(Image: Mayor Bloomberg presents a proclamation to the cast and executive producers of “Gossip Girl.” Photo credit: The Mayor’s Office.)

This past year “broke all records for television production in New York City” said Mayor Bloomberg during a presentation on the set of “Gossip Girl”, which shoots on the Silvercup Studios stages.

Bloomberg and Media & Entertainment Commissioner Katherine Oliver were on hand to drop a proclamation on the cast and executive producers of the CW Network show which will soon celebrate its 100th episode. (Gossip Girl is a production of Fake Empire and Alloy Entertainment in association with Warner Bros. Television and CBS Television Studios.)

While Bloomberg and Oliver have touted the increase in production in the city before, it’s interesting to hear the numbers in relation to a specific show. According to a news release by the Mayor’s Office, “Gossip Girl” spent $200 million on local development and used more than 500 vendors for paint, lumber, office supplies and other services, and over the past season hired more than 120 principal actors, 180 crew members and more than 7,000 background actors.

You can find a few additional details here from Bloomberg’s old haunt, Bloomberg News.

This is as good a time as any to mention a Craigslist item that just might help you break into the industry, or at least some aspect of it: Brooklyn Workforce Innovations is offering a Television & Film Office Training position. This free four-week training program offers training and placement to New Yorkers hoping to break into various parts of the TV and film industries. There’s a January 31st application deadline.

(Image: A shot from Sony’s unveiling of the 4K F-65 at NAB 2011. Photo credit: Mark Forman)

I begin my first NYC Production & Post News column with the question: will 3D or 4K triumph?

It isn’t immediately apparent that these technologies can be discussed in the same sentence. Over the last few years 3D, of course, has garnered attention as the next big thing in presentation. But if you’re involved in production, you know that now the excitement is building around available and upcoming camera gear in 4K. (That’s a 4096 x 2160 pixel image according to the DCI cinema standard.)

Why? Three-D production is its own production language that calls for a new set of shooting and editing rules. Directors, DPs and editors need to integrate these approaches as if they were learning film production from the beginning. If these narrow prescriptions are broken, viewers can be turned off from even watching the painful results. Requiring bulky 3D glasses just adds to the hassle.

(Consumer research company Gartner has even reported that uptake of 3D TVs in the home–which are necessary if the studios are going to recoup their investment–has peaked as the technology has failed to “live up to consumer expectations.”)

While 3D offers a new dimension for users to adjust themselves to, 4K is easy to understand. It brings its own glasses-free, hyper-real sensibility to viewers even while DPs, directors and editors can build their already honed skills. Basically, you don’t need to go to school again to know how to shoot in a higher-resolution format.

Just this past week Sony announced that it was beginning to ship the first of some 400 pre-orders worldwide for its new flagship 4K F65 camera system.

RED, JVC and others are joining Sony with new models to come at April’s NAB show, joining other manufacturers who will be showing 4K editing and effects systems. (JVC actually announced its GY-HMQ10 handheld 4K camcorder at CES. It captures, records, and plays video images at 24p, 50p, or 60p with a 3840 × 2160 resolution, which is four times the resolution of HDs 1920 × 1080. Whether or not pros find a place for this camcorder, just the fact that a consumer-oriented product could deliver 4K for about $5000 is astonishing.)

JVC says its GY-HMQ10 is able to output 4K images to a monitor or projection system in real time with 'virtually no latency'.

I’ll go out on a limb and call this the year that 4K production takes off.

The consumer market is following up, bringing its first 4K monitors and projectors to the public. There will still be a place for 3D in the future, of course, but it will be a relative niche market with special uses such as animation and sports claiming most of the attention.

If you need some more convincing, come to the SMPTE NY chapter meeting on March 14th. Along with others in the industry, I’ll be hosting a presentation “4K and Beyond” that will highlight how this technology is coming into its own in 2012.

Later,

Mark Forman
Mark Forman Productions
http://screeningroom.com

$200m Funding Deal" />

(Image: Peter James Elias in Nagendra Karri’s “Where are You Sophia?” Photo credit: Eternal Mind Productions)

Eternal Mind Productions LLC says it has signed a three year production deal with investors from Dubai, U.A.E to the tune of some US $200 million. Headed by CEO Nagendra Karri and actor/producer Peter James Elias, the New York-based company had been in contract talks with the AL MUHAYMIN Film Fund, according to a press release. Karri writes, produces and directs for the company, which has offices on lower Broadway and in New Jersey.

Karri wrote, produced, and directed his first feature Where are You Sophia? in 2009. Shot in the rural New Jersey town of Highlands, this “psychological thriller” was budgeted at an estimated $2,000,000. The director, a native of India, has also said he wants to “showcase India” to the international film industry.

According to earlier reports, Karri plans to expand distribution of his low-cost films, including the upcoming Gate 21 and Mobster, to “untapped markets” in Eastern Europe and Asia. Information on the AL MUHAYMIN Film Fund, said to be Dubai-based, wasn’t available at the time of this posting.

(Image: Insomniac Games used Autodesk Entertainment Creation Suite Software and Autodesk Scaleform Middleware to develop Sony Computer Entertainment’s videogame “Resistance 3.”)

While the economy might be sputtering along, companies involved in delivering creative media creation tools are doubling down on their purchases.

In her article “Autodesk’s year of living acquisitively”, posted on Jon Peddie’s Graphic Speak site, Kathleen Maher reports that Autodesk went on a shopping spree for companies and technologies in 2011. The result? The San Rafael, California-based company has secured some 13 companies important in a range of markets, including game development and design, that are an important part of the company’s “strategy for growth” according to Autodesk CEO Carl Bass.

Autodesk makes products such as 3ds Max and Maya, important for creatives in the media and entertainment markets. While not directly competitive, Adobe is another company providing crucial apps to creatives that has been on its own buying spree this past year; purchases include Automatic Duck (an important part of the company’s strategy for ramping up development on Premiere Pro) and Nitobe, which makes HTML 5 apps that look to succeed Flash for the web.

One market analyst on Seeking Alpha has rated Adobe as “highly undervalued”, as the San Jose-based company is said to have a strong position in cloud computing via its Creative Cloud offering, which should further build its “brand recognition.”

We’ve reported versions of this information before, but Variety’s Peter Caranicas noted the other day that latest data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics seems to show that the benefit of tax incentives to boost film and television production in New York works well.

The Variety article doesn’t really add much, and essentially repeats info published earlier in a number of different publications including this one from Nikki Finke’s Deadline.

The core production jobs covered in the 2010 jobs report of the New York State Comptroller are up to 43,000, an increase of 20-percent from the 36,000 jobs in 2008, and an increase of 22-percent over 2009.

Those numbers are up for 2011 too. The New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development In 2011 noted a 66-percent boost in the same stats over those of 2010. In 2011, that works out to 137 applications to date (i.e. the end of November), including 91 motion pictures, 20 television pilots and 26 television series.

There’s data too on a more granular level about what a large feature such as Jason Winer’s Arthur can deliver.The Warner Bros. film, which shot in New York for 48 days in 2010, dropped some $26 million with local vendors. Local hires came to over 4,300, including 1,043 crew members.

(You can find this data in a November 30, 2011 press release on the Motion Picture Association of America’s website. The breakdown on Arthur is from the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development.)

New Yorkers like the incentives of course, at least those with skin in the game. The MPAA release quotes Mike Jackman, co-chair of New York Production Alliance, saying in part that “The new job figures released by BLS confirm what all of us working in and around this industry know to be true, that film and television production continues to be a catalyst for New York’s economic recovery. It is of no surprise the only dip in job growth came during 2009, a year funding for the New York State incentive briefly ran dry.”

You can also find some of this info on the website of the New York State’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development.

No mention in any of these releases of the Post New York Alliance (PNYA), which has worked to deliver a 10-percent tax break for productions doing post in New York state.

Steven Sasson, credited with developing the first digital camera, holds the prototype he built in 1975. Photo credit: /Associated Press / AP

In a press release sent out late last week, a senior Kodak executive made a point to address the “speculation about the fate of Kodak Motion Picture Film over the last few weeks.” Kim Snyder, president of the company’s Entertainment Imaging Division and a VP at Eastman Kodak Company, went on to say that rumors and the volatility of the market wouldn’t distract the company from providing the “highest-quality tools to tell your stories.”

Well, let’s hope so.

We’ve noted before some of the particular problems facing Kodak.

For anyone involved in production who still appreciates the qualities of the chemical/mechanical manipulation of light, this is a troubling time. In a conference call last week, the company warned that its survival over the next year is contingent upon money raised from selling some of its famed digital imaging patents or raising money by selling debt. The latter is becoming an increasingly expensive proposition as the company’s future looks ever more problematic.

Kodak’s share price hit its high water mark in the mid-1990s at $90. Similar to a few other iconic American companies such as GE, at that point the company enjoyed a “safe buy” reputation, delivering to investors high and steady dividend yields. But that was the top, after which there began a market decline from which Kodak hasn’t recovered. Scratched in 2004 from its role as part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the stock now trades at $1.19/share (at press time).

The company, however, has weathered prophecies of doom before. A headline in a 2002 business journal warned about “Kodak’s Incredible Shrinking Film Business.” A Businessweek article in 2005, meanwhile, warned that “Low-margin digital sales aren’t picking up the slack of disappearing film profits.”

But a wider than expected loss of $222 million for the third quarter led to the most recent bleak prophecies. A turnaround to create its place in the digital future has been a long time coming. The company stakes its bet mainly on an innovative series of inkjet printers for consumers and businesses, which had a recent sales surge. (The company is also betting on packaging and work-force software.)

But slumping sales of digital cameras and lower revenue from its film operation offset that good news.

An added concern: while Kodak makes simpler digital cameras which benefit from the company’s image science to deliver more natural handling of colors, that market is now losing out to cellphones that offer comparable or better features.

An article by AP’s Ben Dobbin said that Kodak was planning to sell 1,100 digital-imaging inventions to raise enough money to stave off bankruptcy.

Dobbin went on to say that the company stayed “firmly focused” on its moneymaking film sales for too long and failed to “capitalize quickly on its new-wave know-how in digital photography.” That’s the shame, since the company had long been a leader in imaging with a core strength in R&D and wealth of digital patents. Steven Sasson, one of the company’s engineers, has a credit as the inventor of one of the first digital cameras in 1975. Kodak didn’t sell digital cameras for the mass market until 2001.

While the company soon pushed to the top in sales for digital still cameras by 2005, the profit margin was never as lucrative as film.

Kodak has come back from seeming disaster before. The move into high-speed printers and other markets may yet turn the company around towards a renewed future of growth. Patents will bring in money that just might keep investors betting on the company. IMAX, for example, recently licensed some of Kodak’s innovative laser technology which will enable it to augment its trademark film projection and instead fill 80-foot screens with high rez computer-based imagery. DPs have are promised a new VISION3 color negative stock.

Although one analyst quoted in a recent Times article by Andrew Martin likened Kodak to a juggler sitting on a unicycle in the dark, the article ended on a more upbeat note by broker Ulysses Yannas. Talk of Kodak’s demise was premature, Yannas said, since the company was spending their money on areas of the economy that are making money.

For those who still love the unique look and qualities of film, we certainly hope so.

(Image credit: TheWrap)

There’s a good multiple part article on TheWrap about Hollywood and the Job Crisis that’s worth a read, especially for the news on production comparisons to the Big Apple. As reporter Tim Molloy notes, this past year has seen a record-setting 169 pilots shot throughout the country (that number is from Film L.A.), fueled in part by the cable industries desire for unique properties.

I especially recommend Part Two of the series which tallies the job erosion of TV production in LA and the news — well, not news to readers of this blog — that New York now boasts of more pilot production than ever. The Big Apple still doesn’t topple LA — the City notched 10 network pilots and five for cable, while LA produced 10 hour-long drama pilots for networks and 13 for cable. Canada is still a strong contender too. Meanwhile LA swamps NYC in the number of half-hour comedy pilots made, garnering some 64 to our hometown’s measly 2. Seems NYC still can’t compare to huge number of sound stages on the coast.

But watch out LA.

(Image: Vidblogger Nation’s Ann Spade gives viewers the low down on Sacramento.)

With an economy that’s not getting any better and alternatives like Netflix and Hulu continuing to garner loyalty, cable TV execs worry that a new generation of viewers might not show up.

That’s not a universally held idea. Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes is among the cable CEOs who spots monthly cable fees as among the last items to feel the hit of a tighter personal budget. But that still doesn’t mean any of the major cable systems view the rise of the Internet lightly.

Case in point: Comcast On Demand Local service recently launched Vidblogger Nation; these short three-to-five-minute episodes by Facebook-aware video bloggers offer takes on local people, places and things. No mystery to this effort: it’s an attempt to pull the younger smartphone-obsessed generation back into the fold. Headed by participatory media director-producer New Yorker Marc Scarpa, the project is available in some 10 markets nationwide at launch.

(To fix its battered customer service reputation, Comcast, the No. 1 U.S. cable TV provider, launched Xfinity early last year. Pushed through by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, Xfinity re-brands the company’s triple-play service for bundled Internet, telephone and TV, adding tweaks like live sports on the web, improved download speeds and the ability to watch some shows online.)

Heralded by Scarpa as the “first-ever Social TV Network”, local talent with “strong Facebook and Twitter followings” create short diary-style segments on local topics such as fun places to go, local personalities, things to do and other topics not so unlike those that show up in the color segments of local news stations.

Scarpa has built his name on finding ways to use computers, the Internet, cellphone and other technologies to make more interactive experiences for viewers. His varied background includes a gig as the first New York Chair of the Producers Guild of America New Media Council and producing the web show ‘Grammy Live’ for the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards. For a 2007 MySpace streaming of a Linkin Park concert, Scarpa says that he was the first to pull off the intercutting of realtime video from fan’s mobile phones with the concert’s live HD TV feed.

“It’s not a video log, it’s not a reality show, it’s just folks sharing their adventures and experiences with the viewer, who are also participants in the programming,” says Marc Scarpa, founder of SimplyNew Studios, producer of the shows. Comcast ordered some 360 episodes in all, with a decision by the end of November whether to commit to the series.

Scarpa says that TV is moving towards an all-IP universe, with an immersive web presence key to blurring the boundaries between web TV and cable TV. Finding a social TV look-and-feel for the cable giant’s current local fare, which hasn’t changed from standard studio presentations in years, is key.

One major hurdle, however, hasn’t changed since the earliest days of TV and Internet video: whoever is in front of the camera needs to be a compelling actor who can put a narrative across. Scarpa faces an added barrier: a huge corporate structure with layers of management ready to nix content that might be too cutting or salacious, the very spice that pulls in hundreds of thousands of viewers to YouTube and other social media sites.

Would be viewers are left with segments such as “Off Limits”, where erstwhile video blogger Jeff Wisenbaugh “sneaks into Spartan Stadium at Michigan State” and makes a go at not getting arrested, or “Beach Front Fun” where one Ann Spade is “off to the waters!” of the sluggish Sacramento River, which, we’re advised, is the city’s “beach.” Viewers may be unsure if they are instead watching a health report, as they face a number of perky reminders to “put on your sunscreen!”

These are still heady times for the cable industry. But as the main audience for broadcast TV ages, growth is hard to come by—profits are high because a push to offer premium services brings in more money, not more viewers.

Comcast, Cablevision, HBO, Turner and other major cable companies now offer TV Everywhere, which allows subscribers to watch TV shows online. But the audience that watches on a 50-inch plasma in the living room isn’t necessarily the same as those who will watch on a laptop or smartphone.

Cable continues to fight a rearguard action. As new generations turn to Netflix, Hulu and newer options for video entertainment, will they also toss in $100 per month for a cable subscription?

The news spread quickly over the web yesterday: Apple has gone back to selling Final Cut Studio. Now, facilities that have built their business around the NLE software can at least buy extra copies as needed. That is until Apple has cleared out its stock of the old software.

There’s another caveat: You can only buy the software via Apple’s phone sales line (800-MY-APPLE)–not its online or retail stores. Don’t expect a discount either. Just as before the advent of FCP X, Final Cut Studio 3 (which includes Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, Color 1.5 and Compressor 3.5) will be sold for its full $999 price. Educational pricing knocks $100 off that tab.

Although Apple has said it is simply clearing stock, some see the announcement as a sign that the company is finally responding to the extensive criticism from many in the professional world. Final Cut Pro X, introduced this past June, took a radical turn that upended many carefully crafted post workflows while proving incompatible with previous versions of the app.

However, according to posts on The Loop and CNET, an Apple spokesperson claimed that that the software was still retired and that the company has made similar efforts with other software products at the end of their product cycle.

If this is a typical way that Apple sells such defunct software, then the blog site AppleInsider came up with some curious responses by company representatives–internal disagreement over issues such as the availability of educational discounts and even if the software really was available for sale in the first place. While Apple seems at first the only one to sell the earlier version, web seller site Videoguys noted that they did have copies of Final Cut Studio to sell, although it was in limited Supply.

With the announcement just this past week that Steve Jobs was relinquishing the CEO position, it’s tempting to think that the new regime headed by Tim Cook was choosing to be more responsive to the considerable unhappiness voiced by the FCP community these past few months. In reality, that’s probably just wishful thinking. Pro editing can’t rate all that highly in Apple’s future plans.

The numbers of people who see themselves as professional editors is relatively minute compared to the numbers who buy MacBooks, iPads, and iPhones. (The Labor Department recently provided figures that noted that some 25,000 folks across the nation defined themselves as making their money principally through editing.)

With Jobs’ influence now set to decline as the guiding light behind the Cupertino-based company, some are instead wondering whether there is even a strong place for the creative arts at the Apple anymore. In his blog posting on Wired, reporter Tim Carmody starts by asking “Without Jobs as CEO, Who Speaks for the Arts at Apple?” Carmody declares Apple as a unique mix “built on the synthesis of technology and the liberal arts” that Jobs insisted on.

The reporter goes further, calling this time of CEO changeover “an awkward place for a technology company with deep roots in media to find itself.” Carmody thinks that Apple has slipped in its support for video professionals, book readers, or just those who want to use a computer to watch TV in the living room. His bleak assessment is that Apples’ “strategies for media, education and the creative industries — its ticket back to relevance after 1997 — have largely stagnated.”

Meanwhile, the NLE’s two traditional competitors–Adobe and Avid–continue to push for as many of those disconcerted FCP users as they can scoop up.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Future Media Concepts (FMC) one of the nation’s largest digital media training companies, announced that it has “teamed up with Adobe to offer training and discussion events for users of Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium software.” FMC will be holding free user group events in six U.S. locations that will include presentations and Q&A sessions with an Adobe-certified instructor.

It’s not too hard to see Adobe’s strategy here: push hard to show that their NLE software can take the place of FCP with a familiar look and feel while working seamlessly with the rest of the post ecosystem.

“The Adobe Premiere Pro user group events with FMC help our customers stay ahead of the learning curve — whether they are current Adobe Premiere Pro users, or they’re moving over from another non-linear editor,” Anita Engelman, senior marketing manager for Premiere Pro at Adobe, said in a press statement.

This first set of meetings will address the latest version changes, hardware, plug-ins, techniques, and more. In time–each month for the remainder of the year–the events will feature guest lecturers in many other areas of expertise.

The Adobe Premiere Pro user groups will be held throughout the U.S. in Boston, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Fla., Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. For more information, to register for the Premiere Pro user groups, and to view the current roster of the user group events to be held at FMC, visit www.fmctraining.com.

Even though Avid reported a loss this past quarter, that number came in as less than a year ago. Many think that the Tewksbury, Massachusetts-based company is well positioned to keep and strengthen its hold on the upper reaches of the editing world. Company CEO Gary Greenfield was recently interviewed on CNBC as to technology in general and the company’s prospects in particular.

According to MacRumors, both Adobe and Avid are continuing their programs of heavily discounting versions of their suites and NLE appls through the end of September.

For anyone involved in the postproduction industry, the news this past week that HP would potentially sell off its computer division was a wake-up call. Sure, this is a fast changing industry and some at the company fear a future of ever diminished profits. But HP is a key player in the film and video industries. Now one of largest IT companies in the world, it also has a proud history of innovation that began in a humble one-car Palo Alto garage owned by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard that in turn sparked the growth of Silicon Valley.

Just ask DreamWorks or any number of animation houses how important HP gear is to their work. That doesn’t touch on other companies doing CAD, architectural or car design, gas and oil exploration or anyone that edits or does compositing or special effects. The speculation that this innovative maker of quality PCs, servers and workstations would be sold off to the highest bidder–as some speculated–was unsettling, even in an industry known and celebrated for constant, destructive change.

There’s an interesting analysis of HP’s situation by Forbes magazine staff writer Quentin Hardy. The article makes its conclusions known upfront via its title-“HP: The Case For Incoherence”-with a first sentence that reads “You don’t see this much bad news in one place very often.”

The gist of the article, which details the losses incurred by the recent purchase of Palm, the turmoil in the PC industry (HP and Dell are said to make around a 7-percent profit margin on computers while Apple sails by with an estimated 30-percent margin), and the precarious future of the company’s important printer division all lead Hardy to conclude that “changing this company will cause a lot of turmoil and take a long time.”

As chance had it however, I was meeting with a group of HP upper managers and product specialists on tour in the city to present their 3rd major launch of new PC gear this year. “Our situation is no where near as dire as some make it out to be,” said Jim Christiensen, director of media relations of HP’s personal systems group.

“We have over $40 billion of revenue in the personal systems group, making us a Fortune 60 company” says Christiensen. “While our CEO has announced plans that will bring some significant changes, our group is going stronger than ever. Whatever happens, we’re still a very viable part of a $140 billion company. We’re in this business for our customers, and we won’t be letting them down.”

Indeed, September will see the launch of a range of new, innovative computer products at lower, more competitive price points. While I can’t yet go into detail, let’s just say the technology I saw and the calm, confident manner in which it was presented makes me think that HP’s computer division will be doing well no matter what happens.

HP’s innovation lives on: Here’s a PC Mag article that shows how the valuable WebOS ecosystem obtained from HP’s acquisition of Palm will turn up in PCs and other gear.

As long as we’re on subject of changes to one of the US tech industries star players, you might want to read a disturbing analysis of why the US is loosing out on the creation of the next generation of technology. Steve Denning, in a series of Forbes magazine articles that begins with “Why Amazon Can’t Make A Kindle In the USA,” faults—among other issues—traditional cost accounting, which focuses too much attention on increasing short-term profits by continually cutting costs even while this destroys the underlying strength of a technology company.

This inexorable logic is how whole industries disappear, says Denning. Instead we should correct short term thinking with, for example, approaches like “throughput accounting” that puts the emphasis on how companies can add new value, rather than just cut costs. Investors too need to change their thinking to “realize that short-term financial gains are ephemeral: the companies that will generate real value are those that do what is necessary to continuously innovate.” Apple and Amazon are two companies Denning gives credit to for their mantra of continuous innovation.

American tech companies dropping out of a market after creating innovative technology isn’t anything new, of course. Ampex is a good example. The California-based company perfected the audio tape recorder, invented the studio VTR, a portable videotape recorder, high-fidelity movie theater audio systems, multi-track audio recording and video editing. After all of these successes however, over the years Ampex divested itself of video and audio products for both the pro and consumer markets–”We’re just an engineering company” was their new tune. But they didn’t have that huge revenue engine anymore. Ampex finally made only tape recorders for storage–the Space Shuttle and the military were customers. But that wasn’t enough; it went into Chapter 11 in 2008. The Japanese bought a number of these patents and slowly, methodically built successful, worldwide consumer and professional industries from inventions we cast off.