Neil Wilkes, Director
Opus Productions, UK www.opusproductions.com  Neil Wilkes November 23, 2004
"One of the biggest joys for us is that we don't look at what we do as work or a job. We have great fun, we really enjoy what we do. The tools of our trade we look at as toys. And we have a great time creating new products; music, film and we get paid for it. I think we have the best job in the world."
"We came down to the first meeting and we liked the way it was all being done. We liked the open access to the information, we liked the opportunity to meet and mingle with all the other people working in our field. That is absolutely priceless. And it makes sense to us to be part of an organization that is not only nation wide, but world-wide. Support your local chapter, work hard within that chapter."
DVDA (Bernie Mitchell, President): Tell us about Opus Productions and how you personally got involved with DVD... Neil Wilkes: We stated out, set the company up in 1999, when I fly back from LA wounded. I was primarily a live sound engineer since the mid 80's, and I smashed my spine up and had to have a bit of a rethink and the studio seemed the obvious place to go. We had been doing the studio for about 12 months and we were getting more and more calls for high resolution and surround sound. And so after looking at the Dolby Digital and the DTS surround CD's and discovering that they are lossey, we needed to look around for a way to get high resolution, multi-channel sound onto a disc without dropping any quality. So we looked at DVD-A and SACD. I learned an awful lot between the two formats and came down on the side of DVD because of compatibility and the absolute beauty in that you can incorporate the video layer with the audio layer and produce a disc that will play on every DVD player currently installed. And the quality for us being primarily audio was of prime importance and DVD-A was the only medium and as far as I am aware still is the only medium where you don't lose any quality whatsoever.So, the whole initial push was from the audio side. Now I notice on your website www.opusproductions.com you do have a video production side as wellThat's correct. The video production side came about almost by default because we had to learn to do the video titles that were compatible with DVD-A and would play on all players, wed had to learn the video side of things, so we could create the video layer that works with the Dolby Digital and the DTS audio and it just seemed like a logical progression to our graphics side, to get into the video editing. So, Claire Bidwell, our director in charge of graphics took her self off to University and spent a year and half doing a crash course and came out the other end of it with a Bachelor of Science in Multimedia Computing and Sound and Music Recording with a very fine understand of DVD video. DVDA: How big a company is Opus? Neil: We are small at the moment, there are only 5 of us. DVDA:Can you give us a breakdown of the facility, the equipment and tools that you are using?
Neil: From the audio side, we have a digital audio workstation in 5.1, which will do everything we can throw at it. Resolution up to 24 bit, 96K. We've got two separate video editing and authoring machines all running various combinations of software. At the moment we use an awful lot of Adobe Systems because their stuff works very, very well for us. And , we've got another general purpose machine that we use to put together the video title sets for the audio discs. We have a separate playback room, and testing rooms, and it is never ending, it is permanently growing all the time.
DVDA: That's a good thing, can you describe your client base?
Neil: I can't give names at the moment because of non disclosure agreements, and various different stuff like that. But it is ranging from small independent music production companies, major record labels, named bands with big international contracts, right down to actors, jobbing actors and actress who want to get and put show reels together, independent film makers who are putting together small productions, venues and places in London that are putting together promotional DVDs toi advertise competition, events, all sorts of things really, it is expanding in areas that we hadn't thought of when we set up.
DVDA: Using DVDs for Marketing is very interesting.
Neil: Yeah, the whole corporate side is something that we hadn't considered at all when we set up. We felt that we would stick purely with the music side. And that is just not the way it has turned out, we find almost an equal percentage of our income is from corporate side now
DVDA: Let's talk about business. In US we are seeing intense competition on prices for DVD services, is that true in UK?
Neil: With the DVD Video and DVD Rom side it is cut-throat, it really is. But what we are finding we are keeping our client base on features and quality of product. A lot of the people who are doing the cheap, cheap, cheap prices seem to be skimping in the quality department. And I think the old truth, you get what you pay for is true again.
DVDA: What makes OPUS special in the market?
Neil: Three things really; attention to detail, and the fact that we treat each project as if it is the most important that we have ever done., make each client feel like they are they are the most important client we have ever dealt with, no matter who they are and if necessary we will guide them every step of the way thru their project from conception to completion. There is no such thing as a standard job that we will knock out in a day, we just don't look at it that way at all. We want our customers to feel happy, and more to the point we want them to mention us when the talk to other people and not have to think, oh no, I couldn't possibly recommend them. We want them to be excited about their project and therefore each one is treated individually, we never use stock templates, stock designs, everything is custom from the word go.
DVDA: We can look for you in next year's DVD Excellence Award Entries, then?
Neil: I sincerely hope so.
DVDA: What are the joys and disappointments of some of the projects you have been involved in?
Neil: Ohhh, the joys, you get to see some really exciting stuff. And you realize that there is an awful lot of very creative, very talented people out there working, and you see a lot more, a wider range of things than you would by just going to the stores and buy things, or going to see them at the cinema and I think one of the disappointments arises from that when you realize that there is so much talent being ignored as well.One of the biggest joys for us is that we don't look at what we do as work or a job. We have great fun, we really enjoy what we do. The tools of our trade we look at as toys. And we have a great time creating new products, music, film and we get paid for it. I think we have the best job in the world.
DVDA: What advice would you give someone who wants to get into DVD? Is DVD an industry and what advice would you give them?
Neil: First things first is to go into an university and learn the specs thoroughly. Work out what area you want to go into, what area you want to specialize in, because they are all different. It all gets lumped into one format but you've got DVD-ROM, eDVD, WebDVD, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio and the audio/video hybrids, they are all different and they all require different skills and you must get an understanding of what the spec can and cannot do, otherwise you are on to a loser from the word go. That is really important, training and quality training at that. Get out there and get involved.
DVDA: From a recruiting point in the UK, if you need to hire people, are your finding people with the skill level you need? Neil: At the moment it is very difficult. One of the problems we've got is that there is an awful lot of short training courses as the moment. They seem to be promising people, they will take them in and within 6 or 13 weeks training and push them out the other end as a qualified DVD author. Or a sound producer and you find they come into you and they have been given all these promises and told all these things about how wonderful they all are. And how good they all are, and you suddenly realize that they have been taught everything completely upside down, and you have to start again. The way we look at it, is that we have a University just up the road from us and we find that if we actually go an talk to the University themselves, you can get a fairly good impression from the University as to what students have actually got talent. Because as well as hard work, you have to have talent, otherwise all you are going to produce is stuff that is technically brilliant, but will have no feel to it, no soul in it.
DVDA: What is your take on the new formats HD-DVD and Blu-Ray? Neil: What I would like to see and it doesn't matter what name the format is, is something that will give high definition video and high resolution multi-channel lossless audio on the same disc. But it also has to be backwards compatible with existing collections that people have got. How many hundreds of million of units have been shipped in total? Not just the players but the actual collections. People have collections of hundreds of discs, DVD, DVD-A. So any format that is brought in must be fully compatible with what has already gone before. And we have to unite behind one format, or we will have another one of these insane wars as there was between SACD and DVD-A, because all that does is confuse our customers and put them off! My personal thoughts at the moment and I definitely reserve the rights to change my mind should anything happen, is to stick with the DVD's forum recommendation and go the HD-DVD route because coming from an audio background, I Like the look for their spec better with the MLPs being mandated data rate in both stereo and multi channel, that looks good to me. I find that the lack of serious thought about audio on Blu-Ray is a concern.
DVDA: How do you as an audio person counter the statement that the consumer has already decided that audio quality is not important, they have embraced MP3?
Neil: I don't buy it. I just don't believe that. I think that the reason that the audio quality has been deemed unimportant is because sales of SACD and DVD-A are not what they could be and this is true. But most of that is down to the way that the labels have marketed the product. It is very, very difficult to get them. Product awareness is very, very important. There is an awful lot of people we know who know about 24, 96 mulitchannel audio and how good it sounds. We play it to people and it is like " Wow, I didn't know it could sound that good." The idea that MP3 or to a lesser extent Dolby Digital can sound as good is a myth. I don't buy into the theory that you can throw away most of your audio and still have it sounding as good as it did before hand.
DVDA: Let's talk about the DVD Association. Opus has just joined the new London Chapter of the DVDA? Why? What benefit to you see the DVDA providing? Neil: Two reasons really, we joined. We came down to the first meeting and we liked the way it was all being done. We liked the open access to the information, we liked the opportunity to meet and mingle with all the other people working in our field. That is absolutely priceless. And it makes sense to us to be part of an organization that is not only nation wide, but world-wide. And is dedicated to pooling the talents and resources and the information that we have available. Everybody works together on this, and everyone benefits. If everyone works against each other, nobody wins.
DVDA: What types of things would you like to see the DVDA pursue?
Neil: Interesting question. Blimey, straight off the top of my head, I would like to wave the audio flag, I am very happy to do that. One of the things the association, I would like to see a central source of what is being looked at the pros and the cons, and the pitfalls of each would make a lot of sense to me. There is an awful lot of wrangling between the DVD Forum and The DVD Alliance, and it seems everybody is jealously guarding everything, left right and center. And all there is is a lot of innuendo, and a lot of hearsay. There is no real community spirit. It need to develop into it's own community. With the music side of things, we have producers who get together world over, and we need to do a similar sort of thing, otherwise things will get fragmented again and I think united is best and fragmented is bad. Another thing that could be done is to maintain standards, it's a bit of a strange expression but it is almost to standardize standards, if you will. That way we end up developing and building on a world-wide pool of talent, skill and experience So, whenever I run into a project where I've got something going on that I am not familiar with, I don't want to give my client second best or third rate. So, it would be nice to have a situation whereby I can get on the Forum to the Association and say, "I need someone who could handle this part of the project I've got, and have access to that world-wide pool of knowledge.
DVDA: Where do you see the DVD industry in 3 years?
Neil: Idealistically or realistically?
DVDA: (Laughs) I'll let you choose.
Neil: Idealistically, the high definition part will all be sorted out. We'll have the one standard that can do just about whatever you want it to, with transfer rates of 30-40 megabits per second, there is nothing we can't do with that format. With the amount of storage that you've got on the proposed blue laser stuff there is nothing we can't do. We could make the whole thing a genuine interactive experience for the user where they have got everything all on the one disc. That's the idealistic point. All the studios are producing to the one format.
The realistic point, I see unfortunately that what every format comes out on top the proponents of whatever formats loose out, and I think there are what six of them on the go now, isn't it, at the moment. I think greed of accountants these days I think that they will still try and have the same problems that we have had before. "Oh, our format is better than your format. Your format is not any good. And you are going to be seeing the same product released in a half a dozen different variations and it might cause confusion. That's a worry.
DVDA: Any parting thoughts to the readers of Wavelength, to the members of the DVD Association?
Neil: Support your local chapter, work hard within that chapter. Get to know everybody in your area who is in the same business that you are. Pool information, pool resources, pool the knowledge, pool the skill, pool the talent. In that way we won't be competing with each other, but we will all be complimenting each other in stead.
DVDA: Thank you, Neil Wilkes and we wish you continued success at Opus Productions. Interview conducted by:
Bernie Mitchell, President, DVDA |
