Steiner Studios Breaks Ground In Brooklyn

Brooklyn, NY- Building a major Hollywood-style gated studio complex from the ground up on the East River is no easy feat. Over five years the concept of sound stages built on the Brooklyn Navy Yards has gone from a fantasy to a pet project of the City Economic Development Corporation, to an economically viable business plan with an experienced CEO at the helm. Jay Fine, a veteran network executive who’s built and managed operations at NBC and CBS over the last two decades, signed on in January to build 280,000 square feet of column-free sound stages and space for support services on the historic yards. Steiner Studios will be ready to host its first tenants in the fall season of 2004.

Over five years the concept of sound stages built on the Brooklyn Navy Yards has gone from a fantasy to a pet project of the City Economic Development Corporation, to an economically viable business plan with an experienced CEO at the helm.

"We’re looking to create critical mass for producers who want to shoot in New York," said Fine. The first phase of the project comprises a physical plant of 100,000 square feet on 15 acres. Steiner Equities, a developer that stepped up to the plate on the project, has already invested $10,000,000- laying pilings and foundations for five stages- anchored by a 27,000 square-foot space that Fine believes will be the largest on the East coast. Four additional stages ranging from 16,500 to 22,000 square feet fill out the shooting space. Built for the largest scale productions, some of the stages will be constructed to a 45-foot grid height. Phase Two brings another build-out of about 100,000 square feet and five more stages.

Fine, who’s lived on both coasts, is unfazed by the downturn in the city’s local production community. "I think New York is experiencing normal cyclical ups and downs in production right now. The fact that we haven’t had the kinds of facilities that are available in LA and other production centers has held us back." Seconding that motion is the EDC’s Andrew Stern who’s championed the project: "A stage of the right size will bring new business," he said at a recent New York Production Alliance meeting, remarking that the way for New York to grow business is to hold on to interiors that routinely relocate back to LA. "We have to make the pie bigger and not haggle over the crumbs," says Stern.

Like so many of the great Hollywood lots, the waterfront location has history. The Navy Yards were built at President Thomas Jefferson’s urging to strengthen U.S. maritime muscle. Historic buildings dot the campus- along with dry docks and industrial buildings. Said Fine, who’s become a history buff in his first two months on the job, "During WWII about 70,000 people worked here in the Navy Yards. Now there are 2000 and we hope to add another 2000 direct TV and motion picture jobs."

Located between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, Steiner will be a full-service facility featuring support companies from catering to camera rental. Fine hopes to attract a community of production and post companies drawn by the back lot feel, the secure gated environment, the East River view of Manhattan, and easy access to JFK and La Guardia airports. The studios will also be accessible by ferries.

The City of New York will rebuild roads within the complex so that scenery can be rolled right into the stages. "From the service side, we’d like to be as good if not better than anything you can get in LA," says Fine.

Boston, MA- Software supplier DMOD has expanded its horizons by adapting to the realities of the production business. DMOD Worknet is a project-based version of DMOD Workspace, its secure media-asset distribution system. The difference is one of pure economics- while the Workspace systems starts at $17,500 a year for one on-site server and five clients, Worknet, which provides the same functionality from a remote location, can be had for as little as $3500 per project, depending on the number of users and the length of the project.

The need for project-based hosting became apparent to DMOD only after it cleared a significant hurdle with its first customers- convincing them that the system was secure enough to safely allow content to travel beyond the four walls of the studio. "Some of our customers are very client-server savvy, and they’re totally able and willing to maintain the actual software and so forth," said DMOD Vice President of Product Development Tom Ohanian, himself a member of the development team that won an Emmy for its work on the Avid Media Composer. "Other verticals work on a project-by-project or month-by-month basis, and they’re not so interested in purchasing the software."

While Workspace users maintain their own servers and software, for Worknet customers, nothing resides on site. Users browse a Web page where they set up project parameters and designate authorized users who can collaborate and send material back and forth. While Ohanian acknowledges that rights management forbidding unauthorized users from tapping into the content is important, he says users often expect it to be more onerous or more expensive to implement. In reality, he says, the process is simple. In fact, DMOD’s systems actually allow authorized users to view encrypted content offline- on a laptop, for instance. "You can take film or video dailies and encrypt them for two or three individuals," Ohanian said. "You take your content, run it through the DMOD process, encrypt the media, then go burn the DVD. You get the DVDs to those individuals, who put it in the specific machine for which it was encrypted, and then it plays back."

The system isn’t absolutely watertight, but it stacks safeguard on top of safeguard. If a physical disc is stolen, for instance, it would need to be viewed on a computer that matches exactly the profile of the one the disc was created for- not an impossibility, but a great difficulty for anyone bent on piracy. If access is dependent on the user being tethered to a network, the content owner’s rights are even more robust. For example, the system includes a "revoke" button that can be tied to a specific user and file. "That file disappears from the user’s DMOD -encrypted file system," Ohanian explained. "If you need to shred the file, you put it in your trash can, and that file is shredded from 500 desktops. When we demonstrate that to people who are more videocentric or filmcentric, they want to see that they can maintain that revocation, that umbilical cord to the media."

To date, DMOD’s greatest success has been in the music industry, where it has been used for everything from transferring CD masters to replication facilities to simply moving files around in a studio setting, sharing them with A&R executives, or transferring raw tracks to the mixing studio. But the newest version of the software has been tweaked specifically to appeal to the video business, adding such features as MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 support (through QuickTime 6.0) and solidifying rights-management features. Among the first customers in the video space, Ohanian said, may be producers of reality-based television shows, who are interested in transmitting MPEG-4 versions of files from continent to continent, allowing them to save precious production days by circumventing the shipping and customs processes.