Sad because our friend, Steve Urban has flown the coop. Happy because he has relocated to Los Angeles with his wife Karol. They have embarked upon a plan of making a name for themselves in Tinsel Town! We wish them all the best & good luck as they embark upon exciting and challenging new work in California.

And we’re doubly-happy because we welcome Brian Callahan. Brian is an experienced Audio Mixer and creative Sound Designer with over fifteen years in the post-production industries of Chicago and D.C.  He has mixed shows covering the gamut – from documentaries, reality, and even theater. Brian is a terrific talent and Post-Op is excited to have him join our team.

It’s an exciting time here and we’re ready for 2012 & we hope to see you soon!

Arlington County announced this morning that they are beginning the process to attempt to purchase the Thomas Building. This has been the building we have called home since our founding in 2003, and also the building many of us (and our old friends from Roland House) have worked in dating back to the early 90′s. We have involved ourselves immediately in the possible changes and will continue to stay close to the process. After some initial concern, it is clear to us that this is a very long process that will take years and faces many obstacles before ever possibly coming to fruition. How those changes affect Post-Op, if at all, will take a long time to become clear as well. So for the foreseeable future, it’s business as unusual here at Post-Op Media.

Cheers to the Post-Op Media Team for receiving a grand total of 9 awards!

Read on for all the details

Post-Op Media received 8 awards for our work across the spectrum of our clients’s projects. A ninth award went directly to one of our staff for her voiceover talents. Good job to everyone! Congratulations!

And this one, for our own Joyce Peifer Forbes. Working with Tron Communications, Joyce took home the Gold Peer Award for her voiceover work! See, we are the complete package!

This re-design will allow us to better communicate with our visitors. Also, visitors can now communicate with us as well. Commenting is now available on our Weblog posts as well as other pages.

Poke around and take a look at the new design. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Green screen is almost essential for visual effects shots, but even a simple interview or spokesperson stand-up can be livened up with a green screen. Political agencies have gotten very good at shooting green screen. Their turnaround has to be quick, so they have no time to waste fixing problems in post.

I can calculate the amount of green screen footage I’ve keyed in months, not minutes, and have developed some tips for producers looking venture into the verde painlessly.

1. Don-t scrimp on money for the shoot – Use a shooter and/or lighting person who has done green screen before. The dollars you save trying to DIY or hire the inexperienced will be burned in the post production process trying to get the key to work.

2. Shoot either in full resolution or at a higher resolution than the final product – Many of today’s formats work solely on compressing the video – cheating on the amount of little dots in the TV frame in order to get more information on a drive or disk. This compression can kill a perfectly usable green screen. So if your final product will be standard def, shoot Dbeta. If you’re finishing with standard def, shoot DVCPro at high definition 720p. Or if you’re finishing on 720 HD, then shoot 1080i. And if you’re going for 1080i shoot full resolution like HDCam or Red Camera.

3. Never, ever shoot DV or DVCam for green screen – The video compression from camera to deck makes it neigh impossible.

4. Oh, and it doesn’t have to be green – Today’s devices just want a color. For example, in one project there was a need to literally paint an image on. A blue “canvas” was used and the talent used a real brush to paint red paint onto the board. In post the blue was replaced with one shot, the red replaced the incoming shot. Clever, eh?

Get yourself in the running! You’ve done good work; it certainly can’t hurt to win an award for it too! We hope to see you at Post-Op this Thursday.