formatting song words for use with IMAG

If you know in advance that you are planning to overlay words on IMAG live video, then you can help yourself out by formatting the words in a sensible way. ...

In most situations it is not necessary to fill the entire screen with words, when projecting song words.
Most people do, but it is just lazyness, and lack of thought. To have live video running behind a full screen of words is very distracting in almost every case. If, however you put the words onto more pages so each page has less words then you have some scope to move them around a bit and let the IMAG and the words complement each other very effectively.

This is best illustrated with some examples:

Here is an example of what NOT to do, if possible:

Putting Paul Oakley right behind the words doesn't do him any favours and makes it very distracting.

Or this one:

It's a very nice guitar, but is totally hidden, and any movement by the guitarist will make it hard to read the words.

So instead, how about:

Here the words and the singer have their own space on the screen
(Strictly speaking this is poor framing for the video, as the singer has no 'looking space', but it is acceptable in this context)

Or this is OK too:

Words on top, video on bottom - that's fine.

Or, if you want to get fancy:

You can find little gaps in the words to fit people into.

Or best of all, make sure your words leave plenty of space in the first place:

Your camera operators will need to be awake if you are trying this, and may have to gently adjust their shots once onscreen.
It also helps if the vision mixer can see a preview of the next screen of words, so they can tell the camops how to line up their shots.

Posted: Mon - September 8, 2003 at 11:08 PM |

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formatting song words for use with IMAG