We’re big fans of technology here at Oakslade, but that doesn’t mean we unquestioningly accept every new toy or go along with conventional wisdom without giving it a good deal of examination first (well, apart from those of us who have succumbed to the iPhone propaganda, but they all live downstairs so the drool’s contained).

Take the Internet, for example. We like the Internet. It kept me in work as a programmer for five years - on websites that brought couples together and told you where to recycle motor oil (often at the same time). And, as we’ve mentioned before, it allows us to download production music at the touch of a button and means we can get instant feedback from our clients as their edit progresses, but it can pose some challenges as well.

With the rise of YouTube, Vimeo and the like, along with the development of more complex and feature oriented company websites, nearly every project we cut has at least two outputs - DVD and the web. But whilst TVs are getting bigger, allowing us creative flexibility to play with grading, text and graphics when exporting to DVD, we have to be much more careful when thinking about our web encodes.   Resolutions are generally smaller, compression reduces picture quality and those subtle, flowing lower thirds that look downright gorgeous on a big screen are just a small, blocky mess. As for subtitles and credit crawls - it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

There’s a number of ways round this, of course - you can make two versions, one for the web and one for DVD.   You can make sure you’ve spent time setting up the right compression settings to keep the quality as high as possible.   Or you can do what we do - sit down at the beginning of a project and plan out how to make an impact no matter what format the output.   You can see it in our work for Un.titled and Handy Group.

But that doesn’t mean we’ll lay off the vignettes completely!