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For many companies, three key trends have given a whole new meaning to the term “corporate video.” The rise of technology permitting the staging of sophisticated live events for employees, the maturation of DVD as a distribution medium, and the ability to repurpose material for various applications have all contributed to the growing sophistication of corporately produced video. As a result, many corporations routinely mount elaborate productions and journey to faraway locations, capturing imagery for display on big screens at company meetings and within promotional and educational materials of all types.

Rhett Turner brought Sony HDCAM technology to the Antarctic to capture nature images for a Peregrine Adventures promotional video.

Increasingly, those productions are relying on high-definition acquisition technologies of one kind or another. Production companies that routinely do corporate work tell Video Systems that HD makes sense more than ever for such jobs, both from the client and the production company point of view, according to Scott Rankin, VP of creative services at Mills/James Productions in Columbus, Ohio.

“Live event staging really lends itself to HD,” says Rankin. “With the widescreen displays people are using these days, you have to have control over every pixel the audience will see. At corporate shows, event planners need to show video at the highest resolution possible. Their attendees are expecting it now, especially as more of them bring HD into their own home theaters. A 16:9 aspect ratio at the highest possible resolution simply gives you a distinct impression in a business presentation environment.

“And even beyond special events, these companies are starting to realize HD makes sense because they have so much use for their video material, and they are archiving it, and using it at trade shows, on DVD for handouts to customers, employees, or distributors, and so on,” he says. “They need to ‘future proof’ their projects and their file footage, so they can use it in different presentations for years to come without having to do tons of new manipulation in post, or having to re-shoot the same thing over again. We are seeing more HD mastering in post, of course, but lately, HD acquisition is leading the process for these kinds of jobs.”

Mills/James and two other production companies recently spoke with Video Systems about high-profile corporate jobs they have done this year using high-def acquisition technology. Following are behind-the-scenes looks at those projects, and how and why HD helped those jobs creatively and technically.

Rhett Turner had a limited budget, a small crew, had never shot HD before, and had no idea how a Sony HDW-F900 would perform in the harsh Antarctic climate. But Turner did have a mission from Australia's Peregrine Adventures to promote its “great escape” vacation tours to the most remote places on Earth. He also had a background shooting documentary and corporate video footage and a hankering to “have a blast” in the Antarctic.

So earlier this year, Turner and a three-man crew joined a Peregrine tour to the Antarctic, and from the tip of Argentina to South Georgia Island and back again, they used their Sony HDCAM, rented from Bexel in Atlanta — where Turner's Red Sky Productions is based — to churn out approximately 40 hours of footage. At press time Turner was editing this footage down into an 11- to 12-minute promotional video for potential Peregrine customers.

According to Turner, who served as director/DP on the project, shooting HD made sense creatively, since he designed the video to promote Peregrine's “trip of a lifetime” offerings.

South Coast Film and Video created vintage scenes for Halliburton using Panasonic's Varicam technology.

“We decided if this is the trip of a lifetime, it better look as good as possible,” Turner says. “We could have shot standard video and transferred to HD and then down-rezzed it, but instead, we decided it made sense to just shoot 24p. I had never shot HD before, but I had a good existing relationship with Bexel, and they assured me the learning curve would not be very steep.

“At first, I was worried when I read the manual and it said the optimal temperature is from 32 degrees Fahrenheit and up; I worried we'd be under 30 degrees a lot. But, to be honest, the temperature wasn't much of a factor. We kept the camera in a comfortable room without air conditioning or heat so that the unit got used to the same temperature all the time, and it played like a champ — it was real robust, to be honest.”

A far bigger problem than the temperature, according to Turner, was the pouring rain they encountered.

“Planning to protect the camera in advance turned out to be very important,” he says. “When we were out on Zodiac boats and we weren't shooting, we had the camera and other equipment in Pelican cases, and I also got a Porta-Brace wind-and-rain storm coat, which I draped over the camera when it was out, and that saved us a great deal from getting water on the camera. At one point, I had to shoot albatross footage, and it was just pouring rain. I just protected the camera best as I could, shot through the water, so that you don't see too much rain in the final image, and kept wiping the lens. We did a little colorization with that footage in post, but it came out looking outstanding.”

The big technical challenge involved frequent use of the HD camera on the Zodiac boats to capture icebergs, penguins, whales, albatross, and other wildlife, according to Turner.

“The Zodiacs are just rubber boats with a 70-horsepower engine on them,” says Turner. “They were our primary method of transportation from ship to land, but we also shot off them. We would find a place with relatively quiet water and shoot as best we could while a whale swam close by. The big thing to be careful about there was the stabilization issue. These cameras do not have image stabilization, and we couldn't bring any kind of stabilizing rigs or heads out there, even if they were available, and I'm not sure they were.

“What I did use was a simple Cinesaddle — basically, a leather thing with foam pellets in it. I used that on the Zodiac as a resting place, and I put the camera between a couple of them. That really helped reduce vibrations on a calm day. If the sea got too rough, we couldn't shoot in the Zodiac, of course.”

Mac Tools' widescreen video presentation required Mills/James Productions to produce the entire piece in HD.

Turner's crew included his producer, Duncan Cameron, as a grip, and the editor, Greg Pope, as the soundman. Pope simply relied on the camera mic, a 2ft. location mic with a blimp cover, recording direct to tape. “We just recorded mono and are doing a mix now,” adds Turner. “It was mainly interviews with people on the expedition and sounds of nature, like raindrops and animal sounds.”

At press time, Turner and Pope were editing the piece on an Avid Xpress (5.8) system. “We're downconverting to Betacam SX to edit in 15:1,” Turner adds. “That will give us the 24p look, but we won't have to go back up to 24p for [Peregrine's] distribution since they are releasing it on DVD. However, another advantage of shooting HD is the fact that this material will have longer legs for Peregrine if they want more material or have a new version. I will also get to keep all HD tapes, which have a great deal of nature footage to help my business down the road if future clients someday need HD nature material for HD broadcast.”

When the international marketing division for energy giant Halliburton asked South Coast Film and Video, Houston, to put together a three-minute promotional video to be presented on large screens during the company's annual Business Development Academy held earlier this year at the Austin Convention Center in Texas, the company had several goals for the piece. Many of those goals made it logical to use high-definition to produce the video, according to Everett Gorel, South Coast's president and DP for the video.

Rhett Turner, with his Sony HDCAM bundled up inside a winter coat, shoots nature images and conducts interviews for the Peregrine promotional video.

According to Gorel, South Coast chose Panasonic's AJ-HDC27F Varicam to shoot both modern elements for the piece, and elements designed to simulate vintage footage and mix with stock film and SD video images from Halliburton's corporate library.

“The video was delivered to Halliburton as a Windows Media 9 file to be broadcast on multiple screens during the opening of the event,” says Bill Brauer, writer and producer of the piece. “The company's goal was to promote and build on its historical legacy, to pay homage to its origins. Thus, the first 30 seconds show black and white simulated footage from the 1920s with a vintage Model T truck, and then it jumps into what the company is doing now, and how it has both a large reach and great technical savvy. That all meant lots of elements — simulating the vintage material, incorporating SD stuff into an HD piece, and shooting modern stuff on an oil rig and at other Halliburton facilities.”

The Varicam was chosen because of its variable frame rate capability, according to Gorel.

“With high-tech clients like Halliburton, we've been migrating them to HD anyway, and in this case, the nature of the piece meant that we'd be trying different frame rates, so the Varicam just made sense,” says Gorel. “But in the corporate world, I'm finding more and more companies like Halliburton have an interest in moving to HD anyway. Among other things, they have their own libraries of material going back for decades, and many, including Halliburton, are transferring all that stuff to HD, and it just gives them longer legs with this material and more options for future use to start shooting it all in HD.”

Among other locations, the South Coast crew took the Varicam unit (using mainly Canon HJ18×7.8B HD zoom lenses and a digital drive) onto a Halliburton oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to capture footage. Gorel says that adventure was tougher on the crew than on the Varicam.

“The weather was horrendous the day we went, so we couldn't helicopter out to the rig,” says Gorel. “We had to take a boat out and that wasn't much fun. It was a cold, blue morning, and we had to keep checking the color temperature on the camera because it looked more like the North Sea than the Gulf. But we were able to change setups and white balance to reflect more of a normal lighting situation to get the environment on tape the way we wanted it. Overall, the camera performed great on the rig. We just had to remember to wipe down the lens a lot.”

The production team also faced challenges in shooting material to simulate the 1920s at a Halliburton facility using a Model T as a key prop. According to Gorel, South Coast had to creatively alter the imagery to give it an authentic, black and white, period feel without reducing the overall quality of the sequence.

“We shot that opening scene with [black Fogal hose] behind the lens, mostly at 17fps to simulate jerkier film motion of the period, but it still looked pretty sharp, even in black and white,” says Gorel. “Rather than doing cliché film scratches, we just decided to add grain to the footage [applied by editor Marco DuBose using Grain Surgery software from Visual Infinity during the finishing phase]. Between the use of the [hose] behind the lens, the odd frame rate, and the addition of grain, we seemed to get what we were looking for.”

The edit on the piece, performed from rough-cut to finish by DuBose in an HDBoxx system from Boxx Technologies — chosen because of the system's support for the Varicam format — also proved crucial from a design standpoint. Halliburton officials stressed that they wanted a circular design for many of the graphics and imagery to emphasize the circular Halliburton logo, and that requirement helped DuBose solve one of the key problems he faced: how to incorporate standard-def elements into the video. A South Coast animator built some spherical graphics in Adobe After Effects, incorporating small SD clips from Halliburton's library. Then DuBose put those clips together to present multiple images in the same shot, while adhering to the circular design requirement.

“[It] was a good way to bring those different elements together without the viewer being able to tell what was SD and what was HD, and we did lots of other stuff with the Halliburton logo resolving itself into the headlight of the Model T truck, and later, into the sun — things like that,” explains DuBose.

South Coast Film and Video added standard-def images and graphics to the Halliburton video by incorporating circular design elements into larger HD frames.

Even before producing its video for the company's annual corporate meeting, Mac Tools, in consultation with Mills/James Productions' live-event division, had already decided to show attendees the piece in an ultra-widescreen presentation, using the then-new Montage widescreen video processing system from Vista Systems, Phoenix.

The event, known as the Mac Tool Fair, was staged earlier this year at the JW Marriott Orlando Grande Lakes hotel in Florida, in a giant ballroom. Using a 32-input Montage system rented from staging support company LMG, Orlando, Fla., Mills/James showed some 2,600 attendees a two-minute promotional piece produced to appear like a vintage clip from the company's past. It featured a now-retired Mac Tools distributor reminiscing about the “good old days,” and then flashing back to a mechanic from the 1930s using Mac Tools on a fully restored, authentic 1938 cream-colored Packard. The video then fades into a fast-paced montage showing Mac Tools at work in a variety of modern settings, and then ends with some sharp graphics leading into a live speech on-stage by the company's CEO.

According to Thom Gall, producer and director of the video and a producer at Mills/James, the decision to go ultra-widescreen with the presentation meant that the video had to be shot and carefully produced in HD. The Mills/James production crew therefore selected a Sony CineAlta HDW-F900 system with a Canon HJ9×5.5 IAS lens and found a 1940s-era garage building where they shot the vintage sequence.

“Even before deciding on the story for the video, it was a big objective to provide something very cinematic for Mac Tools, given the way they wanted to show it to their audience,” Gall says. “After talking to the people at LMG about their Montage system we'd be using for the live event, one baseline bit of information they shared with us was that anything we'd create to fill a 40'×25' screen end-to-end and top-to-bottom would really require an HD image. They would be displaying it with multiple projectors, and there would be no other way to have a sharp enough, quality image otherwise. Most of the shoot wasn't that complex in the sense that we did it on a stage, mostly with one camera dramatically rolling around a single speaker on a 180-degree dolly track while we captured six different angles on the actor.”

But to creatively convey the notion that this was both a vintage piece of film from the 1930s, and in keeping with the Mac Tools philosophy of “longing for bygone days,” in the words of Rankin, the crew decided to minimize any color and quality manipulation in post, and instead relied on an in-camera technique to create a warm sepia tone to the vintage portion of the video. According to DP Jeff Warnement, Mills/James used a Tiffen 1/4 Warm Black Pro-Mist filter to create warm flesh tones and soften highlights.

Mills/James found a vintage-style garage to stage an HD shoot using a Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta system with Canon lenses.

“We decided to paint the colorimetry in-camera and work with a shallow depth of field,” says Warnement. “The Pro-Mist filter enhanced the camera's soft-focus feature, and provided smoother highlights from the vintage 1938 Packard soft-top.”

Gall adds that composition was also crucial due, again, to the widescreen intent of the presentation. “We had to be very sensitive about the bottom of our frame,” he says. “In composing the frames, we couldn't put anything critical at the bottom of the frame because we had to think about whether those items in the bottom would interfere with sight lines because of the stage and the size of the ballroom we'd be projecting in.”

Mike Jackson of Mills/James offlined the piece in an Avid Media Composer; editors Mark Trbovich and Jack London finished to HD on an Avid DS Nitris system. Rankin says the project marked the first time that Mills/James had finished a corporate piece to HD on its new DS Nitris system — a trend he expects to see more of with corporate work in the near future.

“We've been shooting HD for commercials and other things, but even those are still being broadcast and seen in standard def,” says Rankin. “This piece was our first end-to-end piece for a corporate client shot and finished in HD and viewed that way. This was an entirely HD signal path.

“I think you'll see more of that for corporate work that will be seen in live-event settings. With HD, you can more fully control the entire process when producing the video, all the way from the shoot through projection. It also gives the client the option of more easily repurposing the material, and they can still bring it down to standard def easily enough if they need to.”

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