Tuesday, January 08, 2008

TV Graphics

I'm watching election returns. TiVo had me on MSNBC and they had McCain giving his speech in a small screen on the right half and changing graphics in a left window showing vote counts. It was annoying to watch and took me a little to figure out why. First off, the background was one of those computer generated animated shapes things. This was like a camera rotating around large marble columns, like you might find in a government building. The graphic on the left didn't fill it's window and that window had it's own similar but different graphic so it met the larger background graphic. Rotating marble columns superimposed on different rotating marble columns. Then I noticed the vote chart was actually swaying back and forth on a central axis as if it were a cardboard sign hanging in a gymnasium with good ventilation. There was also a news crawl at the bottom. What is the point of this crap? Then I remembered the MS in MSNBC stands for MicroSoft.

I switched to CNN. They had McCain talking filling the whole top 2/3 of the screen. In the botton third they showed the top three democrats on the left with their percentage and vote totals and a vertical bar showing the percentage of districts reporting. They had the same thing for the Republicans on the right. They might have them on the wrong sides but they used the correct blue/red coloring. Between this and the main video was a headline section that showed two lines of easy to read text that changed every 30 seconds or so. It was much cleaner, showed more info at once and didn't freaking rotate.

And no, I didn't check Fox News.

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