Ben Baker

HBO's Studio Services are the internal post finishing resources within HBO and sits within the Production Operations department. Our clients consist of the Marketing, Documentary and Sports production departments, with Marketing being around 85% of the work across East and West coast offices. As the VP in this division, I have responsibility for our production client's work at a high level, including any new workflows mandated by our downstream linear and streaming distribution partners, including handling incoming dailies, production OCF encoding, editorial, color, sound mixing, restoration and UHD/ HDR & Atmos mastering. Studio Services also takes an active role in media management and archive lifecycle workflows on behalf of our production clients, and deploys 24/7 it's frontline media management team to meet the exacting demands of our clients and partners.

I set up the post departments for three different divisions at Vice- Viceland (cable channel), Vice News (HBO Delivery) and Vice Studios (longform and episodic department). Viceland: Established the network delivery workflow in Vice's new, purpose-built post facility in Williamsburg, for the launch of Vice Media's cable network, Viceland. First quarter content was 5 x 8 network series episodes, plus 30 hours of remastered archive content- all through color grade, sound mix, online finishing to delivery- over 70 hours of programming. This involved everything from initial workflow mapping and development, to the boots-on-the-ground hiring of colorist, sound engineer and online editor talent, running the daily schedule to make sure that everything ran on time and got done. The job also involved working with their software development team to adapt the existing production resource scheduling intranet into a post-production scheduling and reporting system that was used to maintain the many competing schedules for each production. Vice News: Established the post department in Vice News around workflow for Vice News Tonight (VNT), the nightly news show on HBO, opened two domesitc (DC, LA) and two international bureaus (London, Hong Kong). Once that show had stabilized and was on air, the existing Vice On HBO weekly show for HBO was assimilated into an overall News Post department, enabling efficiencies of scale for the two titles and ViceNews.com. This included international delivery from BRK to six different territories, as well as delivery to social and other outlets on a many-per-day basis. Vice Studios: Setting up the post department for Vice's new original feature and episodic studio, delivering content worldwide to our many distribution end points, including DCP and KDM distribution to theatrical partners, IMF delivery to Netflix, Amazon and more traditional feature deliverables to studios, sales agents and licensees.

I was brought on to build out the workflow for Vice's internal post production resources, in order for Vice to deliver it's network content to it's network, Viceland (A&E). I worked with 6 post supervisors to get 6 x 8 episodic series plus 40 hours of archive programming into the network for launch. This involved everything from hiring staff and high-level workflow management, to building out a scheduling system on their intranet with a dev team, to reporting progress every day to the senior management team.