Terabytes

I remember (back when I was a youngster) when we ordered two 9-gigabyte drives for our first non-linear edit system. It cost thousands of dollars. Back then if you would have asked me about a terabyte, I probably would have thought you were talking about some kind of dinosaur.

Fast forward to 2007. Our 500 Gig graphics drive was running out of room, so we just ordered a terabyte drive. And we paid much less than we did for that 9 gig drive ten years ago. Now we have over 4 terabytes of space on our two edit systems. Of course, that fills up quickly with uncompressed video.

But not to worry, we still have the original video on tape. Ah, videotape. That’s what we’ll be waxing nostalgic about in another 10 years.

Mercury Awards

Last night was a fun night for us. We went to the Greater Dayton Advertising Association Mercury Awards, and we were named the best Video/Film/Post Production Company. Over the years, we have won awards in creative competitions, but this award is a real honor because it is voted on by the people who are our customers. Thank you to all who nominated us.

Extreme Office Makeover in Norwood

It’s the Miller-Valentine Extreme Office Makeover! OK, this place is really a dump! The Norwood 911 Call Center is the winner of the Miller-Valentine Extreme Office Makeover. Nova Creative Group hired us to produce a video documenting the transformation. The final product will be an interactive presentation that will have video segments and a menu for navigation.

Today we videotaped the facility in its current form… and it wasn’t pretty. But Officer TA was a natural on camera, and a gracious host. We’ll post more about the transformation after it’s complete. You can also check out Dayton’s Extreme Office Makeover here.

We're back on Times Square!

OK, this is cool. You might have seen our New Year’s greeting, where we created a fake video playing on Times Square (click to view). But this time we had a video play on Times Square for real.

Yesterday, UD President Dr. Dan rang the closing bell at Nasdaq to celebrate the RISE Forum. As part of the closing celebration, we were able to produce a 30-second spot for the 7 story screen on the Nasdaq tower. The screen is the largest stationary video screen in the world. The one drawback is the windows that are located throughout the screen. So we designed the video so that the key information would be aligned between the windows. And we formatted the video so that it would best utilize the tall aspect ratio.

Justin Bayer, an old friend and current UD employee, happened to be in New York at the time, and got some pictures of the commercial running. He reports that it looked great. We’ll have to take his word for it because they had it partially covered with a graphic on their webcam. Since we don’t have good video footage of the commercial running, we created this mock-up of the video running on the tower.