•postbrooklyn•

I’ve been sadly neglecting the blog as of late, so I’m going to do my best to make it a point to at least make an end of the week update. In the news this past week:

• A short digitize job of “Pilgrim State” going to DVCPro HD. Still one of the most impressive formats out there. I’m very interested to see how the Apple ProRes format takes it to another level, though. Especially since I end up doing a lot of my post and storage on external FW800 drives (purchased through OWC — one of the most mac friendly sites on the web, I think, and with a solid reasonably priced product, too. Can’t recommend them enough so far).

• Finished the last minute layback for LFS via MTV for spots relating to Real World Reunion Las Vegas. The spots were a nice mash-up of the Grindhouse style with some 3-D in 2-D space work done in for good measure.

• Began the graphics work on “Beauty Sleep with Dr. Michael Breus” which should be airing on PBS nationally starting in December. It promises to be a pretty interesting and educational show. The post starts in earnest July 20th, so right now we’re just beginning to generate the appropriate assets.

And that’s about the size of it. We’re still working by word of mouth, but hopefully we’ll start doing some external marketing in the hopes to get into some new arenas and more interesting projects. Always looking for an interesting project or two.

We’ve begun the process of the DVD authoring, package design and duplication of the American Public Television series, “Chef’s Story,” a clever and intimate approach to learning more from true top chefs. The shows begin airing in a few weeks and the DVDs will be available through a 1-800 number or in many other retail outlets, as well, including Amazon.  Also available on the website: http://www.chefsstory.com/

So far, episodes 1-12 have been created. More to come, I’m sure, in the future.

So, we’re putting the finishing touches on some of our upgrades. The most exciting of which still hasn’t arrived — the new FCP Suite 2 — but, hopefully, apple will stop tinkering with cell phone technology long enough to actually ship something halfway useful somewhat soon (it was supposed to start shipping around now, I heard, but so far nary a peep).

That might be the most anticipated little entry, but the other upgrades to postbrooklyn are equally exciting, I think. We’ve added an internal drive to our G5 to alleviate some project space tightness. We upgraded the G5 to also include a brand spankin’ new Pro Tools HD system, to further our interest and approaches to sound design and mixing into the HD world (7.1 surround here we come!). We’ve created a duplication station all by itself that can consistently knock out 50 DVDs at a time, printed and everything. And we added a new MacPro to the mix – quite literally! It has all the same programs and capabilities as the G5, thus making our ability to handle any workload and work seamlessly between edit bays quite transparent. The MacPro even takes advantage of a little Pro Tools Jr. — better known as Pro Tools LE and 002 rack — but it’ll work with the same Pro Tools panache that the big brother does. All of that and 2TB of internal RAID space operating in a very quiet new tower. These are all very exciting and promise to become even more impressive once the new suite of Apple tools does, in fact, arrive.

But perhaps most exciting to me from a post engineering standpoint is that we’ve violated several laws of audiophilology by wiring our video patchbay… with audio cables. Yep. It sure as hell wouldn’t pass muster in any broadcast stickler’s home — but for what we use an audio patchbay for (mostly to get some of our d/a conversion out to speakers) it works very well. Just be sure not to patch a video signal to an audio one of vice-versa. That’s a wee bit dangerous. Regardless, it makes working in our facility much more workable. And really, that’s sort of what we’re all about ’round here.