I learned this when Jessie Goldstein and I went to profile pawn shop owner Dave MacArthur. When I was up in Maine this summer, I learned that pawn shops up there were seeing a huge increase in business, people coming in, pawning or selling items to get money for gas and to pay the upcoming winter fuel bills. This was when the price of oil was going through the roof.

I made some calls and found out this was the case with pawn shops across the country. Since March 2008, owners were seeing a record increase in loans... and a lot of it directly traceable to the price of oil.

I learned this when I went to profile pawn shop owner Dave MacArthur. When I was up in Maine this summer, I learned that pawn shops up there were seeing a huge increase in business, people coming in, pawning or selling items to get money for gas and to pay the upcoming winter fuel bills. This was when the price of oil was going through the roof.

I made some calls and found out this was the case with pawn shops across the country. Since March 2008, owners were seeing a record increase in loans... and a lot of it directly traceable to the price of oil.

But by the time I edited this video -- a month after I shot it -- gas had dropped and so had my news hook. But people in this fringe economy are still scraping by, and the video stands as a window into their lives.

MacArthur's take on the pawn industry is, make it feel like a regular store, make it welcoming, and his store absolutely has a friendly vibe to it. We had a great time there. But at the same time, these are people who don't have anywhere else to turn. And he knows this. He told me, "We make a living off of their hardships," so the least he could do was treat them with respect.

My other thought was, pawn shops are another great way to recycle. They're a bit like estate sales, selling second hand, but good condition items. Just make sure to test the electronics in the store. As for pawning an item, he does charge 20 percent interest.

Oh, and sorry for the uneven audio levels. Lots of questions still on how to edit audio in Adobe Premiere. -- Vikki Valentine

In my group this week, we split up some of the reporting -- I wasn't there for some of the tape-gathering, and we didn't have time to go through the tape in preparing our project. Very scary and frustrating for me!

--Joanne Silberner

rebecca

1. Make sure the timeline that contains your final project is selected, then go to the File Menu.
2. Export Movie
3. Give it a name and tell it where to save.
4. Click Settings. The first window that pops up is General.
File Type: QuickTime
Range: Entire Sequence
Export Video: Check
Export Audio: Check
Add to Project When Finished: Check
Embedding Options: Project
5. Next click Video.
Compressor: H.264
Color Depth: Millions of Colors
Frame Size: 640h 360v 16:9
Frame Rate: 29.97fps
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Pixels (1.0)
Quality: 100%/High
Data Rate: Recompress: Check Maintain Data Rate
6. Next click Keyframe and Rendering
Bit Depth: Use Project Setting
Fields: Lower Field First
Optimize Stills: Check
(don't mess with Keyframe Options - it's probably grey-ed out anyway)
7. Next click Audio
Compressor: Uncompressed
Sample Rate: 44100Hz
Sample Type: 16-bit

It reminds a bit of how I chose courses in college. I went for the most interesting teachers, no matter what subject they were teaching. That's how I wound up in courses on Swedish History, Gothic Art and Architecture, and Irish Playwrights of the Early 20th Century.

--Joe Palca

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92633252

Quinn O'Toole

Monday on ATC, Jeff Brady will report on the McCain campaign's efforts to court young voters -- a bloc that Barack Obama has a pretty strong hold on. The web page that goes with that story was written, produced, and entered into NPR's content management system by US. That's right -- radio people! Using Seamus! (full disclosure: big assist by digital media's Maria Godoy -- she's a peach.)

So, I'll post the link when it's live. Check it out -- there's a video and an audio slideshow -- in addition to the web text and the link to the radio story. It was a great experience, really seeing how npr.org works -- and as we've suggested, would be a great task to add to future Knight training programs.

-- Quinn O'Toole

It's about the closing of a Washington D.C. independent bookstore that happens to be a few blocks away from NPR headquarters. Many of us visited it on a weekly basis to pick up books, DVDs and music for radio pieces, or sometimes just to have lunch in its pleasant little cafe.

--Neda Ulaby

Here's the result:

The smoker in the video is Larry Massett.

He's a long time independent radio producer and musician who lives in Cabin John, Maryland, not far from Washington, DC but hundreds of miles away in spirit.

The non-smoker is me.

I've known Larry since 1979. The first story we did together was about me trying to fix my own car. This was a funny idea because I can't even make my own toast.

Later, Larry and I sprung into action when we heard on the news that the State of Maryland was looking for a way to tone down its official song. They wanted to eliminate the lyric that says "Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!" We wrote a version so harmless and banal that it could offend no one. It was about crabs and happy people.

Changing the Game

These collaborations with Larry changed my concept of what could be done on radio. Instead of hard news and silly features they was another path; a shortcut to reality by way of bizarre humor and imagination. Larry went on to create many of these features for NPR and for other places.

The two of us also did stories from abroad in Nepal, Japan and China.

Larry Massett was part of my personal Cultural Revolution.

Photo by Art Silverman.

In the 1990s, we created "The Program That Never Was" -- a weekly series of conversations and skits with Amy Dickinson, Chris Mandra, Rebecca Flowers and the two of us. We taped them for several years. And, of course, they never found a radio home. But now, under the title "Chesty Morgan's Forbidden Love," they have a new life.

-- Art Silverman with Steve Proffitt

-- Joel

Our Knight training includes a lot of stuff about capturing images - both still and moving - that is a little foreign to guys who have made their careers capturing sound. So we were paying careful attention when we attended a morning tutorial by NPR videographer David Gilkey on the art of lighting.

Just the fact that NPR now has lighting kits must say something. And our membership in the Knight Foundation Training exercise allows us to request one. That means we are given a bag with one diffuse, wide lightbox and another small spotlight to put behind people. This second light, we learned, adds a the sense of depth to what's shown.

Immediately we decided that we'd use our newly formed illumination knowledge. We booked some time in NPR's famed performance studio, which comes complete with a Yamaha grand piano. Our big idea - have some people play the piano and talk about what the instrument means to them, and how playing it makes them feel.

We invited a handful of NPR employees (Anya Grundman, Barbara Van Woerkom, Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr and Patrick Jarenwattananon) who thankfully were kind enough give us a half hour each of their time. We took some shots of Steve at the keyboard, too.

One thing we learned was that not all heads are created equally. While the backlighting on the full head of hair on our female subjects looked great, hair-impaired subjects (such as Steve) were a problem. The backlight bounces off the top of a bald head. Steve looked like he was wearing a white yarmulka. This greatly distressed the Catholic in him. Later, David Gilkey explained those situations call for a lower position for the spot.

Live and Learn

In the end we had just enough decent shots to complete the task, but no story. Steve took care of that by writing a first-person commentary about the piano. We fit the video to the words and left a lot of blank frames to set the pace.

Over the years we've both worked at NPR we've often found the most success with radio projects that grow out of a simple conceit. Steve created a whole piece about dust, for example. This video project borrows from that sort of idea - keep it simple, stupid.

-- Art Silverman and Steve Proffitt

-- Joel Riddle

We discovered there are behaviors of Adobe Premiere that we don't yet fully understand.

Steve Proffitt, left, and Art Silverman, render video in Adobe Premiere.

Photo by Jo Miglino.

Or, perhaps, it just doesn't understand us.

The video editing program seemed to freeze at least hourly for us. To defrost it, we always had to log out completely.

Also, the laptop often forgot it was attached to the external hard-drive.

Even after we locked the video and audio in Premiere, we found that when converted to a QuickTime movie, we lost sync.

And there was more.

Art's laptop could not be used to capture video.

And Steve developed an unexplained palsy.

We figure this can't be the program. It must be operator error.

-- Art Silverman and Steve Proffitt