Creating a Greener Studio

Reading this article’s headline, you may be thinking, "Global warming is a big corporate guy issue and I’m just a small production company in Anytown, America." However, production tools that save on materials and energy output are available as never before. Effectively, one can invest in energy efficient technologies upfront to reap long-term savings. Wonderdog Media, my production company in the Seattle/Tacoma Market, has implemented a plan to help reduce our carbon footprint for the benefits both to our environment and to our bottom line.

When my wife and business partner, Olga, and I first discussed our energy-saving strategy, we decided that change we could make with the most environmental impact would be to reduce our use of media stock. In the eight years we’ve been in business, Wonderdog has been utilizing various formats: miniDV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, BetacamSP, DVDs, even 3/4-inch tape. All this was amounting to considerable waste. Back then the only real tapeless camera on the market was the Panasonic AG-HVX200. Now, of course, there’s the Sony XDCAM EX camera and nearly every manufacturer has some contribution to the market. But back then, we invested in a Panasonic HVX200 P2 camera and three P2 cards.

Nearly 80% of Studio/monthly readers surveyed cite “using digital storage” as their top method of conserving energy.

It took some time to adjust to the new workflow, but after a few weeks, I was shooting 85% of my projects on P2 cards in SD and HD.

We soon noticed the reduction of waste and energy: no more UPS trucks hauling my tape stock to my office every 3 to 5 days, no more tape stock (meaning non-decomposable petroleum). Also, the cost was huge.

Of course, as I soon realized, one of the biggest adjustments to going tapeless is the need for immediate, reliable storage. We purchased a FireStore FS-100, at the time a 100 GB hard drive that connects to the camera via FireWire, allowing for more storage and longer shooting times. This, combined with the fact that firmware updates can now shoot variable frame rates, makes longer shoots a breeze. Another major advantage of our FS-100, which can hold 100 minutes of DVCPRHD, is it also works with my other FireWire cameras. Since buying this drive, I no longer shoot with tape stock on any of my other six cameras. Unless a client has specific requirements, we just don’t use tape.

Another advantage of the FireStore unit is it can shoot in native AVI, AVI Type II, QuickTime and Avid OMF files, giving us faster access to edit the captured footage. It also lets us post clips via ftp or burn dailies on set to deliver to a client for previewing.

Other suggestions for "greening" your studio include recycling office supplies, powering down at the end of the day, and auditing for energy leaks.

While I look forward to day when I can shoot direct to disc and upload the files to any client anywhere in the world, our studio has been fortunate to be able to work mostly with local clients. This means we save a lot of time and money, while reducing our environmental impact.

A major adjustment to the tapeless workflow has been finding a highly-organized way to safely store our data. We have expanded our storage, currently at 15 TB of storage, tenfold since 2003, giving us multiple back-ups. Highly specific file-naming conventions have been an absolute must.

If you’d like to compare how your building or office space compares with official green construction standards, go to www.usgbc.org.

After eliminating tape, the natural next step was to get rid of paper, too. Olga came up with the idea to convert all of our paperwork to PDF using the form creator program inside the latest version of Adobe Acrobat. Hence, all of our invoices, bids, contracts and project tracking are now in e-mailable interactive electronic form.

We spend less on paper, which means less waste to local landfills, less trips to the local office supply store, and, ultimately, saves on fuel. Our accounting software, QuickBooks, makes it easy for each employee, officer and vendor to digitally track time for company projects and billable hours. Each week the logged timer files are emailed to Olga for AR/AP processing. These files are then processed through the accounting software. We’ve found we now have a quicker turnaround for order processing and bid approval with this new system in place.

We knew that if we wanted to reduce paper output in a meaningful way, we’d need to address the faxing issue. We have a client that sends and receives 12,000 pages of faxes a month- that’s a lot of paper! We figured that our best solution was to move to eFax.

One Studio/monthly survey respondent takes an all-inclusive approach: “Our studio uses low-efficiency materials. From the lights to the carpet to our building materials, everything is eco-friendly. Our customers appreciate the “Built Green” logo on our front door. It may not be a deal-breaker for clients, but it always helps in conversation.”

For most, a combination of protecting the environment and saving energy is the drive behind creating an eco-friendly studio.

eFax is an electronic fax or e-mail fax. When a client sends a fax, it is automatically transmitted to us via e-mail. We can now can fax from our laptops and desktops. A client can fax me a script and I don’t need to be near the office or portable fax to receive it. Each of our employees has a personal fax number so they can get their faxes from wherever they are via e-mail. Our clients really love this change and have given us great feedback about it, especially with regard to accountability. You immediately know when and where a fax was sent.

We’ve also utilized our bandwidth to all of our phone lines to VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol. Our VoIP modems connect to our traditional Lucent partner phone system. This technology alone gives us a substantial cost savings on a monthly basis. The simulring feature allows up to seven numbers to ring at the same time when a client calls our office: no more missed gigs.

When our lease was up we spent a few months looking for office space, placing a high priority on available natural light to further reduce our energy output. We found a location with multiple skylights. When we moved in to our new production facility this year the savings was immediate. We also converted all of our incandescent light bulbs to more energy efficient compact fluorescent and LED light bulbs.

We have a two-year plan to replace the majority of our production lights with energy efficient LED lights. I look forward to not onlly the additional energy savings, but the reduction in unneccessary heat around us and our talent.

Our commitment to creating an environmentally-friendly studio is an evolving process. The changes we’ve made already have had a wonderful domino effect. Saving on one production front helps us afford other environmentally-sound and energy-saving investments. Even if global warming isn’t a personal concern, some of these simple changes can go far to increase a studio’s cost-effectiveness and efficiency.