Green Screen Video Interviews

What is a green screen video interview?

It’s a technique used for video interviews that allows a video editor to put any background behind the subject you want. This provides the flexibility of the look your art department desires and can be married to the video well after the interview, or changed later for another program.

Green Screen Video

Marketers’ Golden Opportunity For Product Promotional Launches & Technique Overviews

For the surgical device marketer, you have all of your surgeons in one place during academic meetings. This is an opportunity to bring your surgeons for a professionally lit and recorded video interview for:

• Product Promotion & Product Launch Campaigns
• Technique Overviews & Sawbones Demonstrations
• Company Web Site & YouTube Video Presentations
• Instructional Presentations & Teaching Programs
• Marketing Campaigns of Any Kind
• Surgical Device Company Executive Interviews
• Product Manager Presentations for the Sales Force
• International Marketing Campaigns
• Surgeon Interviews to Complete Surgical Video Programs
• Video News Releases, Documentary, & TV Commercials

And for surgeons this is an opportunity to promote your practice with a professionally produced video session lit by green screen experts. We shoot these interviews in the Sony XDCam EX HDTV format at 1080 30p NTSC, and you can either walk with the footage if you bring your own Mac based Firewire 800 external hard drive with at least 30 gigs of free space for each hour session (for footage transport), or have us edit the footage for you at a later date using our simplified process.

How Marketers Can Prepare

Marketers should prepare a set of questions to ask their surgeons well beforehand and have their Regulatory departments approve the questions. All questions should be single-concept questions. Complex or compound questions should be avoided. You will find that simple questions will better elicit a flow of information much more than complex or compound questions. Two pages of double-spaced questions are more than ample. We encourage clients to act as the interviewer (asking the questions), so a set of guidelines will be provided on interview technique. However we are also happy to conduct the interview for you or show you how to do it at first.

Typically 40 minutes of footage can be shot during a single hour session, and as much as 20 minutes or more usable footage can be had from a single session, depending on how well the surgeon delivers audio. These times will vary. This is also an opportunity to record surgeons who are multi-lingual and cover the questions in multiple languages for international marketing purposes.

Editing & Compositing After The Interview – A Simplified Process

You are welcome to walk away with the footage and edit it with your video editing team, but Plexus can also edit it up and composite a background into the interview for you as well. The process of editing involves synchronizing the two video tracks from the two cameras and making a large first cut to send to you for evaluation. This first cut will still have the green screen in the shot. We will send a single DVD as well as an H.264 mpg4 file to you for evaluation in order to make editing decisions, such as which section you would like to keep or delete, or which sentence you would like to delete, etc. You can make as many stand-alone clips as you want. With both the DVD and mpg4 you can locate the timecode IN and OUT points you would like, and from your editing decision list, we can make the fixes for you quickly from our editing bays. We will also supply an audio file of this first cut for you to send through Regulatory in order to identify language Regulatory may have an issue with.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds can be considered at any time in this process, but backgrounds will not be needed until the editing decision list is delivered to us. Once final decisions are made, backgrounds can be composited in. Animated as well as still backgrounds can be used. Typically these backgrounds are developed by your company art department. All artwork backgrounds should cover a 16×9 aspect ratio typical for widescreen HD video. Artwork guidelines will be supplied. An important consideration for all artwork is that in these sessions we are shooting a studio video session, so the atmosphere will still have an indoor feeling. Outdoor backgrounds may not work. Also it is always important to pay attention to the position of the key light on the subject, because the background key light should come from the same direction, if there is a key light in the background. For textures and curtain-like backgrounds, this is not a concern because no key light is used in those backgrounds.

Company Logos & Lower Thirds

We will also edit in your company logo if you wish. Animated logos should be supplied to us in 1920×1080 30p ProRes or XDCam clips. These animations are typically short enough to send on a standard DVD. Or if you supply artwork for a logo and the background for the logo, we can composite these for you into the beginning of the interviews. Artwork guidelines will be supplied.

A “Lower Third” is what we call the lower titles that show the surgeon’s name and city of practice. Sometimes animated lower thirds have been produced for other programs. These too can be sent to us for editing into the clips and many lower thirds utilize company branding.