The good thing about film sets, is that they’re temporary. Erected relatively quickly, taken down even faster. So it would seem that the fire at Universal Studios this week caused no permanent damage. According to the president of the Studio Ron Meyer it could all be replaced.

Presumably this doesn’t include the films and TV shows in the vault that were damaged. According to the article in the Guardian that i’m copying most of this from, almost half of Hollywood’s entire output has been lost forever.

Which brings me to the point of this post (that i’m desperately trying to finish so I can get down to the pub and out of the house before Big Brother 9 starts), three little words that we think are very very important to our post-production customers.

Off-site backup.

Please ask us about them next time you’re popping in.

Off to the pub now.

As a director, staggering bloodied but unbowed from the wrapped set of your latest project, or as an editor about to enter the fray, we have a fairly strong belief that what you need when moving from production into post is a clear head, relaxed environment and frankly, a bit of peace and quiet.

This is the essence of what Oakslade Studios offers.

So rather than bog you down with technical specs (here if you really want them), we wanted to show you what we think Oakslade is all about. So we made a film about it, and you can find it here on the homepage.

We’re not in Soho, and we think that’s a good thing.

Another quick post pointing you toward something interesting. Studio Daily is a web resource for all kinds of production matters, from cutting edge technology to training resources to general production related material, but there was a post on there recently that caught our attention. We’ve waited until now because the responses seem to have petered out at last but it did provoke some interesting debate.

The short version is this “the availability and affordability of high end home editing systems means that the majority of the newest generation of editors don’t know squat about editing”.

The interesting distinction to be made is that it doesn’t say these people can’t edit, rather they don’t know, don’t understand or don’t care about the tricks of the trade, etiquette, useful planning techniques, technical details, traditions, inside-knowledge, trade secrets, workflows, standards, practices, finishing techniques, secret handshakes and (with a raised eyebrow) work ethics and that have built up over the last century.

If you’re an editor its worth a read, regardless of which side of the argument you fall down on. But if you’re not an editor then its absolutely worth a read because it explains the difference between editing and being an editor and demonstrates how hard it is to tell the difference between the two.

The Studio Daily blog is here.

Hi, Simon here. As an editor here at Oakslade I get to see a lot of lovely, crisp HD footage pass through my edit suite on a daily basis. I always enjoy sitting down and cutting this together according to the client’s brief.

Something strikes me as odd though. People always seem to forget about sound. I’m not sure why, obviously its one of the two key senses we use when watching film and TV. So for me, nothing we do here feels complete without a good soundtrack. I’ve seen many corporate films in the past where its clear that 95% of the client’s focus has been on the image and the soundtrack is an afterthought, usually just dropping any old royalty free soundtrack on the bottom as background music to finish it off.

Sometimes people recognise the need for a voiceover but haven’t budgeted for a professional voiceover artist. In our experience these people are called artists for a reason. As Oakslade has it’s own recording studio clients will sometimes ask us to just grab someone from the office and whilst we understand that ‘cash is king’ this just doesn’t do all of this gorgeous footage justice. No-one in the office sounds like Don LaFontaine so films made in this way, without the proper budget or planning never reach their full potential. Which is a shame because the hard work is always already done.

I think what I’m trying to say here is to always remember that sound is just as important as the image. If you were able to watch Blackhawk Down without the sound effects, I think you might get what I’m on about.

Even better, watch this:

Until you ask someone who does.

Bear with me. It’ll makes sense in a minute.

I had a weekend of watching foreign language movies. It wasn’t deliberate, it just happened to turn out that way. But the ones that I watched all happened to be really very good. Apocalypto on Friday night, The Lives of Others on Saturday afternoon then The Orphanage on Saturday night. The opening of Apocalypto works particularly well. Perhaps they were trying to get over the language barrier (its in Yucatec Mayan), but there’s no dialogue at all for the first five minutes or so. Without dialogue or explanation the editor, John Wright, conveys a huge amount of information simply through judicious shot selection. We spend our days striving to use visual imagery to reinforce our client’s message however it is always worth checking out how our Hollywood cousins do it.

Fortunately we have people here who do that sort of thing for us too.

We’re all pretty excited here at Oakslade at the moment - not only has spring finally bothered to show up (leading to a mad rush as everyone tries to book their summer holiday on the same week in August) but we’ve been playing with a very big, shiny and, quite frankly, groundbreaking new toy.

Our good friends over at AEFilms brought over their RED camera last week so that we could see how to fit it into our Post Production workflow.   It’s fair to say that it’s one of the most eagerly anticipated developments in the world of filmmaking for many a year… and so there are thousands of detailed, geeky blog posts out there if you want to know more about it, but suffice to say that it takes beautiful images in amazing detail and records them straight onto a hard disk - doing away with the need for all those little tapes that end up rattling around in the bottom of the kit bag.

The huge benefit to us editors is that we can then work on the files straight away - no capturing or logging necessary!   And, because the pictures are captured in such high detail, we can really push the boat out when grading, creating graphics or adding that extra little bit of magic to your project (usually the few days at the end of the schedule when we go a bit wild eyed, lock ourselves in our suites and only emerge to demand caffeine).

We’re looking forward to putting the RED through its paces on a couple of shoots we’ve got coming up in Birmingham and the Midlands over the next few weeks, so expect to see a few examples of our footage in the not too distant future - once we’ve wiped the drool off it first!

I was looking for something completely different this morning on google and pretending it was work when I came across this article over at FXguide. The new S4C channel idents will be one of several different live action scenes but will have vfx elements that will change according to the character of the announcer’s voice, much like the levels on a mic or stereo. All of the compositing is done in real time and every single one will be different as it goes to air. A fantastic idea, flawlessly executed.

If you like hearing about how things like this are done, FXguide is an excellent resource and they do a great podcast for the VFX Show over on iTunes. Podcasts are simply the best invention for those people who, like me, walk a dog twice a day.

An interview with Hugh Laurie, still awesome in House, in this past weekend’s Observer magazine mentioned a documentary he did about funerals. The stable lad for the funereal carthorses mentioned that the horses don’t like this sort of work because “the load isn’t heavy enough”. I was reminded of the time I visited the Microsoft computer lab at Pembroke College in Cambridge and saw a supercomputer with 1TB of RAM designed to calculate fluid thermodynamics being used to play minesweeper.

This comes to mind today because Creative Cow sent me a marketing email this morning about the Redbox parallel processing unit. Essentially a render farm in a box, it increases productivity by a factor of 8, where productivity is measured by the time your computers spend doing insanely complex mathematics. We don’t need one at Oakslade because “the load wouldn’t be heavy enough”. We don’t do the sort of processor-intensive graphics, animation and visual effects that would need a Redbox. However every project here does need a certain amount of computer heavy lifting. If HD footage were an object it would be the kind of thing you pass to a friend and go “feel how heavy that is”. And the point comes where the edit is finished but the graphics need to be rendered out one last time, just to be sure, and then the project usually needs to be compressed for delivery. All of this tends to occur as the deep stomach-churning rumble of an approaching deadline gets uncomfortably louder.

Luckily we don’t need a Redbox for this, our gigabit Ethernet network allows for distributed computing power amongst our sleek detachment of Macs to handle the heavy lifting and continued investment in equipment here means that the load still isn’t heavy enough.

We’ve blogged before about how the internet is putting our clients more in touch with the magic and wizardry that goes on behind the scenes here at Oakslade, but we’ve now put it to use as a virtual music researcher. Anyone who has visited our rather swanky, hi-tech office will have seen the mountainous pile of CDs that made up our music library tucked away in our sound studio. However, with new releases arriving every other day and finding that one special track becoming ever more difficult, we’ve taken drastic action and sent the lot for recycling. But don’t panic! With the majority of production music studios falling under the umbrella of just a handful of large companies, they’ve all got speedy web sites that allow us to search, preview and download thousands of tracks in seconds, as well as save playlists that we can send to our clients so they can pick their favourites before we drop them in to the edit.We’re obviously very excited by this - not only does it now take us minutes to find the perfect piece of music rather than hours, but we’re also not being sent lots of nasty, environmentally unsound plastic cases each week.

And, with the CD shelves lying empty, Steve now has somewhere to display his vintage Star Wars figures (once he’s made the alarmed perspex doors to keep our grubby hands off them)!

Lots of people in the production industry are complaining about the rise of UGC (user-generated content) when they should in fact be welcoming it as the biggest catalyst for the increased use of video since the birth of the world wide web. There’s also plenty of room for creative companies to add value to user-generated content itself.

Our new friends at American Express wanted to reinforce the company’s “win” philosophy for a big conference. They wanted to capture “live” the successes of its sales team as they occurred but the problem was no sensible budget could afford to send camera teams to each of 14 markets for three months to wait for the golden moments.

American Express worked with Fullrange Media to develop a “diary room” approach where team members could self-record entries as and when they had achieved a sales success. Low-cost standard-definition Sony miniDV cameras were sent out across Europe and a web-based instruction video was produced to help people record the best possible entries. Point 1 where our expertise was able to add value to the production of user-generated content: helping explain how to use the kit properly, as well as some of the fundamentals of how to record a good clear video diary entry (there’s a wealth of this sort of thing on the Guardian website from their supplement on Making Video).

The completed tapes were then collated, formated and edited at Oakslade Studios: point two where we were able to really enhance the work the teams had done. By taking the teams’ fantastically raw, natural responses and weaving them together to tell a consistent story we were able to create a powerful and engaging end film which gave American Express a bigger bang for their buck than anything we could have shot entirely ourselves. Audiences who are used to online video are happy to overlook even the most dire technical barriers - so the standard definition source footage wasn’t a problem, especially once a consistent look and feel was added by motion graphics and idents.

And the conference delegates applauded every entry - why wouldn’t they, after all it was their peers who they were applauding (albeit whose efforts we’d enhanced and shaped into being ‘on-message’). Peer-group learning using film - 1. Shiny indulgence of a production company that wishes it was making TV ads - 0.