November 23, 2008 by John Dickinson  | 4,348 views | Comments (9)

Title and action safe guides are used to ensure that important content isn’t placed outside the viewable areas of a television screen. If you’re creating a project that will be seen on both 4:3 and 16:9 televisions, the best way to ensure that 4:3 viewers don’t miss any of the action is to use guides with a 4:3 safe zone. Up until After Effects CS4 I used a Photoshop file [Read more]

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July 26, 2008 by John Dickinson  | 4,309 views | Comments (28)

As a broadcast designer there are many terms one must understand in order to know what the hell a client is asking for. The problem is people use different names for the same thing. When I was first asked for a Clusterbuster I thought the guy wanted some kind of chocolate bar. So once and for all I’d like to create a list of broadcast terminology [Read more]

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February 15, 2007 by John Dickinson  | 10,656 views | Comments (14)

Lower thirds are graphics which are placed at the lower third of the screen and contain various information, most commonly the name of the person speaking. Here’s an example of one created using Illustrator, After Effects and Particular.  Example movie   Download project

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