A Short History of Corporate Video
The Seventies
Corporate videos have been with us since the 1970s and even
before when film was used. The arrival of reel to reel editing
machines heralded this new phenomenon within corporate communications.
But a reel to reel studio back then could easily cost £100,000
to fit out, not including the tube cameras which could cost £30,000
upwards. These studios were primarily geared up for television
production, and knocked out a few corporate videos almost
as a sideline.
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| Big budget corporate video |
So naturally corporate video was the domain of the chosen
few, the rich companies who could afford to have a piece of
television
all for themselves. Being a big budget affair right from the
start, it wasn't unusual to have wild animals, exotic
locations or expensive TV personalities as part of the show.
A £50,000 price tag wasn't unusual. We know of
one major client who spent £110,000 on a single
training video, using flightcam shots amongst others - and
it wasn't even for worldwide distribution!
The Eighties
Then as the 80s progressed Sony, the main supplier of video
and media equipment, started to bring prices of professional
equipment down. Digital Video Effects (DVE) machines also
dropped from £100,000
to a low end of £15,000. These allowed scenes to fly
on, or appear in interesting ways, like circles and cubes.
This
price drop resulted in the growth of independent video studios
who didn't depend on television as their main source
of income. The true corporate studio at last started to emerge.
Typically an independent could produce most of a video in-house
then maybe go to a TV studio for the final finished effects,
the polish if you will.
Back then, a video would be edited in a local studio on a cheaper semi-pro format such as Hi-Band, where the completed programme was made at offline quality. The offline was taken to the TV studio, sometimes with a file that listed all the edit points, or frequently with a piece of paper listing all the edit points. The TV studio then compiled the offline at full online quality. This was a laborious and time-consuming process compared to today, but it meant that any company with an important message that needed to go on video could afford to do so.
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| Graphics to enhance |
Alongside this graphic PCs emerged, from high end Sun workstations to the lowly Amiga, all capable of delivering that most important of video elements - graphics and captions.
Graphics were a big breakthrough in corporate video as they allowed invisible things to be seen such as the inner workings of a machine or technology process; or with training videos, the key points to remember could seen as captions, making the learning easier to remember.
The Nineties
By the 90s we saw the emergence of the first non-linear digital editing suites, edited on a PC, be it Mac or Windows. In practice these edit suites were limited by the speed of the PCs of the time, and all the clips in a video now had to be rendered, ie, processed by the PC, which made production times in the studio much slower. Realtime became much rarer, and many video producers took a while to adopt these systems (not Rossiter & Co, natch).
In practice we saw the rise of the hybrid edit suite - a mix
of reel to reel tape machines with a PC in the middle to do
the effects, dissolves and transitions, and manage and edit
the timeline of the video, complete with high quality audio.
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| Corporate video becomes affordable |
While this is still a long way from today's totally
digital environment, it did see the price of corporate videos
plummet much more to today’s acceptable levels. Editing
a video as a timeline onscreen was a major leap. Now clips
could be cut and pasted to wherever they were required. And
clips could be quickly trimmed to a precise size, which improved
the timing and dynamics of the resulting video programmes.
Hand in hand with this, Sony brought out lower spec reel to reel video tape machines. So instead of spending £30,000 plus for an edit machine, it was now more like £5,000. These lower spec machines ran Betacam SP, the television standard, but were actually a notch below true broadcast in quality.
This small quality drop made no difference to the corporate
clients. They started to order video in droves.
Right through the nineties, video hardware products came down
in price, and software flourished with more and more effects,
graphics and tech functions being added to the ever faster
PC which now become the heart of the video studio. And we started
to use DVDs.
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| Digital editing |
The Noughties
By 2000, corporate video had become a worldwide phenomenon,
not just restricted to Europe and the US. Everything corporate
could be shot on a reasonably priced camera using DVCAM,
and edited wholly
on
a PC.
Since
then, we’ve
had more and better of the same, until now we have film producers
like Richard Rodriguez producing commercial movies in his
garage in Texas, which turnover £25M plus, well
known movies like “Once upon a time in Mexico”.
Prices and costs have levelled out for the corporate commissioners
too.
What has now emerged as the key point is the added-value a
studio the can offer over and above the basic shoot and edit
of a video, things like creativity and style. And unlike say,
PC manufacture, video has not yet become a commoditised off
the
shelf product.
This
is
because
we’ve seen that many corporate videos are actually quite
bad, in that their story is poorly or naively told, or that
too
many videos look the same, so audiences are growing tired of
them.
This has meant that a studio’s script and storyboard capability has come to the fore, along with special creativity they provide, the creativity that will keep tired audiences riveted to their seats, and remembering every word.
As for technology - apart from DVD, we see HD as the new standard,
with quality so glossy that the finest of textures like smoke
or
rippling water look iridescent. And pictures are so detailed
that you could almost fall into them. Non HD looks flat and
dull by comparison.
Long live HD. But you can be sure there’ll be something
better before long. Perhaps streaming HD that works on the
web with the simplicity of multimedia? Corporate video never
stands still! |
