“Meet some of the companies we believe are headed for greatness,” proclaims the website.  The first profiles feature Charles River portfolio companies Jitterbug, Eons, Vlingo, Geni, Twitter, Verenium, and Conduit.

DigiNovations Senior Editor Mike Chapman gave a presentation at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Post Production World Conference in Las Vegas about shared storage for post-production facilities this past week.  Some 200 attendees listened as Chapman described the advantages and potential pitfalls of integrating shared storage solutions into a post production workflow.

DigiNovations has implemented a “storage area network” (SAN) within its Concord-based production studios, hooking together eight post-production workstations with a high-speed optical fibre network to a central storage array with more than 20 terabytes of storage.  This enables any post-production workstation within DigiNovations to access production project files with performance comparable to storage on a local hard disk, and allows multiple editors to collaborate on a single project.

Chapman tested shared storage at leading companies such as Avid, Pinnacle and Facilis before joining DigiNovations in 2006.

John Keltonic composed a lively score to go with the photos and interviews.

The film is being shown to kick off many dozens of centennial events for Harvard Business School around the world during 2008.

Mont Fennel

Mont Fennel is a four-time Emmy award-winner and a 16-year veteran at New England Cable News (NECN). His nightly business reporting on the nation’s largest 24-hour regional news channel reached 3.7 million subscribers in more than 1,050 cities and towns across all six New England states. Fennel’s reporting won four Emmy awards for NECN, and was nominated 17 additional times. “Mont Fennel is an NECN pioneer,” said NECN News Director Thomas R. Melville. “He was on our air on Day One - March 2, 1992 - and he has been there ever since as the only full-time business reporter on television in New England. He is a masterful producer of television news reports. As a master, he has used the medium to bring complex business topics to the small screen in creative and interesting ways. He is a great storyteller.”

Fennel joins the staff of one of the fastest-growing creative video production firms in New England. As a leader in the field of web video and internet TV, DigiNovations lately has seen client interest explode in the area of internet video production. “Internet video demands a blend of new skills and attitudes with well-established disciplines,” said DigiNovations executive producer Michael Kolowich. “What appealed to me about Mont is his instinctive eye toward finding the core of the story and then using the medium to bring that story alive. I believe he’ll flourish in the new medium of internet video, just as he’s done in traditional broadcast journalism.”

“We will miss him — in our newsroom and on our air,” noted NECN’s Melville. “I predict a very bright future for Mont as he brings his vast set of skills to his new position with DigiNovations.”

Fennel also served as Boston correspondent for the Nightly Business Report on public television.

In Iowa, Romney videographer Michael Kolowich (behind, on top of the MittMobile) covers the Straw Poll Victory

• “Ten Lessons from Mitt TV”
• “In Political Campaigns, YouTube is a Two-Edged Sword”

Ellyne Lonergan

Ellyne recently relocated to the Boston area from Tampa, Florida, where she was Senior Vice President of Content for public television station WEDU, and has run her own production company, Glass Onion Productions.

“Ellyne brings a tremendous range of skills to DigiNovations that will strengthen and broaden our offerings to clients,” said executive producer Michael Kolowich.  “Her graceful style of writing, producing, and client relationship-building fits right in with our approach.  We couldn’t be more pleased to add her to the team.”

Click here for a complete profile of Ellyne Lonergan.

Here’s a rundown of the winners, as well as links to the videos themselves:

• Platinum Award - “Beginnings” - Client: Beginnings Child Development Center (not yet released for the web)
• Gold Award - “Learning 24/7” - Client: Sacred Heart University
• Silver Award - “Inside the Case Method” - Client: Harvard Business School
• Bronze Award - “Consider the Abbey” - Client: Portsmouth Abbey School

This is the fourth consecutive year in which DigiNovations has placed among the top corporate video productions of the year in the VISTA competition, and the third out of the last four years in which DigiNovations has captured the top Platinum award.

DigiNovations began a major digital technology upgrade this week, as it started to swap out its fleet of HDV cameras with the latest new high-definition technology from Sony, the XDCAM EX1.  Many, many new improvements come with this format — full 1920x1080 resolution, dramatically improved audio fidelity, larger video pickup chips for improved low-light capability and improved depth-of-field.  But the most obvious new feature is the fact that these cameras don’t record on tape; they record their hi-def magic onto solid-state memory cards instead.

Executive Producer Michael Kolowich with one of the new XDCAM cameras“The tapeless workflow means we can be much more efficient with our post-production efforts,” said DigiNovations Executive Producer Michael Kolowich.  “Often we’ll come back from a two-day, two-camera shoot with 7 or 8 hours of footage, and it takes a whole day to digitize the footage.  Now, we can start the editing process in the car or on the airplane on the way in, and we can be editing within minutes of reaching the studio.”

A 16GB solid-state memory card stores 50 minutes of hi-def videoDigiNovations Director of Photography Bill Charette and Senior Editor Mike Chapman are working on designing all of the new workflow approaches that go with the new format.  “Among other things, we need to almost immediately transfer all our footage to our central storage facility,” said Kolowich, “because the memory cards are very expensive and we need to constantly reuse them.”

The move to the XDCAM high-definition format reflects DigiNovations’ commitment to stay on the leading edge of high-quality, low-cost video technology that keeps production affordable while keeping the bar on production values very high.

• Harvard Business School took home the Gold Award for Video Viewbook in the Graduate School category for the film “Inside the Case Method,” produced by DigiNovations for its MBA admissions effort.
• Sacred Heart University was recognized with the top prize for Video Viewbooks for colleges between 5,000 and 10,000 students for “Learning 24/7”, a project produced by DigiNovations in partnership with Keating Associates.  Sacred Heart also won a Merit award for a DigiNovations-produced TV Ad that runs regularly during NCAA sports broadcasts.
• Portsmouth Abbey School was awarded a Silver Award among Secondary Schools for ”Consider the Abbey,” an admissions video produced by DigiNovations in 2007.
• And St. Joseph’s College of New York was awarded Merit recognition for a TV Ad produced by DigiNovations.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done for New England’s great educational institutions — not only in admissions but also in fundraising and institutional image.  Congratulations and thank you to all the winners!

Our legal marketing partners, Legal Insight Media, Inc., developed the strategic approach for the video and DigiNovations was responsible for all the production (videography) and post-production (editing and encoding for the web).  The result is a hard-hitting, 3-minute video created from nine interviews with recent Navy JAG recruits.

The result, writes Larry Bodine in a posting today on the LawMarketing Blog, is a another example of why “video is a must for recruiting Web pages.”

Larry quotes LCDR Colleen M. Shook, JAGC, USN, JAG Corps Detailer for Accessions and Recruiting, as saying, “This compelling Web video captures the sense of adventure that attracts lawyers to become JAGs better than any other medium could.”

The U.S. Navy JAG and Legal Insight Media join a growing list of clients who have turned to DigiNovations to fill their recruiting web video needs — from international law firm Ropes & Gray LLP to Harvard Business School to Sacred Heart University.

Watch the Navy JAG Recruiting Video

Kolowich (left) talks with WEVA Chairman Roy Chapman and WEVA Hall of Fame member Hal SliferThe award, given in honor of gifted video artist and animator Bob LeBar, honors “forward thinking that enables us all to progress to a higher level.”

The WEVA Special Awards Committee cited Kolowich’s groundbreaking work in internet TV channels and bringing this approach to all of his work, from creating Mitt TV for the Romney for President Campaign to the dozens of channels he’s built for institutions across New England.

The article is published in WEVA Magazine, the magazine of WEVA International, the world’s largest professional association for videographers.

Read the Article

The Mitt TV crew in Ames, Iowa. (l to r) Executive producer Michael Kolowich, audio engineer Russ Tomlinson, videographer Larry LeCain, producer Jillayne Smyth, and director of photography Bill CharetteIn late January, under the direction of Executive Producer Michael Kolowich and producer Jillayne Smyth, two video crews from DigiNovations spent 24 hours on the road in Iowa with both Governor Romney and two of his sons, offering a rare inside look behind the scenes as the candidate and his family rounded up support for the August 11th Iowa Straw Poll.  Then it was back to the studio to edit more than 26 hours of footage into a two-part documentary, called “24 Hours on the Trail” and a movie trailer to promote the video on YouTube and other venues.  The documentary and the trailer may be viewed on Mitt TV.

Two weeks later, it was back to Iowa to cover the big Iowa Straw Poll, which Governor Romney won by a big margin.  Here, multicamera coverage and speed were the imperative, and the crew turned around a three-camera cut of Romney’s major speech, a five-minute documentary on the Straw Poll win, and a 30-second TV spot within 48 hours.

At the very heart of HBS is the case method — the teaching method it invented, refined, and has placed at the core of the learning experience. Though the case method is often imitated by other graduate programs, those in the know agree that there is no other school in the world that practices the case method at such a high level as HBS.

For the first time in its 100-year history, Harvard Business School invited a camera team inside the HBS case classroom to explore what makes the HBS Case Method so special.

Calling on DigiNovations and its executive producer Michael Kolowich, Harvard commissioned “Inside the Case Method,” and is showing it to every prospective student, faculty member, and other member of the community who really wants to understand what’s so special about this remarkable method of teaching and learning.  The film is featured as part of the HBS Admissions website and is shown as part of the live presentation on the admissions road show.

View “Inside the HBS Case Method”

“Increasingly, our clients are asking us to work at the intersection of video storytelling and web presentation,” noted Michael Kolowich, president and executive producer of DigiNovations.  “Barry’s deep experience in both domains will continue raising the bar in the services we offer clients as they think about how to tell their story across these critical visual media.”

Profile of Barry Ouellette