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.

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:

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.

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!

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”!