THE GROWING USE OF THE AT HOME TV STUDIO: At the Newcast Studio blog (a blog devoted to TV news studio design — yes, there’s a blog for everything), a link to a Washington Post article last month talking about the growing use of home TV studios by cable pundits:
While these studios may not have multiple cameras, a jib, an interactive touch screen, etc., they provide quick and affordable access to pundits. Many of these studios are powered by Cisco, using its TelePresence technology.
“In the Carville-Matalin house, CNN’s team of techies mounted a smallish camera — called a Cisco link — that gets steered and focused by engineers in D.C. or Atlanta or Hong Kong or whichever CNN nerve center has booked either half of the power couple.”
“Cisco newcomer Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary, recently welcomed a CNN-paid crew to his house in Westchester County, N.Y. ‘Considering they invaded my property to build a studio, it was a smallish invasion with smallish equipment,’ he said. In their wake, they left a little camera that ‘hibernates into one position,’ some glaring lights, and a white X made of tape on the floor — his mark to stay in frame.”
Of course, when you combine the home TV studio with a green screen, anything is possible:
Which reminds me, my newest video (shot in front of the above wall) is now online at YouTube:
[youtube TgXNOMEXVUw]
UPDATE: A reader emails:
Ed I want to say I love your blog and I’m kinda disappointed, now that you have so much else to do behind the curtain, that it isn’t updated as often.
Although, when you guest host at instapundit, I get a lot more of Ed Driscoll so that’s OK ;-)
Second, about your latest Silicon Graffiti. You look stiff while standing. Sorry but it just seemed awkward, the hand gestures and the camera angle changes.
Thirdly about us becoming Germans. Weren’t we always Germans? As I recall, from school, the Germans were the single largest emigrant group to the USA so… just a return to our roots?
Hey, when I produce those videos, I’m well aware that the talent is a stiff. So I try to surround him with virtual sets, B-roll, background music, graphics, etc. He needs lots of help. But if that guy can do video, anybody can…
And as someone who’s half-German (on my late mother’s side), I know Germans are a large immigrant group, but most German immigrants, if they were anything like my family, were pious, God-fearing Catholics and protestants. But the introduction of Nietzschian nihilism, the welfare state (via Otto von Bismark) and Frankfurt School-style political correctness are all very much notions that were also imported to the US, as Bloom noted in The Closing of the American Mind. Mainly I was trying to explore that these memes didn’t sprout up from nowhere, they started overseas and were imported here, where they now fight it out, sometimes for the better, often for the worse, with traditional American ideas.
And I’ll be back at Ed Driscoll.com next week, so watch for blogging to resume there once again.