It probably comes as no surprise to the people who swing by this blog that in a technology led industry like ours the ’state-of-the-art’ and the ’status quo’ get further apart every hour. So it is part of the editors’ remit here to keep up to date with both technology and design. This is a polite way of saying they get to surf the net a lot during render breaks.

This led Simon came up with something interesting the other day from those very smart people over at the Pro Video Coalition in America about the cost of video production. Although the article relates specifically to production the principles transfer happily across to post-production too.

In short it says that you can’t compete on price because someone will always undercut you. So we all need to articulate what it is that makes us different? What makes us worth it? Why come here? Why pay more? Why pay less?

We want to keep this blog as a thinking space more than a selling space, so I won’t give you our answers. But we have definitely asked ourselves these questions and will continue to do so. I hope you have too.

A purchasing expert recently challenged me on our prices for editing - asking me to reduce the cost of our £500 per day edit suites beyond the normal 4-day week offer. We came to an arrangement, of course, because of the amount of time this particular client spends at Oakslade Studios.

But the conversation made me question whether we were really offering value for money, rather than simply comparing ourselves with other providers as being somewhere between ‘low-cost’ and ‘expensive’?

Whether or not a marketing campaign (in our specific case a piece of video) was worthwhile value for money depends entirely on results. These don’t have to be simply “increased profit” - but unless you’re embarking on marketing just to make yourself feel glamorous, whether or not the cost was worth it depends on what the darn thing does to change and improve your business.

Investing in and spending money on marketing relates to the whole ethos of a business. Would you sit down and ask your managing director to breakdown where they spend their salary and work out where they could cut costs? You’d judge them on their performance of course. How well they hit their objectives, how they communicated goals and delivered strategy throughout the business.

The challenge for us, and for marketers in general, is in setting the objectives in the first place, measuring them, and relating them to business issues that everyone has a stake in. In some cases this has to be something as concrete as increased profit!

We’ve been playing with a timelapse camera in the office and it seemed rude not to share some of the results…

I was looking forward with anticipation to the above named event laid on by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Would they reveal any secret revelations about the online world… perhaps some tactics for how to market within social networks? At least there might be a speculative debate among experts.

A debate did take place - but virtually everyone there seemed more interested in trying to protect the CIM from becoming obsolete rather than discussing what the future of marketing actually was. Indeed the session revolved almost entirely around a research project which the CIM has commissioned about the definition of marketing. When I asked whether they’d asked any consumers what THEY thought marketing was I was literally laughed at: ‘that’d be like opening Pandora’s box!’ someone said.

This baffled me. Even the speaker’s own presentation slide (amusingly entitled ‘Changes in marketing since 1976′) had ‘Conversation with customers’ among its bullet points.

I think the most valuable marketing work we do with film plays into the notion that people respond to ‘human conversation’ much more than ‘commercial announcement’ (read Seth Godin). Ok, so it’s hard to have a conversation with a screen - but the rise of shared video in online social networks indicates that video is more often than not the conversation-starter.

Companies that want to be part of a conversation with their customers need to have something interesting to say - but they also need to be prepared to listen to the response. The speaker last night concluded that he was pleased that their polemical discussion had sparked a debate. I’m not quite so sure the Chief Executive thought the same - his passing comment to me was (and I swear, verbatim) “Remember lad, I’m the one who’s over sixty and has the words ‘Chief Executive’ in my title”!

One thing we learned early on was not to force our clients to go to any more trouble than necessary to view the work we’d done for them.

Picture the scene: the deadline for the first draft is upon us, and the client is impatiently awaiting a screening; they’ve got their own boss to show it to and time is short.

What’s going to work best?

1. Trying to email a 50MB video file which is most likely going to crash the client’s inbox?
2. Saving the file on our FTP server and spending the next hour explaining in painstaking detail exactly what an FTP client is and exactly how to use it? (only to find the client’s corporate IT policies won’t allow installation of new software)
3. Sticking the video on YouTube where the client can easily view it - but so too can everyone else, including their competitors?

or:

1. Giving the client immediate access to a secure online website where they can view and download our edits, whether on PC or Mac

You can probably guess which option our clients are extremely enthusiastic about!

Our new service, called WatchYourEdit.com, is a brilliant way for our clients to save days of time whilst DVDs are posted back and forth. And it works straight away even on the most dusty old office PCs.

Clients can even watch back an edit and leave comments or scribble notes directly onto the video - our editors then receive a list of annotations complete with exact timecodes, so they can dig straight in and make the changes in no time.

WatchYourEdit.com has been a wonderful example of a new piece of technology making a genuine, beneficial difference to both our clients and our editors’ lives, and we love it very much

You may have seen that we’ve recently added some new tricks to the box.

In days of yore, TV commercials in the UK were submitted on 1/2″ tape to the clearing house, who’d check the content of your ad to make sure it didn’t break any laws.  You’d then send it off to whoever was dealing with broadcast for you and the edit would be subjected to a series of tests to ensure that the video was within stringent broadcast standards. If you’d distorted some audio or your whites were a bit too bright, the tape would be rejected and you’d be faced with another mammoth round trip.

Fortunately, some lovely people have got together in the past few years and created digital means of submission.  Both the clearance service (in the UK this is Clearcast) and the companies who serve the ads direct to the broadcasters (IMD are one) can now accept ads submitted online.For the quality to be broadcastable, you obviously can’t employ the same compression the guys at YouTube use.  The requirement is for 50Mbps MPEG2 video comprised entirely of I frames - which is to say that the compression encodes every single frame individually, rather than trying to guess at the changes in between key frames.

This format is not easy to encode to with standard tools, which is why when the need arose we plumped for the utterly brilliant Episode Pro which has taken on all encoding duties across the facility.  It’s fast - optimised for our multi-processor Intel Macs - and highly configurable, which is a great boon when involved with the black art of tweaking compressed files for the best quality for the smallest file size.

Not only is the software easy to use, it produces beautiful output - and the first ad we submitted with the system went through its technical checks with flying colours.

Much excitement today as our third DVD disc surface printer arrived, in a series of cardboard boxes stacked like Russian nesting dolls.

Each of our machines can print 300 DVDs or CDs in full colour before needing reloading. And each disc is done in under a minute. Pretty good going for the extraordinary quality these lovely beasts produce.

Danielle is very very happy