Amsterdam and IBC

 

It’s two weeks before the annual trek to film and video’s altar of technology, the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention and exhibition in Las Vegas. It’s a weird year because two major exhibitors – Avid and Apple – have both decided they could better spend their marketing dollars in other ways than by mounting multi-million-dollar booths on the show floor. This got me thinking about my 2006 trip to Amsterdam for the IBC convention. Why don’t the many NAB exhibitors look towards IBC’s human scale and create a more civil NAB instead of the annual booth one-upmanship that brought them to this costly point?

 

IBC

 

For those who don’t know, the IBC conference and exhibition is the sort-of midyear sibling to NAB and is the “must go” venue for many international film and video professionals who can’t or won’t go to Vegas. IBC itself is owned by six trade association partners, including SMPTE, and exists solely to manage this show. That makes IBC different from NAB, which is a broadcaster trade association that’s also involved in other conferences and lobbying activities. The annual venue for the IBC show, held in September, is the RAI Centre in Amsterdam – a multi-hall conference center and exhibit space recognized throughout the world by the arched roof of its main hall. The RAI Centre actually grew to span a local thoroughfare and as such is broken up into various halls, instead of one single event space. There’s a manmade beach and café in the middle of all this, which is accessible to locals who do mingle with attendees during lengthy midday breaks. In fact, September 2006 was a hot one in Europe, so a few of these office workers also chose to do a bit of lunch hour sunbathing – in a rather, shall we say, European fashion – providing a bit of distraction from all the geek stuff inside the halls.

 

 

 

In any case, the IBC convention uses the floor plan of the separate buildings to group product areas into specific themed halls. For example, all post-related exhibits were in a single hall. The booth square footage, number of vendors and total number of attendees is less than the NAB convention, so everything feels more comfortable. Even Sony, who typically creates an NAB booth bigger than most facilities or TV stations, had something far less grandiose at IBC. The result was a booth that was actually inviting and where you could find something out about the products. Furthermore, I had the distinct impression that the percentage of attendees who were employed in film and video crafts was higher at IBC than I’ve typically seen at the NABs of recent years. IBC schedules the convention over a weekend to accommodate European professionals who can easily commute from just about any major city to Amsterdam in less than a day via high-speed rail or cheap flights. Therefore, if you only want to see new editing hardware and software, you can knock out your convention time on a single weekend day and still have the rest of the week to spare for sightseeing.

 

 

 

The long and the short of it for Americans, is that IBC offers a welcomed alternative to NAB, if you’d like a more relaxed convention and tie it in with a trip abroad. Often the products you see at IBC in September are the actual shipping versions of those products that were announced – but weren’t ready yet – at NAB in April. A few companies time their product updates to coincide with IBC  instead of NAB. Of course, there is no shortage of customer events and parties around town hosted by the vendors.

 

Getting Around

 

Amsterdam is a fun place to visit. In my case, I booked a suburban hotel that was right next to a train stop leading directly to the RAI Centre and the airport. So, I got a book of train tickets at the airport and was set for the rest of my stay. Trains run like clockwork, so each morning I hopped an early train and in less than half an hour was at the hall. Of course, like most European hotels, a hearty breakfast was included, so when I tally up the cost of the trip, it wasn’t really all that much different than the expense of a week in Las Vegas at NAB. Of course, this year the dollar is weaker against the Euro, so your mileage may vary!

 

 

 

I consider Amsterdam and the Netherlands as a “starter country” for first-time American travelers. English speaking is pervasive and in fact, even the local billboards and other ads routinely use so many English words and phrases that you have to wonder. This makes it easy to get around on only English, as most Dutch speak better English than Americans tend to speak any other second language. It’s a great town for tourists, so in addition to the trains, there’s an extensive tram system throughout the center of the city and tram or bus transit is generally free to IBC attendees during the days of the convention. Again, in my case – a train from the hotel to the RAI Centre and then a tram to any area within easy walking distance of museums, shops and other attractions. Plus the town is a beehive of bicyclists, which offers another travel alternative. A rental car is probably the least desirable option, because of bans, penalties and hassles related to inner city parking.

 

 

 

Sights

 

Naturally when you say Amsterdam, the first thing that comes to mind for many is the Red Light district. It’s an area I don’t recommend, unless you like your attractions seedy in the same sense as the worse of New York’s 42^nd Street before it was “Disney-fied”. The shame of this is that Amsterdam has a wealth of culture to offer from churches to cafés to museums to architecture. You soak it in just walking around the old neighborhoods. It’s the town of Van Gogh and Rembrandt for goodness sake and there’s plenty of that to see in the many museums. Getting up close and personal to study the bush strokes on an actual Van Gogh or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch was awesome. Did you know that Van Gogh studied and copied Japanese prints in his early work? If art is not your cup of tea, there are plenty of other options, like canal trips and side tours of nearby Delft, Rotterdam, The Hague and the coastline.

 

 

 

As you contemplate the impact of Apple’s and Avid’s pull-out from NAB, you might look for some alternatives to NAB next year. IBC could be just the ticket you’re looking for.

 

©2008 Oliver Peters

Staying Green In Post

 

A lot of emphasis is being placed on saving the environment and operating in a “greener” workplace. That may be easy to see in a production on location, where waste is easy to identify, but how is that applied to post facilities and editing boutiques? Let me outline some simple steps to help you do your part.

 

Water

 

I’m not exactly sure when it became the norm for everyone to have their own personal bottle of water, but palettes of bottled water have taken over the frig at most post houses. If you’ve listened to the news for the most fleeting moment, you should be aware that our landfills are being filled with these plastic bottles in spite of recycling efforts. You can make your contribution by going back to other sources of water for yourself and your clients. After all, the source for what’s in those bottles is generally the same as what’s coming from your tap anyway. You can handle this by something as simple as using a large water supply service to stock a water cooler of the same stuff, but in much larger, recycled containers. Or how about enhancing your customer service and actually bringing your clients a tray of glasses and a pitcher of ice water into the session? While we’re at it, the same logic can be applied to cans of soda.

 

Power

 

Through my decades in the business, common wisdom said that equipment should stay on 24/7 and that more gear dies from being powered up than from staying on constantly. I’m here to tell you that at least with today’s technology, this is total bunk. When you’re done for the day or the week – shut the power off! I’ll admit that I have had some gear break when it was first turned on, but these cases have been rare and nothing in the last ten years. In fact, most of the shops in which I freelance, routinely power down decks, computers and drives at the end of the day. None have had any issues. Hard drives are the only item I tend to see left on, but I would recommend turning these off as well. 

 

Remember that many items use standby power even when the units are off. This standby power feature enables faster startups, but in some cases draws almost as much power as if the unit were still on. I would recommend that you put such gear on a power strip. You can hit one breaker switch and turn off the current feeding that unit, after using the computer’s software shut down. This has the added benefit that you are truly turning off the unit, so the next time the computer is booted, it starts clean and “flushes” out any problems that might have been held by standby power. Macs are especially susceptible to this, as “gremlins” are often held in memory in spite of shutdowns or restarts. These miraculously go away when you actually kill the power to the unit and do a reboot from a true powered down condition.

 

Let me point out that power surges and poorly conditioned power do more harm to gear than whether or not it stays on 24/7. So as a normal installation item, I would recommend that all drives and computers be connected to a large uninterrupted power supply (UPS) from a reliable manufacturer, such as APC. If you get the more expensive models (not the cheapos from an office supply store), they will apply some power conditioning to the signal. Believe it or not, I have seen where the absence of a UPS has caused file loss and/or corruption on a SAN array! All purely a result of the lack of this sort of power conditioning.

 

Air Conditioning

 

Another holdover from the old days is air conditioning. Tape rooms used to be set to about 60 or 65 degrees – and suites close to it – so it was a common sight to see editors and clients in sweaters and even heavy jackets during a session on a hot summer day. The logic was that heat kills gear and so if the ambient temperature was about 65 degrees, then it was hotter inside the equipment racks and probably close to 100 degrees on the circuit boards themselves. Again, technology has advanced since the 1950s. In a recent Google study, their engineers analyzed the failure rates of hard drives at Google data centers. In this study they found that there was no strong correlation between heat and drive failure. The researchers are careful to point out this doesn’t mean that there isn’t one, but that heat is only one of the factors in drive failure rates.

 

Ultimately all drives fail, so you have to balance the energy costs against the hardware replacement costs and decide whether 10 degrees difference in temperature is worth the possibility of gaining an extra year or so of life from your hard drives. Most of the smaller boutiques in which I work haven’t had the luxury of designing large, cold machine rooms that mimic a Google data center. Instead, racks are installed in standard office or remodeled home environments. Since equipment and people share the same spaces, I find that the thermostats are typically set in the low to mid 70 degree range. Low and behold the gear is just fine and anecdotally, I don’t see any higher failure rates than when I worked in the frozen tape rooms of the past.

 

Cleanliness

 

Heat is one factor, but an even bigger factor is how clean your gear stays. Most computers and drives that employ fans, use a front-fed, flow-though ventilation. Air is sucked in the front and pushed out the back. Most of the rooms where you find this gear could hardly be considered a “clean room” environment. Even the cleanliest environment has dirt and dust, especially if there’s carpet. Take a look at the fans or open up your computer occasionally and you’ll be appalled at the amount of dust that’s trapped inside. This dust prevents proper cooling, so if heat is a factor, then this dust is greatly reducing the efficiency of your air conditioning. The best solution is to establish a monthly maintenance routine in which computers are opened and vacuumed out. Drives are removed and either vacuumed or blown out with compressed air. Obviously the latter should be done outside so that you aren’t simply blowing this dust back into the same environment from where it came.

 

File Based Media

 

Many people are discussing the concept that video technology is cleaner than film technology and that ultimately file based digital productions (P2, XDCAM, RED, S.two, etc.) are environmentally better. I haven’t done any sort of analysis on this and quite frankly, many environmental arguments often don’t actually hold up once you look at the total net effect of the alternative. For example, yes, manufacturing film stock and processing negative is a very dirty technology, however, there’s not much 35mm film production being done worldwide anymore outside of the motion picture industry. On the other hand, digital storage for still photographers and videographers is mushrooming – so I don’t think you can definitively say yet whether manufacturing all the solid state storage, hard drives and data back-up tapes to enable this digital revolution is actually cleaner than what it has replaced. After all, manufacturing digital media is not without its own environmental impact.

 

That is, of course, primarily a production question, which means the decision has been made before it gets to the editing suite. On the other hand, there are a lot of things editors and post facilities have historically done to protect assets in post and these practices should be revisited in light of cost and the environment. For instance, if you produce a set of shows, it’s common to output various formats (master, textless, 4×3, 16×9, letterboxed, etc.) to individual tapes. This is an item that is consumed for each piece of programming and even if you get the right length of videotape to match that program, the cost of cassette shells, cases and mechanisms is the same whether it’s a 5 minute or 60 minute program. Hard drives are cheap these days. It makes more sense to archive this content in a data format. You can get many more programs on a single hard drive or even data back-up tape than if videotapes are used. In the future, as massive online storage becomes the norm, courtesy of folks like Google, it might be feasible and in fact preferable, to archive your assets in the Internet cloud and not on-site as a physical piece of media.

 

Review And Approval

 

Edit sessions used to involve working with a client who sat in on the session and then walked with review dubs (3/4”, Beta-SP, VHS, etc.) for their bosses or clients. As our business changed, more of this work has become long distance and I find it to be the exception when a client spends the entire time in the session. At first, this meant making dubs to review (VHS or DVD) and shipping these across the country via Federal Express or another carrier or locally across town using a courier service. Hence, cost for materials – that eventually get tossed into the trash – as well as transportation. Again, the Internet is your answer. Many editors routinely turn to services like YouSendIt, SyncVue or Xprove to send review files to their clients. Internet services have become fast enough and compression quality good enough that it takes next to no time to upload or transfer 320×240-sized review videos at a sufficient quality level to get client feedback and approval. On most of my projects, voice-over recording sessions, music library searches and client review and approval cycles are entirely handled via the Internet. No material or transportation costs involved, so all-in-all, a much more environmentally-friendly process.

 

Even if you don’t believe in many of the environmental or energy arguments offered, it still makes perfect sense to come up with a plan to incorporate these suggestions. If nothing else, they will go a long way towards reducing your business’ operating costs and might just be beneficial for the rest of us, too.

 

©2008 Oliver Peters

Central and West Florida Film & Video Production Spotlight, Part II

Area Producers Stay on the Edge with Innovative Technology

 

 

The big technology story for the production community is high definition video. By Federal Communications Commission regulations, all US television stations have to convert to digital transmission, but this doesn’t mean high definition TV. Many affiliates will choose to pass through the HD network signal, but continue standard definition NTSC broadcasts for local news, syndicated programs, and of course, commercials. This is all perfectly legal but means that it will be a long time before local advertisers will see their creative gems in splendid HD glory. Yet, many area production companies are shooting with HD cameras and edit houses are adding HD post suites. Why?

 

The answer is threefold. First of all, some HD camcorders can capture images at the film-like rate of 24 frames per second (referred to as 24P) versus video’s 30fps.  Although there are standard definition cameras that also offer this option, shooting in HD today adds shelf life to the future of the footage. Secondly, many producers work in other genres than 30-second commercials. These alternatives include broadcast and special venue videos that are adopting HD more quickly that the commercial world as well as directors who want to try their hand at digital independent filmmaking. But the third and most important reason is cost.

 

Thanks in part to Apple and Panasonic, this is the year for low cost HD post. It is now possible to shoot HD with a Panasonic VariCam, transfer that footage over FireWire into an Apple PowerBook or G5 computer and edit true high definition footage on a personal computer. In fact, Apple offered this new feature as a free upgrade to Final Cut Pro 4 owners, back in April. By the end of the year, Avid Xpress Pro, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere Pro, Pinnacle Liquid and other nonlinear editing software will offer similar capabilities.

 

There has been a huge explosion of new editing systems installed in the central Florida market, mainly due to the release of inexpensive Apple Final Cut Pro software, along with inexpensive HD hardware from companies like AJA and Pinnacle Systems. Bob Zelin (Rescue 1, Inc.) has built HD editing systems for CDB Productions, Adrenaline Films and Transcontinental Records, with several more companies about to enter the HD arena. Zelin comments, “ The acceptance of the AJA Io box, a $2000 piece of hardware that allows any Mac G5 to create broadcast quality video, has been incorporated by many of my established clients. Almost 100% of my clients have expressed interest in getting involved in this new way of doing post production.”

 

Tim Bartlett, Adrenaline Film’s general manager, adds, “Adrenaline Films has continued to make significant investments in HD technology. These investments include an HD nonlinear edit system built around Final Cut Pro and the AJA Kona HD card. One of the more diverse investments that we have made is the purchase of an Amphibico Amphibicam underwater housing designed for our Sony HD cameras.”

 

Emerge Media also brings clients a firm commitment to HD. Ray Combs, one of the partners at Emerge tells me, “Local commercials are not immune to the power of HD. We shot and posted a series of commercials for Orlando Infiniti at Chapman-Leonard Studios using the Panasonic VariCam, as well as a series of HD spots for Mercedes Benz of South Orlando, all of which are airing locally.” HD has been strong in the indie film market, giving a boost to Emerge’s post in HD.  Combs elaborated, “In April, Emerge Media performed the high definition edit for the feature film, Redemption, using Pinnacle’s CineWave HD hardware and Apple’s Final Cut Pro editing software. Redemption premiered in South Florida at the Palm Beach International Film Festival. Selected showings were projected in high definition proving that HD is a viable format for theatrical films.”

 

The same trend can be found in Tampa. Naked Eye Editorial is expanding into a new location and with this move is adding a second suite based on Final Cut Pro. I asked owner/editor Rick Bennett whether he was simply adding Final Cut Pro or making it an HD suite. Rick told me that, “Yes, it’s the real deal – Final Cut Pro HD software with the Kona 2 card as well as the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A VTR. We’ll start with the basic FCP set-up, then add the VTR by end of year. A very good client of mine just purchased the Panasonic HD camera. I have cut some stuff shot on the Sony HD camera and, for my money, the Panasonic looks just as good, if not better.”

 

Look is everything, of course, and many producers are now shooting with HD cameras because they offer a film-like look at a far lower cost – even if the end result is, for now, still standard definition. ImageROCKS executive producer Jim DeRusha has shot several spots during recent months with the Sony 24P camera. “What I’ve found is that true tape-to-tape color-correction is necessary to enhance 24P to more of a film look. It’s less expensive than film, so 24P is a great tool if the budget is limited and there is short turnaround.”

 

The Sony versus Panasonic battles ranges in HD as it has in every other arena the two have challenged each other. Many area shooters have plenty of time with Sony cameras, but the Panasonic VariCam is gaining new converts daily. In fact, I’d guess that Florida probably has more VariCam owners than Sony CineAlta HD camera owners. David Nixon Productions has been using the VariCam for a couple of years. David tells me about some of their experiences with the camera. “We’ve just bought the P+S Technik Pro35 Digital Image Converter. This enables us to utilize 35mm film lenses on our VariCam. The ‘look’ of this system is so much like 35mm film that it’s uncanny. The engineers at P+S Technik figured out that if you increase the target area up to 35mm, you can gain a shallow depth-of-field. So to do that, they have built a mirror system that bounces the image up to 35mm in size and projects it on an actual 35mm ground glass. This system is mated on the front of the VariCam and then you mount a 35mm lens (such as Panavision or Zeiss) to create the classic ‘look’ of 35mm film, where only the subject is in focus and everything else is out of focus. It really works!”

 

“We’ve just completed two projects with this system. The first was a standard definition project for Disney. They wanted to create the look of a film trailer, so this system was perfect. Not only did it look like we shot on 35mm film, but we were able to create the very dramatic look of a feature with radical focus shifts and very tight depth-of-field focus to keep the background soft. The second was a feature length dramatic film. By shooting on the VariCam with the Pro35 and Panavision lenses, the audience in the theatre will never know the movie wasn’t shot on 35mm film….and it saved the producers thousands of dollars in film and processing costs. This project is being cut on HD right now, and will go to a 35mm print for theatrical release. This will sell the ‘film look’ even more by gaining the texture and grain of the film print.”

 

o2 Pictures jumped also into the hi-def world with their own purchase of a Panasonic 24p VariCam. The camera was used extensively on a project for Disney Vacation Club that required shooting DVC members in their own homes all over the country. “We’ve been shooting almost non-stop since we bought the camera, and I’m incredibly impressed with the image quality” said director DanO’Loane. Much of the hi-def imagery is currently on display at the new sales center at Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort and Spa. “We created a whole new multi-media experience for the guests and the sales team. So we’ve had a chance to really branch out this year, both with the kind of work we’re being asked to do, and the way we’re doing it. It’s pretty exciting”. 

Whether it’s for creative or budgetary reasons, area producers and post houses are poised to be at the forefront of digital film and video technology, bringing cost-effective innovation to their clients. With costs coming down and the economy heating up, the year ahead looks good indeed. 

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Create magazine

Central and West Florida Film & Video Production Spotlight, Part I

In a word – diversification – best describes the strategies being applied by area production and post professionals. Diversity in projects and new technology keep Orlando, Tampa and the surrounding communities hopping with productions that include reality television, independent feature films, infomercials and, of course, television commercials.

 

The Metro Orlando Film and Entertainment Commission has relaunched its website (www.filmorlando.com) with new features, such as a section where people can “list their property” for locations. This should be great for producers like Philadelphia-based Banyan Productions, which last year shot the entire series of Trading Spaces Home Free in this region, choosing eight metro Orlando couples to compete for a new home. In addition, Banyan also taped several episodes of the regular hit series Trading Spaces, as well as another series, Perfect Proposal, in and around central Florida. It’s not all about reality TV, though. Part of the Film Commission’s website redesign includes an Industry Resource section powered by ProductionHub.com for up-to-date information on industry jobs, events and seminars.

 

Central Florida continues to be a favorite of film producers. Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions shot for several days in Orlando and neighboring counties for the upcoming ABC movie-of-the-week, Their Eyes Were Watching God, starring Halle Berry. This was a two-year effort in location scouting and permitting and about fifty local crew members were hired for the production. Central Florida made the national spotlight at the past Oscars, when Charlize Theron picked up the Best Actress win for her portrayal of convicted killer Aileen Wornos in Monster. As a central Florida story, Monster required such key locations as the Seminole County Courthouse, the Diamond Motel in Kissimmee, Fun World and general shots in downtown Orlando.

 

About seventy-five percent of the crew was local, including Stephen F. Campbell, an area film and television director of photography, who served as the “A” camera operator on Monster. Steve commented, “For me the most amazing part of the experience was while I was watching Charlize’s performance through the lens, it was mesmerizing to see her portray the character of Aileen Wornos. We would do a take and I would say to writer/director Patty Jenkins, ‘she’s become that woman!’ We were able to provide the LA-based production team with a central Florida-based, technically and creatively inspired crew that is on par with any in the country.  Along with being the ‘A’ operator on the show, the opportunity to DP for a few days allowed me to work very closely with Oscar winner Charlize Theron, director Patty Jenkins and to have a creative participation on an Academy Award winning picture.”

 

Local production companies have been staying the course to grow their business. HB Production Services is now in its eighth year offering a mix of production, post and marketing savvy. HB Production Services, together with producer/director Joseph P. Torina of Torina Media, Inc., has produced eight infomercial projects which are currently airing in over twenty markets throughout North America each week. For these clients, the team develops the script, shoots “real people” segments all over the country and keeps two newly installed Avid Media Composer Adrenaline bays busy fine-tuning the finished stories. According to Harry Brockman, president of HB Production Services, this is balanced out with post and fulfillment for over 250 commercial spots. These are posted in HB’s linear editing suite, which has proven to hold its value, because of the real-time compositing and short turnaround required.

 

i.d.e.a.s. at the Disney-MGM Studios is moving beyond the traditional boundaries of commercials and entertainment television. In the past year they produced Courage, Colorado, a show that is part marketing, part reality TV. Greg Galloway, VP of Entertainment for i.d.e.a.s., tells me that, “Courage Colorado - two thirty-minute episodes, shot entirely in high definition – is part of a new reality-based program designed to help fulfill the dreams of a family or group of friends each week by taking them on an adventure in Colorado. The first two episodes starred the Van Eerden family from Greensboro, North Carolina, who visited various Colorado adventure spots during the ten days of production. The family participated in activities ranging from an authentic cattle drive to whitewater rafting to rock climbing. Courage Colorado was produced by i.d.e.a.s. in association with Orlando-based Skydog Productions, the marketing firms of Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell and PRACO (Colorado Springs). The two episodes aired numerous times over the past two months on the Outdoor Life Network.”

 

Speaking of outdoors, Florida is host to many major water sports competitions and leisure activities. Capitalizing on this is World Productions, the television division of Winter Park-based World Publications, publishers of such magazine titles as Waterski magazine. Headed up by executive producer Ken Kavanaugh, World Productions currently produces Sport Fishing Magazine (Outdoor Life Network), Hook The Future (Fox Sports Net) and the Mastercraft Pro Wakeboard Tour TV series for ESPN. World handles full location production and post on these projects and also makes its facilities available for hire to outside clients.

 

The commercial world continues to rebound. John Dussling, GM at longtime central Florida production company Florida Film & Tape, reports the spot business has been quite strong in the last year. “We produced a series of commercials for Valencia Community College in conjunction with VCC’s Marketing Department. In their own words, the students’ passion for their studies was a key to the success of the commercials. With the PUSH agency, we produced several Addy Award-winning commercials for Florida Citrus Sports to promote Orlando’s two major college football bowl games: the Tangerine Bowl and the Citrus Bowl. The humorous theme, Right In Your Own Backyard, featured a football-dressed character and a tangerine-clad character swinging on a swing set; bouncing on a trampoline; and running through a lawn sprinkler …right in your own backyard.”

 

Alphawolf Entertainment, another stalwart of the Orlando commercial scene, saw quite a few changes this year, including moving into a new location within the Celebration community and an official name change from Alphawolf Entertainment to imageROCKS. As if this wasn’t enough, executive producer Jim DeRusha and producer/director Jack Tinsley have been quite busy with spots for The Golf Channel, Orlando Utilities Commission, Florida Lottery, Hasbro, Mississippi Development and Hughes Supply. Disney has been a traditional client of DeRusha’s and this year saw the production of various promos and interstitials to promote the new EPCOT attraction, Mission Space. These have included working with a number of celebrities like Tiger Woods, Buz Aldrin, Roger Clemens and Pudge Rodriquez.

 

Several companies either expanding or on the move are Gate Seven Creative Studios, Digitec and Eagle Productions. Along with moving literally across the street, Digitec has also upgraded audio and video post facilities, added another DVD authoring station and expanded interactive services to support their new customized software and hardware product offerings. These new services include online instructional design, with an emphasis on game-based learning, with or without Digitec’s Knowledge Direct™ WEB software product (an easy-to-use learning management system).  Content design and development services support Digitec’s V-Wall product, an array of  flat-panel video monitors that can display up to sixteen synchronized channels of video and audio.

 

Eagle has upgraded its new facilities to include a full Adobe-based video suite with Premiere Pro editing and Encore DVD authoring. They’ve recently produced 275 science videos as part of series of DVDs for a New York educational publishing company. In an innovative use of the web, Eagle used Flash Communication Server and Flash to make near-real-time client approvals feasible during the shooting stage of the production.

 

Gate Seven upgraded both Avid Media Composer suites and added a third Avid Symphony system. In addition they’ve entered into an in-house partnership with AniMill to offer design, animation and effects services. Business for Gate Seven has been brisk with spot work for Universal’s Revenge of the Mummy – the Ride campaign, promos for Sunshine Network and a series of vignettes for the Speed Channel.

 

The past year has been busy for Kent Vanderberg, president of Elite Film + Video (formerly Elite Digital Video). The new name reflects the fact that in the past year film has increasingly been their production format, along with video. Last November Kent directed a corporate image film for Virginia-based Computer Science Corporation, picking up a Gold Addy for the effort. Along with a heavy schedule of presentations for Siemens Medical Solutions and events at Disney, Kent had a chance to return to his first love, live concert events.  Seven cameras and 24-track audio covered the onstage action during a wild night at Ybor City’s Twilight Club, where performances by The Verve Pipe’s Brian VanderArk and New Orleans-based Cowboy Mouth rocked the house. Both bands are negotiating the release of concert DVDs from the material.

 

22A Productions has found success in handling projects outside of the US. As an in-house production management team that is part of the Universal Studios Production Group, 22A, headed by Charlie Krestul, coordinates and produces various internal and external jobs. These have included a 3D film based on Sesame Street for Universal Japan, producing commercials for Wet & Wild and various outside commercials. When I say outside, I mean that! The 22A management team has recently produced international commercials for Praxis and Chocomel in Australia and Missing Witness in Africa.

 

One of west central Florida’s largest media facilities, Tampa Digital Studios, has seen projects increase four-fold during the past year. Notable projects include commercials and direct response spots for Sam Seltzer’s Steakhouse, Florida Digital Technologies, Kuhn Volkswagen and others. Tampa Digital Studios has moved towards CD-ROM and DVD production as a substitute for VHS duplication. Specific projects handled by Tampa Digital include a paint ball DVD by Focus TV and Workouts For Women Inc. In response to the rising film and video production taking place in the Tampa Bay area, Tampa Digital Studios has added two new Avid editing suites and expanded its graphics and animation department, now providing clients with 3D and 2D motion graphics. The new capabilities were used to create the 15-second opening graphics package for six one-hour special programs of American Muscle Car, aired weekly on the Speed Channel.

 

Written by Oliver Peters for Create magazine

The Basics of DVD Creation

The DVD has become the de facto replacement for the VHS dub. DVD authoring has become an extension of most nonlinear editing software. This has made something that started out as a very arcane, expensive and specialized task into something that is easy enough for any video professional to master. When you produce a video DVD, you are actually building a creative product that must conform to the DVD-Video spec. This is one of the categories within the overall DVD format specification that includes other forms, such as DVD-ROM and DVD-Audio. Creating a disk with the full nuances of the DVD-Video spec has been addressed in such high-end applications as Sonic Solutions’ DVD Creator. Newer, more user-friendly programs like Adobe Encore DVD, Apple DVD Studio Pro 2, Sonic’s own Reel DVD and Sony’s DVD Architect now offer enough of these same DVD authoring features to satisfy the requirements of over 90% of all the types of DVDs typically produced.

 

The full DVD spec deals with complex elements like program managers, title sets and so on, but these newer authoring tools have adopted a more streamlined approach – dividing your assets into tracks (for video and audio elements) and menus. You are generally limited to 99 different assets – far less than the full DVD spec would actually allow, yet well within the requirements of most commercial and corporate DVDs. This is especially true considering the significant drop in price from the early days of DVD tools.

 

Most of the popular authoring applications offer the main features, like motion menus, subtitles and multiple languages; but, not all permit some of the more advanced features, including 24fps encoding, multiple camera angles and AC-3 Dolby surround audio tracks. Obviously, there is still room for the advanced products, but any of the sub-$1,000 software tools will do the trick for most producers.

 

Encoding

 

DVD program assets are made up of elementary stream files. Each video segment has a compressed MPEG2-format video file (.m2v) and, if there is audio with the program, at least one audio file (.wav). When multiple languages are used, there will be more than one audio file for each video element. For surround audio, there will be both a stereo track, as well as an AC-3 encoded audio file for the surround mix. In the past, these files had to be created prior to any authoring. Ground-breaking DVD tools, like Sonic’s DVD Creator, employed real-time encoding hardware (which is still used), but fast software encoding has now become an acceptable alternative. Many authoring tools let you import DVD-compliant files, which have been compressed using a separate application – or work with regular AVI or QuickTime files and apply built-in encoding at the last stage of the authoring process.

 

DVD videos can be either NTSC or PAL and the frame size is the same as DV: NTSC – 720 x 480 (non-square pixel aspect ratio). The compression of DVDs should typically fall into the range of 4.0 to 7.0 Mbps (megabits per second). Higher data rates are allowed, but you generally won’t see much improvement in the video and higher bit rates often cause problems in playback on some DVD players, especially those in older laptop computers. There are three encoding methods: constant bit rate, one-pass variable and two-pass variable.

 

Constant bit rate encoding is the fastest because the same amount of compression is applied to all of the video, regardless of complexity. Variable bit rate encoding applies less compression to more complex scenes (a fast camera pan) and more compression to less complex scenes (a static “talking head” shot). In two-pass encoding, the first pass is used to analyze the video and the second pass is the actual encoding pass. Therefore, two-pass variable bit rate encoding will take the longest amount of time. During the encoding set up, a single bit rate value is entered for constant bit rate encoding, but two values (average and maximum peak rates) are entered for variable.

 

The quality of one type of encoding versus another depends on the quality of the encoding engine used by the application, as well as the compression efficiency of the video itself. The former is obvious, but the latter means that film, 24P and other progressive-based media will compress more cleanly than standard interlaced video. This is due to the fact that interlaced video changes temporal image information every 60^th of a second, while film and 24P’s visual information updates only 24 times a second. As a result, compression at the exact same bit rate will appear to have fewer artifacts when it is applied to film and 24P media, than when applied to interlaced media. Add to this the fact that film material has grain, which further hides some of these compression artifacts. The bottom line is that a major movie title can often look great with a much lower bit rate (more compressed) than your video-originated corporate training DVD – even with a higher bit rate. Most standard DVDs will look pretty good at a bit rate of around 5.5 Mbps, which will permit you to get about 60 to 90 minutes of material on a 4.7 GB general-purpose DVD-R.

 

Authoring

 

Creating the interactive design for a DVD is a lot like building a web site. Menus are created which are linked to video assets. Clicking a menu button causes the player to jump from one point on the DVD (menu) to another (video track). Menus can be still frames or moving video, but must conform to the same constraints as any other video. If they don’t start out as video, they are turned into video in the final DVD build. By comparison a web site, CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM might have HTML-based menus of one size and QuickTime or AVI video assets of a different size. This isn’t allowed in a DVD-Video, because the DVD must be playable on a set-top DVD player as video. Motion menus must be built with loop points, since the longer the menu runs, the more space it will consume on the disk. Thirty seconds is usually a standard duration for a loop. A slight pause or freeze occurs in the video when the disk is triggered to jump back to the start of the loop. This is a buffer as the DVD player’s head moves between two points on the disk’s surface.

 

Lay out your design on paper first. A flowchart is a great idea, because this will let you see how one or more menus connect to the videos in the most efficient manner. Although any type of flowcharting software program will work, it is often just as simple to do this on paper. On the other hand, a nicely printed visual flowchart goes a long way in explaining to a client how the viewer will navigate through a complex DVD. Links can be created as buttons or drop zones. A button is a graphic element added to a menu within the authoring tool, while a drop zone is a hyperlink area added to an imported video. You can create videos or animations to be used as menus and turn graphic or video portions into linkable “hot spots” by adding drop zones on top of the video.

 

Clicking on a button or drop zone activates a jump to another menu, a video track or a point within a video track (chapter point). Part of the authoring task is to define what actions occur when you click on the control keys of a standard DVD handheld remote. You must define what happens when the viewer clicks the Menu, Title or Return keys, as well as which direction the cursor travels when the arrow keys (up, down, left, right) are used. Although the degree of control over these parameters varies with different software applications, all the contenders must let you define the next options. You have to set the First Play – the file that plays when you first pop in the DVD. You also have to set the target destination for the end of each video file. This determines whether the video continues on to another video or jumps back to a menu – and if so, which one. Remember that if you have more than one menu, you will have to add buttons and navigation commands to go between the menus.

 

Finishing

 

Most authoring tools let you run a simulation of the DVD as you configure it. This lets you proof it to see if all the links work as intended. When the authoring is complete, the next step is to “build” the disk. This is an automatic process in which the application checks to see if your authoring has any errors and then “muxes” (multiplexes) the audio, video and menu files. The muxing stage is where the VOB (video object) files are created. You can see these files if you explore the folders of a non-encrypted DVD. If your DVD tool features built-in encoding, that step generally occurs during the building process.

 

When a project is built, it can be saved to your hard drive as a disk image or burned to a recordable DVD. Although there are a handful of different recordable DVD formats, the DVD-R general-purpose disks seem to be the most universal. These are typically rated at 4.7 GB, but actually hold about 4.3 GB of data. If you require more capacity, you will have to advance to a dual-layer or dual-sided DVD (9 GB and higher). These cannot be burned on a DVD recorder and not all authoring tools handle these formats. If they do, you can prepare a disk image to be saved to a DLT tape, which would be sent to a commercial DVD replication facility. When you burn a DVD-R on a recording drive, be aware that the burning speed is based on the rating of the media. 1X blanks will only burn at the 1X speed, 2X disks at 2X speed and so on. If you saved the build as a disk image, you will be able to use a disk burning utility like Roxio and burn multiple DVD copies. Although encoding and recording times vary, it is not out-of-line for a one-hour DVD to require as much as four hours from the time you start the build until the DVD has finished the recording step.

 

We’ve only scratched the surface; so to learn more, check out the white papers and technical documents that are available on the Pioneer, Sonic Solutions and Mitsui web sites. A great reference is DVD Production, A Practical Resource for DVD Publishers by Philip De Lancie and Mark Ely, available from Sonic Solutions. User guides and tutorials – especially those included with Adobe Encore DVD and Apple DVD Studio Pro 2 – are also quite helpful. Start small and move up from there. Soon you, too, can be a master of the DVD world.

 

© 2004 Oliver Peters