News and Events

Washington Area's Henninger Media Services Helps Bring History into Homes Around the World

2009-02-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2009, Barack Obama is inaugurated as America's first African-American President. The world watched the day's events, and ABC provided the first-ever view of what happens post-inauguration--the glitzy inaugural balls. But how do you bring the First Couple's first dance into the homes of millions of Americans? Arlington, VA and Washington, D.C.-based Henninger Media Services provided ABC and White Cherry Entertainment with the media and production solutions.

Arlington, Virginia (PRWEB) February 12, 2009 -- January 20, 2009, Barack Obama is inaugurated as America's first African-American President. The world watched the day's events, and ABC provided the first-ever view of what happens post-inauguration--the glitzy inaugural balls.

But how do you bring the First Couple's first dance into the homes of millions of Americans? Arlington, VA and Washington, D.C.-based Henninger Media Services provided ABC and White Cherry Entertainment with the media and production solutions.

Many of our staff members stayed overnight in the edit suites and offices in order to beat the January 20th traffic rush and security lockdown

Executive Producer, Ricky Kirshner and Director/Executive Producer Glenn Weiss, had just days to edit all story features and graphics packages that needed to be rolled in live for the Obama-inspired, Neighborhood Ball: An Inauguration Celebration television production.

"Video footage came to us on every format you could think of…" - Henninger DC Chief Engineer, Dave Komes.

The Neighborhood Ball dealt with nearly a dozen different formats of incoming footage. Formats included standard DVD, Digi Beta, XDCam from ABC News, and tapeless P2 cards from remote shoots.

"Henninger Media Services found time-efficient and cost-effective ways to convert all of these formats to 720p," (the broadcast standard for ABC) Jim Mullen, the Field and Post Producer from White Cherry Entertainment said.

"XDCAM standard-definition footage needed to be upconverted, the P2 material had a different frame rate, transcoded quicktimes needed to be converted, plus we had to extract video from raw MXF files. And it all needed to be output at 720p HD," said Henninger's Senior Editor on the project, Jef Huey. Both Larry Duke and Kevin Barker were integrally involved in the editing process as well.

Three edit rooms were set up at the company's Washington, D.C.-based facility. The 17th Street location was a few blocks away from the action, both on the mall during the day, and at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center at night.

Henninger staff and the visiting White Cherry Entertainment staff worked around the clock to complete all of the on-air pieces.

"Many of our staff members stayed overnight in the edit suites and offices in order to beat the January 20th traffic rush and security lockdown," said Robert Anderson, General Manager of the Washington, D.C. Henninger facility.

Simultaneous edits and shared storage between edit rooms via the Facilis Terrablock, enabled Henninger Media Services to pull off an amazing and historic production feat. Twenty-first century media technology brings twenty-first century political change to life.

About Henninger Media Services:
Henninger Media Services (HMS) specializes in a full range of high-definition services, including original script-to-screen production, video editing, color correction, film transfer, quality control, and duplication; as well as surround sound audio, motion graphics, design, and DVD. HMS has served broadcast, corporate and government clients for over 25 years, with facilities in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. Information on Henninger Media Services can be obtained by calling Michael Delpierre at 703-908-4021. Further information is available online at www.henninger.com.

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Designing For Video

2009-01-30T11:47:00.000-08:00

Translating Print to Video

There's a natural expectation that graphics used in print will translate directly to broadcast television or presentation video. That's true if you know how to overcome the limitations of the video medium.

The Horror!

For artists, the first ghastly realization is the relatively horrible resolution available on standard video. Graphics intended for print typically require at least 300 dpi (dots per inch) or much higher on serious work. Television isn't measured in dpi because the display system could be virtually any size, so it doesn't apply. However, once the image is physically displayed, dpi can be measured for that particular instance. On a standard broadcast television display, you're lucky if you can achieve 50 dpi. That's right, about 50 dpi on a 19" display and even less as the display area gets larger. "Big Screen" TVs of the 1990's might achieve 20 dpi.

The reason for televisions's poor resolution is the number of available pixels in the video image. Compare this: an image of 300 dpi printed in landscape on U.S. Standard Letter paper would measure 3,450 pixels wide by 2,550 pixels tall. A standard television image is only 720 pixels wide and 486 pixels tall covering the same area which is a relatively crummy image - about 65 dpi. The compressed digital world (which is everything delivered to the consumer) has to live with only 480 vertical pixels.

Thinking in terms of consumer digital cameras which are typically 5 Megapixels (5,000,000 pixels), a standard television signal is only some fraction of that - less than 000.35 Megapixels (350,000 pixels). Sad but true.

High Definition television helps that problem a great deal. The current top end HDTV image is 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels tall. That's just north of a 2 Megapixel image but still far short of a common digital still camera. On a mid sized 42" HDTV screen (about 36" wide), that translates to - uhhh - 53 dpi. It's not much better than standard television on a 19" monitor and it seems we're right back where we started from. That's not quite true; there are more pixels in HDTV which allow the images to look great on bigger screens. Watching HDTV, suddenly you can read the street signs in the Rose Bowl parade where you couldn't before.

If you're dealing with a High Definition 720p image, that image is 0.9216 Megapixels (1280 wide by 720 tall) in the same image area - worse resolution than some cameras in cell phones but still very forgiving on larger screens.

More Horror!

The next realization is the limited color space available in video. The color gamut of video is tightly controlled due to the limitations of delivery systems. If you're used to designing with colors from Pantone charts, you can tear out the most vibrant of those from your swatch book. Dramatic colors like "Screaming Zonker Red" are outside of the range current digital systems may describe. It's possible to create a digital system to describe hugely saturated colors but the amount of data required to do that plus maintain subtle hue differences in the lower ranges would be prohibitive to record and transmit. Photoshop contains tools for use on art destined for video. You should get friendly with these tools because "legalizing" a picture for video will dumb your designs down if you press the limits.

Another rude shock is the non-square pixels of standard definition video. If you draw a circle in Photoshop, it will be an elipse on a standard definition video monitor unless you compensate for the differences. Standard Definition video has rectangular pixels that are stretched in width, so a circle in one medium is not a circle in another. Fortunately, the 1080 line and 720 line High Definition systems both have square pixels by design, so that's not an issue.

But wait, there's more. Designers can't use the whole canvas. There's a 20% bleed for titles or still graphic elements and a 10% bleed for action elements in the scene that move. Those margins are called "Title Safe" and "Action Safe" respectively. Both are caused by an old expectation that display devices are "overscanned". The need to compensate for overscanned displays is going away, but there should still be a healthy vertical and horizontal margin just for composition purposes.

If you're designing for HDTV, you may need to consider even more margin in the horizontal direction if the project will also be used in Standard Definition video. The sides of an HDTV product are simply cut off to reformat the images for SDTV, plus you need to allow for "Safe" areas on the remaining video real estate.

Designing Down

All this just scratches the surface of design limitations for video. As maddening as it is, designers need to throw away any expectation of highly detailed images, fine print elements or contrast that ranges from midnight to looking directly at the sun. That said, there are ways to achieve a perfectly viewable image on a video screen in either High Definition or Standard Definition.

Some basic rules of thumb for designing for video:
1. Save your images as 24 Bit RGB Color at 72 ppi (dpi).
2. Design your image file at 720x540 for NTSC graphics and resize down to 720x486 for final
output. (square to rectangular pixel adjustment)
3. Design your image file at 768x576 for PAL graphics and resize down to 720x576 for final
output. (square to rectangular pixel adjustment)
4. A pure white background will flicker on the television, and may cause text to flicker. Use an
light grey/off white (234,234,234) colored background.
5. Use maximum R, G, B values of 234 or less.
6. Run Photoshop's NTSC video filter on your graphic for it to bring colors back into "safe"
range.
7. Action Safe is 90% of your screen size and is considered safe for elements other than text
that still needs to be seen.
8. Title Safe is 80% of your screen size and is considered safe for all text and elements that
"must" be seen.
9. Account for the Interlaced Scanning found in NTSC and PAL television sets. To avoid
flickering, make sure all fine lines are at least 2 pixels wide and that any width is defined in
multiples of 2 pixels.
10. 24 point fonts are best for television readability. A 14 point font, bold, is the absolute
minimum size to use.
11. Anti-alias all text to avoid sharp edges.
12. Leave around a 25 pixel border from the edge of the graphic so that any element doesn't
appear exactly at the edge of the screen.
13. Look at your work on a native video monitor (in addition to the computer display) to see
how it looks on a television used in someones home. What you see on your monitor will
most likely look better then what someone will have on their home TV.

CINE, Finishing In High Def Seminar

2009-01-30T09:23:00.000-08:00

For over 45 years, CINE has supported media talent by recognizing excellence in video and film production through semi-annual competitions. CINE’s most prestigious award, the Eagle Award, has been received by world-renowned producers such as Steven Spielberg and Ken Burns. Aside from their competitions, CINE also holds seminars and workshops to further educate existing producers and advise current students.

CINE will be holding a seminar in February, 2009 entitled Finishing in High Def as part of their Educational Series. Of all the media facilities in the Washington D.C. area, CINE chose Henninger Media Services (HMS), a long-time partner of theirs, to host this seminar. Rob Henninger (CEO and founder of HMS) has a wealth of knowledge about media production and will be instructing parts of this seminar, which will be broken down into the following three workshops.

Digital Glue: Keeping It Together is the first of the three workshops. It will be held on Saturday, February 7 from 10am to 4pm. The second workshop, Audio All Around will be held on Thursday, February 12, from 7pm-9:30pm and will focus on audio technology and mixing for surround sound. Picture Perfect is the last workshop of this series. It will be held on Thursday, February 19, from 7pm-9:30pm and go over color correction, optimization, passing QC’s and compression for non-broadcast distribution. All sessions will be held at Henninger Media Services at 2601-A Wilson Blvd. in Arlington, VA.

HMS holds Washington D.C.’s only commercially available HD Spirit Datacine+Davinci 2k. Among several capabilities, HD Spirit allows for motion picture film to be transferred into and viewed in standard video form.

Henninger Media Services (HMS) specializes in a full range of high-definition services, including original script-to-screen production, video editing, color correction, film transfer, quality control, and duplication; as well as surround sound audio, motion graphics, design, and DVD. HMS has served broadcast, corporate and government clients for over 25 years, with facilities in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. Information on Henninger Media Services can be obtained by calling Michael Delpierre at 703-908-4021 or by email at mdelpierre@henninger.com. Further information is available online at www.henninger.com.

Duplication Duplication Duplication Duplication...

2008-12-05T06:53:00.000-08:00

Duplication Duplication Duplication Duplication...

Anything from a highly specialized tape copy for broadcast to just a plain old "dub", Henninger Media Services can help you. The proliferation of not only tape formats but video formats has created an alphabet soup of technologies professionals and the casual producer alike need to cope with. Chances are, whatever it is, we've seen it.

For every application, there's an equal and opposite tape format

Just counting tape formats can be a daunting task, much less knowing how to successfully handle the material for production. The many seemingly identical yet wildly different DV formats is enough to drive you nuts. But then, there's HDTV to make it even deeper.

Relax. We've got it covered. We understand not only what each format does but also what it will do to you. That's right - it's not as simple as it used to be. Virtually every tape format released within the last 10 years has its own form of compression. Understanding the effects of cascading compression schemes is what will keep you out of trouble. You say "huh?" and we say "Relax".

Deep Duplication

We can sync that NTSC drop-frame DAT tape with your 23.98 FPS HDCam program, or encode the Dolby-E master to a D5 from your DA-88 - mixed in London. We specialize in strange track layouts, task specific encoding schemes, syncing material together and putting your data where it belongs. That includes applying captions and converting television standards, old and new, to or from anywhere in the world.

It's not just tape anymore

Much of what we do is program delivery which could mean electronic transport of compressed files to a multitude of places. Our output products may be targeted for Quicktime on the Web, FastChannel or DG spot delivery or any Telestream ClipMail box in the world. Also, we can create authored DVDs and closed captioned masters.

What can we do for you?

How do we even start describing all the combinations and permutations possible with specialized audio track layouts or specific signal requirements? Lets start with a list of capabilities and follow that up with a way to get more information based on your specific needs. Following is a table of basic capabilities. You may also use a simple form to request a quote for your specific needs.

Henninger Media Services (HMS) specializes in a full range of high definition services, including original script-to-screen production, video editing, color correction, film transfer, quality control, and duplication; as well as surround sound audio, motion graphics, design, and DVD. HMS has served broadcast, corporate and government clients for over 25 years, with facilities in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. Information on Henninger Media Services can be obtained by calling Michael Delpierre at 703-908-4021 or by email at mdelpierre@henninger.com. Further information is available online at www.henninger.com.

Politics in High Definition

2008-11-20T09:11:00.000-08:00

Politics in High Def

Nov 11, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding

http://digitalcontentproducer.com/hdhdv/depth/politics_in_high_def1111/

“Every town has its industry, and you have television people to support that,” says Jef Huey, senior editor at Henninger Media Services, “and obviously the industry of Washington is politics.” Therefore, politics in one form or another drives the video industry in Washington, D.C.—advertisements being one of the largest areas. The District of Columbia has the largest concentration of firms that do political consultancy, and they mostly make political commercials to support their candidates. While some have inhouse facilities, many of the larger consultancy groups use out-of-house facilities such as Henninger Media in order to keep up with the volume of ads they run.

While the main industry of Washington is politics, there are other things as well: The Discovery Channel and National Geographic both have locations in the city, and Henninger actually has a second facility that's located across the street from National Geographic. So the big challenge for the folks at Henninger during the political ad crunch time is to continue to serve these other clients as they have deadlines for their projects as well.

Henninger has a regular staff of 85 people who work both locations, and with the 2008 political season being so hot, this year the company added seven freelancers. The locations, set up for both HD and SD workflows, have nine Avid DS and Symphony dual-boot systems, seven regular Symphonies and eight audio suites in order to handle the bulk of the workload for both major political parties.

“Our Arlington, Va., facility is almost the length of a full city block—and the Democrats are on one end of the building and the Republicans are on the other end,” Huey says. “The principals of the Republican and Democrats firms are great friends; they share Nats tickets. So there’s competition and everything, yet a lot of camaraderie between the two. It’s a very interesting game.”

One of the reasons Henninger serves the larger political consultant groups—sometimes running 20-30 races—is that a few years ago, the company added a shared storage system enabling its staff to push projects from edit room to edit room. The staff found the 90TB Facilis Technology Terrablock system, which they divvied up into various arrangements for the different editing situations to be a very open system. But being the only facility doing the variety and volume of both HD and SD projects this year, Henninger had to write its own manual on workflow and content security.

As one can imagine, security is a big issue when you have major Democratic and Republican firms in the facility at the same time. So in order to accommodate, Huey says, the company basically carved the storage allocation into two hubs, with four Avid DS shared storage systems each—separate so there would be no security problems.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on having high security and serving either side of the aisle as effectively as possible,” Huey says. “And the clients responded very well to that. The funniest thing is that when you’re doing an ad on Monday and on Tuesday, you’re working for the other side and you’re using the spot you did the day before as the ‘bad ad.’ And, everybody knows it in the room, but there’s never any discussion about it. It’s unspoken.”

Creatively speaking, Huey says the spots move along the arc of the campaign, starting generally with biographies of the candidate then becoming more “comparative”—when the ads start becoming more like a tennis match and everything speeds up. “One candidate says something about your candidate, then you have to respond. And then they may respond and it goes back and forth faster and faster, causing tighter turnarounds,” Huey says.

While Henninger did a lot for the Obama team this year, including the 30-minute Obama TV show, the company did not do any McCain projects. Nonetheless, it still churned out a huge number of TV and radio ads for both parties. Estimates show the largest number of spots that went out in one day was 16. Huey says he can’t even guess the amount of political spots the company does in a year, which is a testament to the facility’s efficiency—partially due to the Avid workflow the team put in place.

“At the election watch party, we were sitting here watching the 10 to 20 races we’re intimately involved in,” Huey says. “As an example, I’ve done at least 15 spots for one senatorial race and that’s just one campaign. … You actually end up knowing those people better than those running for president.”

At this point in time, most political ads are run in standard definition. However, most parties are shooting HD as each campaign needs to have a library of footage to call upon—for preparedness for the future and the eventuality of when, not if, delivery of HD spots occurs. Additionally, they need to be able to illustrate certain points at any time during the campaign, and being able to pull HD footage from their own library is the most cost-effective way.

Huey says that one of the Democratic firms he works with acquires footage via the Panasonic AJ-HDC27 Varicam—on tape, not P2, because of the huge volume of footage and because they are shooting in HD for library purposes. The large Republican firm that works out of Henninger shoots a combination of Varicam and Sony HDCAM. There was one greenscreen shoot, Huey says, where the team decided that it would be worth shooting with the new Varicam AJ-HPX2700, 1080 10-bit acquisition because they wanted to evaluate it for future, potential special needs. But as soon as they walked back into their facility, they transferred the footage to Sony HDCAM SR tape for archive.

“The classic [reason for HD] is that many of the shoots are done on horrible deadlines, and sometimes you have candidates who are not actors,” Huey says. “Sometimes just on a simple little candidate speaking directly to camera shoot, if you can’t get in one take, it’s optimal if you shoot in HD you can cut two takes together and zoom in on one take and make an esthetically pleasing cut and it doesn’t look like you’re blowing it up in the DVE. Simple things like that have made the producers like shooting in HD. It offers a little bit more creativity and flexibility in the edit sessions.”

Additional flexibility of note was the fact that during editing of SD spots, the team could reframe the HD shots to fit their needs. However, one commercial in particular the company did do entirely in HD for The Obama Media Team. It was called “Hands” and was aired on NBC during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. This spot may, in fact, be the first and only political spot that’s ever been produced, delivered, and aired in HD.

The Obama Media Team decided to create something special to air during the Olympics. It was decided that since this was a national ad buy during an international event, the spot “Hands” should be produced in HD. And since they had been filming the senator in HD for months, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

“When the 'Hands' spot happened for NBC, the producers were all interested on one level and groaning on another,” Huey says. “There was a lot of excitement because the producers had not delivered a 24p HD political spot before. And integrating a variety of stock footage into that format can be challenge. But they decided that’s what they wanted to do. It was a fun trip.”

But seemingly producing any political commercial can be a bumpy ride; Huey notes that sometimes the turnaround happens literally in the edit room. At 10 a.m., the script is being written as the rest of the team looks at material for vague ideas for visuals. The campaign may be continually changing the script as they’re going through edit, color-correct, and mix to get it out the door by 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. that night. Even in such time crunches, they turn to their post tools to keep visual elements strong.

“We’ve noticed that because of the strong effects tools in the Avid DS system,” Huey says, “the producers are getting more ambitious with their ideas. We constantly look at regular ads and say, ‘Hey, can we rip that idea off and make a political ad about of it?’ We’re always trying to catch viewers’ attention and make them not just tune out and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a political ad.’ So we’re always trying for unique, interesting looks. But as it gets to final weeks where things are crazy, you’re working around the clock and you tend to get more formulaic.”

Beyond just television spots and the 30-minute Obama show, Henninger Media Services also helped put together the Michelle Obama documentary that was shown at the Democratic National Convention called “South Side Girl.” This 6.5-minute piece was also edited and delivered in HD and it was eventually projected onto large screens inside Denver’s Pepsi Center.

Having the capability to deliver in HD is one thing. But getting approvals from sources scattered across the country is another. So just as important as producing everything big was being able to portray their work just as effectively small.

“We use the Web for approvals and basically send things to the campaign so they can get a sense of what the spot is like,” Huey says. “It’s interesting that there are lots of people out there like John McCain that don’t use a computer, so you’re trying to get the most simple bulletproof compression that anyone can open—maybe even on a cell phone—so they can see what they need to see.”

“Almost every spot has a variety of different compressions made as we capture an uncompressed file and then just run it through various scripts to make the three or four different versions,” Huey says. “Most of the groups want both Windows Media or Real Player as well as QuickTime so they can have choices. Because they want to be able to open them up and look at the version they can see at that time, wherever they are in the field, and make comments. It’s just not feasible to make DVDs and have them couriered back and forth from wherever they happen to be in the country.”

Doing all of the compressions can sometimes be the biggest problem, because Henninger has two or three compression rooms cranking with other projects waiting to get in. When the company is swamped with work, the facility’s engineer sparks into action to bend the facility’s technology to get everything done. Therefore, the team sometimes compresses in the edit room using Sorenson Media Squeeze, which came with the package purchased from Avid. At times, they also use the Telestream box, of which Huey says, “even though that’s a front end for DG, it does a nice job of compression when you’re in a crunch.”

As a whole, the speed of putting together political spots is increasing every year thanks to the communication capabilities between consultants and their candidates. And when there’s more client communications, there are more revisions.

“It’s a lifesaver to have an edit system set up where you can have four Avid DS [systems] tied to shared storage so that all of a sudden we can revise what they did in Edit 1 by shooting it over to Edit 2,” Huey says. “Before we had shared storage, it just became these huge nightmares.”

All of the compression that Henninger does isn’t just for approvals anymore. With the changing landscape of information in the modern world, the company also posts a lot of the spots online—to the point where it has an encoding setting on its machines titled the “YouTube preset.” This year, more candidates posted video online, so can we depend on this as a trend?

“I tend to think that what we definitely saw was that there was a lot more ads made specifically for the Web,” Huey says. “It’s cheap, and sometimes I think they use it for strategic reasons—'Let’s just throw this ad up on the Web, and then we don’t have to pay for [air time], but the news media will still talk about it.' And that’s almost as good as having paid the money to have a real buy. Sometimes some of the more unsavory ads are done that way.”

In the end, the trend will not only be small, but back to big, in the form of HD content. And while all of the political media teams are used to the HD footage from the shooting end, getting ready for everything on the HD post end is a little more daunting.

“I sit and talk to the producers, and they’re all scared to death to switch to HD,” Huey says. “Because they know the moment—let’s say—they’re in a race and their opposition does it, they also have to do it. And they’re nervous because all of a sudden all the simple things start to haunt them—now they have to compose all of their graphics for a 16:9 environment. A lot of these ads that are so graphically oriented, that ends up being a big deal because what’s it going to look like on an SD TV because we know that a lot of people will be seeing it that way. So it starts complicating areas that they’d really rather not think about.

“Plus, they know that cost can go up a little bit. Renders take longer and the turnaround time—if renders take longer, then it takes longer to get a spot to the client and then there are deadline issues, etc. And it’s the classic sort of unknown of how will this really impact me.”

Whatever the impact, we can rest assured that every two years, there will be plenty of political ads to watch.

2008 Best of Washington Award in the Video Tape Duplication Service

2008-11-18T07:39:00.000-08:00

I am pleased to announce that Henninger Media DC, LLC has been selected for the 2008 Best of Washington Award in the Video Tape Duplication Service category by the U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA).

The USLBA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USLBA identifies companies that we believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Henninger Media Services (HMS) specializes in a full range of high definition services, including original script-to-screen production, video editing, color correction, film transfer, quality control, and duplication; as well as surround sound audio, motion graphics, design, and DVD. HMS has served broadcast, corporate and government clients for over 25 years, with facilities in Washington, D.C., and Arlington, Virginia. Information on Henninger Media Services can be obtained by calling Michael Delpierre at 703-908-4021 or by email at mdelpierre@henninger.com. Further information is available online at www.henninger.com.

Sound Design

2008-11-07T12:47:00.001-08:00

Listen carefully to the audio track of any professionally produced material, such as a feature film or episodic television drama. Turn off the picture and put on headphones if you have to. You'll probably hear a lot of things that couldn't have possibly been choreographed so accurately and convincingly on the set. Reinforcements or enhancements to the visual experience come from music hits matching the action or subtle noises that evoke a specific environment, emotion or danger. The mood of the imagery is often set by the audio. Change the audio and the picture means something completely different.

This powerful post production tool is called Sound Design.

At Henninger Digital Audio, we receive edited programs that mostly contain live sound recorded with the images along with expanses (meaning more than a few seconds) of unsupported visuals or unwanted sounds. Leaving these gaps in the audio are usually deadly to the production value. Clients who understand the impact of sound design will ask us to craft an audio track to clearly define their imagery.

How do we do Sound Design?

Our job as sound designers is to insert missing audio elements using our large sound effects and music library as well as narration, extra voices and composed original music. If the sound designer can't find an appropriate audio element, they are likely to create one using our foley room. Some of the work is architectural, where the placement of voiceover or music is planned. Some is also sculptural, where the sound designer creates packages of carefully placed and convincing audio gestures throughout a program. All of these elements are assembled and timed against the images to create a complete, flowing aural track indispensable to the support of the images.

Our award winning team has consistently demonstrated the ability to change beautiful visual sequences into spectacular visual sequences with the addition of appropriate audio enhancements. Sound design can even have surprising spillover effects, raising otherwise unremarkable visual material to higher levels of interest just by adding the right sounds.

The Sound Design Process:

The process begins by examining your program material. The editing doesn't need to be completely finished to start getting an idea of what ingredients are needed to design an audio track. A head start or sneak peek at the nearly finished program may allow a quicker turnaround. Our sound designers will begin assembling a customized list of supporting audio which we might draw from our own library, parts of your original field audio or something we may manufacture ourselves.

Also generally needed are music elements and voiceover material. Edited programming we receive often contains "scratch" music and narration tracks recorded by the producer in the edit suite with a "Mr. Microphone". Sound designers will replace those elements with professionally produced material, maintaining the positioning of the original hint.

Once the editing is finalized, all material is laid out on a timeline. Working with dozens of audio tracks, the actual audio is "checker boarded" with careful positioning against the visuals. Sometimes, thousands of audio elements will be laid up for the eventual mixing process.

Only then will the audio be ready for mixing. The strength of each element is balanced and placed into the sound field in the mix room. You can choose what kind of audio you need - anything from mono to full 5.1 or 7.1 surround. There's nothing like sitting in the mix room and listening to the sound design come to life, bringing out the power hidden within your imagery.

The most experienced producers long ago discovered the necessity of great sound to support their production. Storytelling with images is only part of the puzzle. The audio makes it all stick together. Henninger Digital Audio understands how to deliver superb audio to the most demanding ears. Let us arrange a demonstration of our capabilities and we'll show you some of our award winning sound designs.

HD/SD Color Correction

2008-11-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

What is the most important function of a colorist?

Here is quick test to give you a hint: Metaphorically speaking, which of the following items best symbolizes a colorist?

a. Paintbrush
b. Stethoscope
c. Hammer
d. Magnifying glass

Answer: c, hammer. A colorist's most important function is to solve problems, and hammers have solved more problems than anything else I can think of, (cash being a possible exception). Like colorists, hammers do lots of things outside of their primary purpose. But most important, a hammer can do some damage if you don't know what you are doing. Our 4 colorists have over 65 years of combined experience and 10 International Monitor Awards; we know what we are doing!

Problems happen at every stage of every project, the color correction session is where a lot of them get solved.

The Stuff. In this business, there is stuff everywhere; on the grip truck, in the camera bag, in the editing session, at the post house. But not just regular stuff, complicated stuff that breaks a lot. Maybe the lens didn't focus right, or the lights flickered, or the film stock was wrong, or the tape has a glitch, or the white balance was way off... whatever. A color correction room has tools to fix problems. We can soften, sharpen, remove dirt and glitches, and reduce noise and flicker. We have ways to convert different time codes, to encode and decode hidden metadata in film transfer videotapes, to convert any format to any other format. We enhance logos and brighten faces, unless of course you want a logo smudged and a face hidden. We've made a picture look normal that had one of the three color channels missing. We've made a picture usable that was nearly black from underexposure. We've made very important tapes usable that had disastrous flicker. After a special thermal camera broke down, we took a normal image and made it match the other thermal imaging footage. We've started with dropout-riddled tapes that had no color bars or time code, an image too dark to use, and more video noise than my wife's VHS collection, and we made them suitable for broadcast. And I haven't even talked about creative color correction yet.

The Story. There's a place in every story where the pictures need to look special, and it's a big problem if they don't. Happy or sad, bright or dark, color correction helps bend the image to do the bidding of the storyteller. On the colorist's palette are defocus tools, area highlighting windows, selective color isolation, and unlimited control of every color. We use these tools to create moods, increase visual interest or simply make pictures jump off the screen. In a civil war recreation scene, we softened the picture and used a palette of only 2 tones - pinkish orange and union blue, this was a nice change from traditional sepia. For a 1800s shipwreck scene, we desaturated the images and washed them with greenish blue. In a Pearl Harbor battle scene, we matched new photography to the look of 1940s Kodachrome stock footage. In a story about two submarines, we gave the similar looking sub interiors different tones to eliminate confusion; one was an eerie green glow, and the other was washed in red light. But telling the story is only part of the story.

The Stretch. Here is something we hear a lot: "We are starting post production and we need to stretch the budget and stretch the workday". Accomplishing this solves a big problem at a critical time for filmmakers. Obviously, everybody wants unlimited time to tweak the pictures to perfection, but budgets and schedules don't always cooperate. A benefit of having decades of experience like our colorists do is the ability to work fast and efficiently without getting tense: maximum tweak with minimum twitch. With several top colorists who have worked together for years and three superbly equipped suites, we can combine, overlap and extend shifts to get the most out of a day or week, and the results will be the better for it.

The Stream. Whether you are streaming video to the Internet or launching your program into the broadcast stream, your project must meet your client's technical requirements. You don't need to understand everything on that "Tech Specs" document; just bring it to our colorists, we will know what to do. It isn't enough for your pictures to look great, they have to do so without exceeding certain limits. Yes, color correction is where we polish every facet until we have a shining diamond; but there is also a "video mastering" aspect of what we do where we tailor the result for the particular demands of the intended environment be it broadcast, HD projection, Internet or DVD. That's why we use so many different types of signal monitoring tools right in our line of sight; so we can examine every line and pixel and be sure they are right.

You can benefit from our experience, call for a consultation with one of our colorists!

Duplication vs. Replication

2008-11-07T12:43:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest mistakes to avoid when talking about copying discs is interchangeably using the words duplication and replication. While these two processes produce a very similar result, they couldn't be more different.
Duplication, or burning, is a process that copies your data onto a disc (DVD-R), by using a laser to "burn" small pits onto the surface of the disc. A very similar process is done in your home computer (assuming you have a DVD or CD burner installed).

Replication is far different as it involves an injection molded manufacturing process that ultimately creates a "glass master" which is then used to stamp out copies of the disc. The replication process also enables copy protection to be incorporated into the disc image. This is NOT an option with duplication as DVD-Rs have only 2048-byte sectors without extra header information. All replicators accept DLT type III or type IV tapes written in DDP 2.0 format. Some replicators will also accept DVD-Rs, but keep in mind, these will not be copy protected.

Because of more extensive and expensive project start-up and low per-unit costs of replication, this process is most efficient at volumes of 500 units or more. Duplication has very low project start-up and higher per-unit costs, so it is most efficient at volumes below 200 units. That in-between range is where costs are roughly the same depending on other factors such as turn around time. Duplicators can typically turn around projects in a much shorter time frame than replicators.

An additional factor to keep in mind is compatibility of players with DVD-R media. Typically, replicated DVDs have a higher probability of trouble-free playback than DVD-Rs on any random selection of players. It's surprising how many new DVD players reach the market with poor DVD-R compatibility. This has already been complicated by the introduction of DVD+R (plus-R) media which is supposed to be more compatible with off the shelf consumer players, as well as the proliferation of dual layer DVD-R and High Definition recordable media.

On average, we can report a failure rate of about 25% for any given DVD-R on some machines, where the same disk plays perfectly on the rest. It would be best to test a sample DVD-R on a set of players if any significant number of disks are going to be released.

The best case is the example of museum displays or point of purchase displays where the client will install the same type of player everywhere. When it's time for equipment selections, we will help you determine which machine is likely to succeed in your application of DVD-R playback. The goal is to reduce frustrations surrounding these installations and will save money by eliminating more expensive disk replication when only a few disks are needed.

Mt. Rainier Goes High Definition!

2008-10-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Henninger Media Services, Washington, D.C.’s premier media production firm, produced the first ever high-definition interpretive film for Mt. Rainier National Park. This visually stunning film, which features breathtaking views and spectacular aerials, was mastered in high definition and finished with 5.1 Surround Sound at Henninger’s Arlington facility. The film exceeded the National Park Service’s expectations and has already begun to impress audiences at the newly opened Mt. Rainier Visitor Center, where the film is currently playing.

Production on the film began in 2006 and was completed in October 2008. Over the course of filming, the production team came up against a number of logistical challenges, including being trapped at 10,500 feet in an off-season blizzard while attempting to summit. The weather proved to be a constant challenge; rain during the spring and fall, below freezing temperatures through the winter shoots and intense heat in the summer months took its toll on the equipment and crew. Finding creative solutions became a daily task; using disposable shower caps on exposed lenses, extending the life of camera batteries with heating packs and hiring off duty climbing guides to help with heavy loads were all part of Henninger’s continuing plan to make the best film possible regardless of the elements. The production team also worked hard to get equipment to wherever the best shot were, this included building a 30-foot jib arm on top of a very precarious waterfall. Despite the sometimes extreme conditions on Mt. Rainier, the production team stayed focused on the goal of creating an extraordinary film that was tailored to the National Park Service’s needs.

Henninger’s Spencer Parker has been involved with the film since the first meeting with the National Park Service in 2006. Parker noted, “one of the biggest challenges in making this film was trying to capture the paradox of a place that is constantly changing and yet somehow remains unchanged.” It was incredibly important that, along with high-quality visuals, the film stayed true to the National Park Service’s message. Parker added that “we tried to inspire visitors to venture out into the park, educate them about the powerful and complex nature of Mt. Rainier, and most of all, challenge them to be stewards of such an incredible natural treasure.”

The film was so moving for the park superintendent, Dave Uberuaga, that when interviewed by The News Tribune he stated “I came up late Wednesday night to see how things were going, and I watched the movie (about the park) for the first time. I was choked up at the end. This is the highlight of my career, to be here for this.” Visitors to Mt. Rainier can watch the film at the park’s visitor center. To find out more about the Mt Rainier production project, please visit http://www.henninger.com/productions/mt_rainier.

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