As promised, here's a link to our McCain youth story.

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

Quinn O'Toole

Friendship is an elusive thing. This week we tried to illustrate the bond between two guys who hang out -- for no obvious reason.

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.

Continue reading "Smokin' Larry" >

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.

Continue reading "Knights and Lights" >

Since we're sitting here watching our movie convert out of Premiere -- an hours-long enterprise-- we thought this would be a good time to reflect on our experiences this week.

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

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