a television screen. Of course, it's easier to copy television with television. When you copy a video tape on another video tape, it's called duping or dubbing. An original video tape is called a master vide tape. A copy or dub of a master is called a second generation vide tape. a dub of a second generation vide tape is called a third generation vide tape and so on. The vide tape on which a program is finally assembled is called an edited master. Now, if you have your program almost finished and you still have some money left in the budget, you usually add credits, descriptions of who did what on the production. With a little budget, you can tape them off a card. Or with a big budget, you tape them off a crawl like this. [Music] And that, as we say in television, both big budget and small, is a wrap. I'm Leonard Nemoy. See you on the tube.