“I do pretty sophisticated post-production. I just happen to do it in my living room.”

That’s Tom Konkle, half of Dave and Tom, one of a couple-dozen anchor content creators at the launch of Veoh Networks, a start-up online programming provider that offers a glimpse into the workflow of the alt-post-production universe – and a peek at the possible future of post.

Watch an episode of Dave and Tom's show, below, then read on to find out what they're using to put it together.

Veoh Networks resembles any number of other social or commercial video sharing sites, including Vimeo, Brightcove, Maven and the granddaddy of them all, YouTube. But Veoh isn’t the offspring of talented-but-bored computer-science undergrads – its start-up capital came from bankable Hollywood stalwarts like Michael Eisner and Time Warner. Founder Dimitri Shapiro’s P2P technology uses an algorithm developed by Ted Dunning, developer of MusicMatch. It automatically transcodes video to QuickTime for iPod viewing and allows near-HD quality for video pieces that can run far longer than the usual three- and four-minute Internet video fare. It also helps producers monetize their work. It’s a step in between the dorm-dwellers at YouTube and the suits at ABC – leveraging a new technical infrastructure to power a new kind of creator/producer.

Veoh’s initial capitalization ($12.5 million) is lunch money in Hollywood, but it’s more than many of Veoh’s first wave ever hoped to see. Most are actors and aspiring directors who see the online distribution channel as a way to avoid the conventional Hollywood ladder. But they have to be the equivalent of those aviation pioneers who designed, built, maintained and flew their own planes. “If you’re not capable of doing your own post-production in this game, you are dead in the water before you even start,” says Ski-ter (pronounced SKEE-ter), director and post-producer for “We Can Do That,” another Veoh show. In what he calls a “consumer-based post” process, Ski-ter uses a single Panasonic DVM-100 24p camera to shoot the show, recording audio to the camera to ensure sync, and then editing it on Final Cut Pro on a G5 laptop. “Have edit bay, will travel,” he jokes.

But Veoh's producers are dead serious about using the network's higher quality to project their careers as auteurs, and they don’t want to get bogged down in the technology. Konkle says many of the shows are created by collectives of new-media literates who take time off from their day jobs as actors and writers to shoot on weekends and post at night before going to bed (Ski-ter spoke while on a break from filming a FedEx broadcast spot). A typical episode of Dave and Tom, crewed by their Pith-e Productions collective, is “One Wish” (www.daveandtom.com/podcasts/one_wish_480.mov), a slightly scatological play on the old genie-in-a-bottle gag.
Using a Canon XL-H1 camera with mattebox, they shot on a beach in Malibu with a mostly sky background (in HD 24p with a Cinema 2 gamma curve), plus additional green-screen shots later in the day for the large full-body and over-the-shoulder effects. The elements were composited in Final Cut Pro.

The audio post is ambitious under the circumstances. Konkle worked at post houses like VidFilm and Pro West Video early in his Hollywood career, and looped the audio for the entire three-minute piece. “We anticipated the [ocean] noise so we had provided for looping in the production plan,” says Konkle, who used to loop foreign films as a voice talent and thus knows a bit about lip-syncing. “We'd use either a DAT deck or go directly to the camera with time code and do it on site. I'd note the position of the camera in relation to each actor and keep that same distance from the Sennheiser shotgun microphone we used on a boom pole. We'd take the dialog in chunks and punch in a line at a time. It's like making dailies with good sound. In post I added the ocean sound from a Hollywood Sound Effects library.” Looping was recorded, processed, edited and synched using Adobe Audition and Premiere Pro. Pith-e Productions collective member Michael Sherwood, a friend and a commercial composer at Elias Arts, wrote the video's music.

Another member of the collective, Thor Melsted, composited and rendered the final shots from the completed HD cut. Two final reels were assembled: an HD master and an NTSC master on HDV and miniDV tape respectively. The SD version gets uploaded to VEOH and the HDV tape becomes the archival master.

CineForm AspectHD automatically removed the 3:2 pulldown from the 1080i data to create 24p files. Green-screen shots were processed using Ultimatte Advantedge, and additional masking, rotoscoping and clean-up were done in After Effects. The genie’s smoke effect was created entirely using the After Effects particle engine and fast blur in several layers, using masks as guides to control the smoke behavior. The final edit was done in Final Cut Pro.

“One Wish” looks about as good as video can on the web. Konkle says shooting in HD and then downconverting it from 1080i to standard definition directly out of After Effects adds an accidental but very desirable cinematic quality to the look. “It looks a lot like film,” he says. “It takes the sharp edges of high-definition and smoothes them just enough. Side by side you can see the feathering that the downward conversion brings, but actually it leaves the look of the picture about where you’d wanted it in the first place.”

Another sophisticated entry on Veoh (and other sites) is the episodic “Sam Has 7 Seven Friends,” with the intriguing subtitle, “And One of Them Killed Her.” According to Ryan Wise, a member of the Big Fantastic collective in Los Angeles that produces the show, “We shoot on miniDV with two Panasonic DVX-100A cameras at 24p, letterboxed, then digitize it all into Final Cut Pro 5 PowerMac G5s, all in-house. We do the sound mix and color-correction using FCP 5. We then output a 640×480 file to upload to Veoh. The file must be under 100 MB, so we make it look as good as possible before we upload it, using compression for Windows Media Player and high-res QuickTime versions. Then [the sites also] do the compression to Flash and/or QuickTime. We use Sennheiser ME66/K6 shotgun microphones and wireless lavaliers for backup.”

The tools of post production are low-hanging fruit for this group. While some, like Konkle, have conventional post experience, most draw from consumer and prosumer software, including Apple’s Garageband music-production program and Macromedia’s Flash. Steve Tatham, producer/writer/host/post supervisor of The Ointment, a Daily Show-esque current events satire, pulls stills and video together from a variety of online sources and shoots new material with the Panasonic PV-GS250, a well-regarded consumer camcorder. He edits the footage in Apple iMovie using Image IP and Stupendous Software plug-ins.

Veoh’s world is often post-production by-the-numbers. “Everything I use, I found out about from a friend, or went up online for information,” says Tatham, a stand-up comic and one-time set designer for Disney. Those same sources choreographed his post-production routine. “I have, like, 180 steps I follow for posting every show. If I follow them I get a great result. If I make one deviation, I’m totally lost.”

The producers do have an interesting resource to tap: the proliferation of media arts schools offers access to some serious technology. “I’ll go over to the Pasadena College of Art & Design and they’ll be using an Avid over there,” says Ski-ter. And Jim Chroma, writer and animator of “Showbiz Newsy News,” a Veoh celeb-satire, says the schools have caught on quickly to the synergy between technical academics and the new wave of video distribution. “We always had the New York School of Filmmaking pumping out Martin Scorseses,” he says. “It’s just that now, Martin has to know how to use Garageband.”