Somehow during the crazy holiday season the team at Studios 121 found a few minutes to create this hilarious holiday video which premiered at the 2011 Client Appreciation Party on December 8th.

Everyone got in on the action as we poke fun at ourselves and have a blast in front of the camera! Enjoy and Happy Holidays!!!

Studios 121 was recently in Denver at Oskar Blues Brewery and the Great American Beer Festival shooting a presentation reel for network programmers for their series Beer America. Co-produced with Warren Miller Entertainment out of Boulder Colorado, Studios 121 is continuing its effort to bring the revolution of American Craft Brewing to primetime! According to the creator, co-host  and VP of Production at Studios 121, Paul Leone, everything went better then planned! “We pitched this series last year to many cable networks and there was definite interest in this topic for television, but many of these same programmers were still a little nervous about jumping head first into this genre. Brewmasters didn’t get the ratings Discovery was hoping for, so a lot of folks got cold feet. Although we didn’t get picked up based on the trailer we shot last year, we did get a lot of positive feedback, so we took that feedback and re-shot using our revised creative and programmer notes.” According to Paul, “we couldn’t have scripted this past shoot any better then it went. We had drama, beer, mechanical bulls, a gospel breakfast at a hops farm, and beer with meat at Oskar Blues.  Then we had 45,000 people, 2300 beers and the most amazing medal presentation at the Great American Beer Festival awards ceremony. It really couldn’t have gone any better!” We’re off to post now and hope to re-pitch beer America sometime this January, so stand by for more updates.

Studios 121 new state-of-the-art tapeless HD infrastructure helps a client meet a tight deadline!

On Sept 20th, 2011, Studios 121 hosted Arlington-based agency VNR-1 and their client, Kimberly Clark Corporation (KCC) for a live downlink record and edit session.  KCC’s CEO, Thomas J. Falk, was the host on CNBC’s morning show, “Squawk Box,” and VNR-1 gave Studios 121 the challenge to record the three hour program and edit a highlight reel for KCC promotion immediate release internally and externally.  The task was not as simple as possibly imagined, as KCC wanted the edit within one hour of the show’s completion, and the only way to meet that deadline was for a producer and editor to log and edit in real time!

To accomplish this tight deadline, Studios 121 utilized a recently implemented tapeless HD workflow that allows any live input to be recorded and edited in real time.  After satellite downlink, the CNBC’s HD signal stream was encoded using Telestream’s Pipeline Encoder.  Pipeline created HD Quicktime ProRes HQ files directly onto Studios 121′s Rorke Data central storage area network (SAN) which made the files immediately available via an 8Gbps fibre network to any Studios 121 editor.  As VNR-1′s producer logged the show’s “soundbites”, Studios 121′s editor cut the content only seconds after it aired, making the show’s final edit available for rendering just minutes after Squawk Box wrapped at 8:00am central time.

Just another example of how our expert staff at Studio 121 uses the latest, most innovative technology to meet and exceed client needs. Great job team!!