That was filmed on Simon’s new Flip HD camera, a lovely little piece of kit.

Oakslade Studios has been providing post-production services for 14 years but from today, January 5th we’ll be operating with the same level of service from our new home in Fazely Studio is Digbeth, the heart of Birmingham’s creative industry. The need for expansion, more space and more staff, as well as the opportunity to get in at the beginning of something really exciting at Fazeley means we’ve moved the company lock stock.

We’re also taking the opportunity to make things a little less confusing for our clients so Oakslade Studios will now be known as Fullrange. We won’t have to swap hats when you come and speak to us but all of our clients will get the service they’ve always had, which includes the abundance of free parking, only now it’s free parking in central Birmingham.

So this is the last post on this blog, all of our exciting client news, technical developments, industry verbiage and cool stuff that we’ve been getting on here will now be over at www.fullrange.co.uk/blog.

For the complete Fullrange experience, check out www.fullrange.co.uk or come and see us over at Fazeley.

See you there.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, with lower end prosumer cameras offering DVCAM at increasingly affordable prices, DVCAM tapes come through the office on a particularly regular basis, with HDV following close behind.   In fact, we’ve just had to retire one of our DVCAM recorder due to overuse and upgrade our other (newer) machine with an SDI I/O card to replace it.   But it’s that old stalwart, Digibeta, that we see most of - and very happy we are about that, too.   It’s great quality and our Sony J3 and Thomson decks are incredibly user friendly, which makes life easier!

We still get the odd DVCPRO and BetaSP tape through, but the decks spend most of their time lounging in front of the pool waiting for the call to arms.   It wasn’t so long ago that we were running them both almost continuously, but with Panasonic championing their DVCPRO-HD and P2 and BetaSP taking an ever decreasing slice of the market, they don’t see the action they once did.

So, what about the future?   Well, whilst we’ve toyed with buying our own HDCAM recorder, the speed with which the industry is moving towards data and solid state (oh, and the £50k price tag) has kind of put us off a bit.   We do, of course, have full access to HDCAM decks and recorders when either we or our clients require them and have just recently completed conform and mastering on several HDCAM based projects.

It’s going to take another few months before we get a clearer idea of which direction the standards are going to head, but we’ve got our eyes on introducing a meaty Bluray archiving system and we’re still championing the REDONE as the frankly jaw dropping all rounder that it is.   But, in the meantime, we’ve just won a contract that will see our 40 VHS decks called back into service for a good couple of weeks.   So, in honour of the format that refuses to die, here’s Blockbusters’ Bob Holness from 1985.

I’ve borrowed this post wholesale from our other blog at www.fullrange.co.uk but as both companies are sponsoring the event I thought i’d save the effort.

Been a bit quiet hereabouts recently, but that�??s because i�??ve been organising an event for the company. We�??re running an exclusive, private screening of the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace.

So we�??re having the screening in Birmingham at the Electric Cinema. The coolest film of the year at Britain�??s oldest working cinema. There should be about 100 or so people there and we think it will be a great night. We haven�??t filled all of the seats yet but we�??re not having to work very hard to do so.

The guest list has been pretty carefully chosen but we will give away 2 tickets to blog readers. Just email me at 007@fullrange.co.uk with the words �??guest list�?? in the subject line and we�??ll pick some names out of a hat.

Whilst our films aren�??t quite having the global impact the revitalised Bond is, we do have our ambitions turned all the way up to eleven, so hopefully we�??ll see you on the 31st October and perhaps raise a glass to Mr. Bond.

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!

Im currently working on a short film, directed by Steven Spencer, entitled Momster.  The film was shot by our very own Ed Moore using the RED camera at 4K resolution and is produced by Rachel Carter. The film is one of two of the 2007 slate of Digital Short projects funded by Screen West Midlands that we’re involved with.

One of the first things I had to decide when it came to me in post, was which workflow i was going to use to get it in and out of Final Cut.  Due to ‘time constraints’ (which seem really popular in this industry) I chose to get my hands on Crimson and go for that route. Crimson acts as an intermediary between Final Cut and REDcine, the software used to process the .R3D files that the camera creates.

On previous projects shot on RED we had chosen to transcode all the footage to Prores HQ before the edit, but at an approximate time of 6:1, it was quite a lenghty process if you had shot a few hours of footage.  Working straight from the proxies and using Crimson solves that issue allowing us to get straight into the edit.

Using the proxies generated by the camera, I edited the film using Final Cut.  Once the picture had been locked, we went via Crimson to get our timeline into REDcine.  So rather than transcoding all my files upfront to Prores HQ, I now only had to do the clips used on my timeline.

Ed and I then went through the sequence in REDcine, cropping and resizing of any clips which needed it, before giving it a basic colour treatment and exporting it out to Prores HQ.  The film now has to go off to the Vis FX team to add the eponymous momster and other CGI shots, before coming back here for the grade.

SO thats where it is now, being Momstered.

By the way, check out my new website here. If I don’t keep up the blogging on the site you’re all welcome to come round to the office and whip me.

We’ve just finished putting the finishing touches to our colour grading reel, which you can see here.

Grading is something we all get quite excited about here at Oakslade, but it’s often difficult to explain why, but here goes… A question we get asked quite often is: “Why bother?”  The easiest way to answer is to think of all the feelings and emotions that we readily associate with colour. Romance…red? Jealousy…green? Cold…blue?  Heaven…Mila Kunis?   OK, perhaps not the last one, but all the others are examples of how we constantly relate to colour, whether we consciously realise it or not.   Given that these are all common responses, think of the multitude of ways that we react we unconsciously react to colour. How much effort goes into choosing the colour you paint your living room or the colour of your new car? Which is why colour grading your film is important.  Don’t you want to own a TVR just because they come in Felix Chameleon Black?

If you watch your favourite film without sound, it will be a very different experience (providing it’s not a silent movie, of course!) Watch a film without colour and the same rule applies (again, providing your film isn’t black and white - but even then it will have been graded).   So what do we do?

Once a picture lock has been signed off we get to work in our dedicated grading suite (running Apple Color and our super shiny 23″ Vutrix LCD Grading Monitor) to get the most from the images, working on the tonal range and overall contrast until all the shots are equally balanced before moving on to our secondary corrections. These can range from simply improving skin tones and replacing dull, grey skies (a fairly common feature here in the Midlands!) to isolating specific colours and adding stylized looks and moods.

Each sesson with our colourist is specific to the clients brief and helps to achieve a specific ‘look’ to help tell the story. Having an in-house colourist means that not only can we make the changes to your film that you need, but we can can advise you so that even if you’re not sure what you want then we can help you work it out.

Take a look at the reel and see how we can bring your images to life.

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.

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.

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: