Studio Istanbul

Studio Istanbul is a boutique post production company based in Istanbul.

[studioistanbul]

Istanbul Echoes Trailer

A feature length documentary about the street vendors of Istanbul who adapt to the rabid urban changes of their city.

It will be screened at the !f Istanbul Film Festival on February 16th, 2018 in Nisantasi at 7pm.

[studioistanbul]

Istanbul Echoes

We proudly announce that Istanbul Echoes, a documentary about Istanbul’s street vendors was selected by the 17th !f Istanbul Independent Film Festival and will be screened on February 16th, 2018 in Nisantasi City´s at 7pm.

We thank director Giulia Frati for trusting us with some of the field sound recording.

[studioistanbul]

ADR for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan

Together with our friends from Paramount Television we did a ADR recording for the upcoming Jack Ryan series. Since we signed a NDA, we cannot share much. All we can say at this point is ‘Thank you!’ to all the people involved. It was an honor working together with you. 

Jack Ryan will be released on Amazon Video on August 31st, 2018. 

[studioistanbul]

Welcome Home.

Dear Friends, with great pleasure we are reopening our doors to you. After days and weeks of construction, wiring and soldering our new house is open for business. The Media Composer and Pro Tools machines are all settled in and feeling cozy. They are ready to ingest and playout your projects through our 10 Mbit upload radiolink to everywhere in the world.

Our microphones are hanging around in their new sound cabin, and while they enjoy the relaxing silence of their new shelter, they are eager to hear your new stories.

We are looking forward to having you visit us in our new vibrant neighborhood @İstiklal Street, Turnacıbaşı Street Number: 6,  Floor: 2 in Beyoglu, Istanbul. We are right above the Asian restaurant in the same building - so if you dig Asian food, that’s definitely a plus.

Please feel free to stop by, share a coffee (or two) with us - and have a little chat whenever you want.

[studioistanbul]

WOY23 - Daydreams

WOY23 - Daydreams - published by Studio Istanbul - is now live on iTunes, Tidal, Spotify and all other major electronic music stores.

This is the second single from the upcoming debut album “We are not quiete done yet”, which is scheduled to be released Christmas 2016.

Sertac Toksöz (Studio Istanbul) Sound Recording & Mixing

Mikro Ettore d'Agostino (Babajim Mastering Studio) Mastering

Korhan Tokatli & Ramazan Tunay Camera

Wolfgang Beck Video Editing and Color Grading

WOY23 Song Composition & Performance

Hat Tip to Alp Turac (DAS Studio) for lending us his pair of ears.

[studioistanbul]

KOR / EMBER

KOR / EMBER is Zeki Demirkubuz's newest feature film. It will hit theaters on April 22nd, 2016. We proudly announce that our own Sertac Toksöz and his friend Yalın Özgencil did the dialog editing and sound design on this one. We are very excited and cant wait to finally see the movie.

Read on for the synopsis and trailer of the the movie.

When her husband Cemal is arrested in Romania, Emine is left alone with their child who needs immediate surgery. She takes a job as a needle worker at a garment workshop where she comes across Ziya, her husband´s former boss. He can´t stay indifferent when he learns what the woman he once fancied is going through. When Cemal returns months later, he finds Emine working at the garment workshop and their son healthy. A hospital bill he accidentally sees reveals that Ziya has paid for the surgery and Emine hid this fact. Will Cemal, who already blames Ziya for what he went through and is extremely jealous of Emine, be able to confront this situation or choose to ignore it?

[studioistanbul]

ADR for Ben Hur

Ben-Hur is an upcoming American historical epic film directed by Timur Bekmambetov and written by Keith R. Clarke and John Ridley.  The film stars Jack Huston, Morgan Freeman, Toby Kebbell, Nazanin Boniadi and Rodrigo Santoro.

With our friends from Warner Brothers we did ADR sessions with Haluk Bilginer and Dato Bakhtadze in our studio.

The film is scheduled to be released on August 12, 2016.

[studioistanbul]

How to become a better Video Editor...

… at least if you are using Adobe Premiere Pro.

If you follow our blog on a regular basis you know we normally don't do any advertisement for products. But in this case I really have to make an exception, as this ebook I recovered recently could easily make a lot of people become better editors (and maybe leads to some more tidy projects being delivered to us for color grading and/or sound design).

As we own two high end Avid Media Composer editing systems most of our work is done on them. But of course we also own a Creative Cloud subscription and a Creative Suite license mostly for animation and post production effects. We already found that Adobe Premiere Pro made a huge development during the last years and were really thrilled that we were able to use it mostly like our Avid Media Composer systems (you can even just use the same shortcuts ;-) ). But a couple of weeks ago I discovered the eBook "The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro" - and this literally changed my video editing life. The workflows Jarle Leirpoll describes in this book opened my eyes on the amazing full potential of Premiere Pro and optimizing my editing workflows in general. The book is showing these workflows based on Premiere Pro, most of them using Premiere's own amazing feature set, but some of them could be adjusted to any other editing software as well.

After reading, switching from Avid Media Composer (and I have been working with Media Composer for more than 13 years now and got trained for system support on this systems as well) to Premiere Pro completely might also be an option to consider. Media Management is crucial if you want to go this step, but this book shows you how to deal with this too (of course).

The book is not really cheap (in fact it costs 42 € for more than 600 pages) but I am sure it will repay every cent in the amount of time you'll be able to save by using the described editing techniques and maybe also in money saved when you deliver your edits for further post production steps. I'll assure you, we at Studio Istanbul will give you quite some discount on color grading or sound design if your timelines are as tidy as those of Jarle's documentaries shown in his book!

[studioistanbul]

Say Hello to Howell Gibbens

With great pleasure we like to introduce you to Mr. Howell Gibbens, who is joining our ranks as a freelancer and will support us in the sound department. Howell is an American sound editor and currently based in Istanbul and Moscow. Howell was the supervising sound editor for 'Captain America' and sound editor for 'Green Mile' and 'White Men Can't Jump'.

He is currently working on his book 'How to quit Hollywood' and teaches Sound in the Istanbul Bilgi university.

Howell Gibbens

[studioistanbul]

Sync Premiere Pro Keyboard settings between different versions of Creative Cloud

If you are using different versions of Creative Cloud (we are using CC 2014 on an old laptop and CC 2015 on our Mac Pro) keyboard settings are not synced between them automatically. In fact, the keyboard setting files are synced to your system you just have to copy it to the right folder in order to allow Premiere Pro to find and use them.

On my Mac (running CC 2015 instead of CC 2014) the keyboard setting files (with path ending .kys) have been synced to this folder ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/SynKit/XXXXXXX@AdobeID/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/AppSettings/xxxxxxxxx/Adobe_Premiere\ Pro_8.0/Profile-CreativeCloud. As CC 2015 includes Premiere Pro 9.0 these files are never used. After copying them to the correct folder ~/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/SynKit/XXXXXXX@AdobeID/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/AppSettings/Premiere1/Adobe_Premiere\ Pro_9.0/Profile-CreativeCloud/Mac the still didn't show up in Premiere Pro. Clicking on "Use Settings from different account..." in Premiere Pro get's these files scanned, updated and included in your list of available keyboard settings.

[studioistanbul]

WOY23 - Can't Stop Me Now

We proudly present WOY23's first single "Can't Stop Me Now" from his upcoming debut album "We are not quite done yet". The single is currently available on Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon and iTunes.

Recorded at the Bahcesehir University Sound Studios, mixed at Studio Istanbul and mastered at Babajim Istanbul Studios & Mastering the single is featuring Duygu Demir on the cello. Thank you to everyone who was involved in this. 

Vocals, Guitar, Composition - WOY23

Cello - Duygu Demir

Recording & Mixing - Sertac Toksöz

Mastering - Mirko Ettore D'Agostino

Cover Artwork - Ohyun Kwon

[studioistanbul]

Say Hello to Sertac Toksöz

With honor we are announcing our newest member to the Studio Istanbul team. Sertac Toksöz, who already joined us in February 2015 as a Media Designer for Picture and Sound is currently starting his thesis in Mastering for Feature Film Sound. He is looking forward to receive his master degree in Sound Technologies from the Bahcesehir University later this year.

Since February Sertac did not only help us out with the daily news business editing, but conducted sound mixing and sound design for documentaries, voice over recordings for commercials and ADR sessions for international feature films. Furthermore he did short commercial clips shootings on his Panasonic GH4 and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema cameras.

In his free time Sertac is a keen referee at local table tennis tournaments in Istanbul and loves to talk and philosophize about the latest adventures in the cinema landscape. If you would like to get to know him better, just stop by for a Turkish coffee or two that he will gladly enjoy with you.

[studioistanbul]

Gregory Johnsen talks with Fresh Air's Dave Davies

A couple of days ago we had the honor to host Mr. Gregory Johnson for an interview with Fresh Air's Dave Davies. In the interview Mr. Johnsen talks about the current crisis in Yemen. Read on for a link to the interview.

Mr. Johnson is a reporter for BuzzFeed News and the author of The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia. A year ago, he escaped a kidnapping attempt in Yemen, which he also discusses in the interview.

You can listen to the whole interview here.

We thank NPR, WHYY, Dave Davies and Gregory Johnsen.

[studioistanbul]

Goethe-Institut

We proudly present "Almanca Ile Basari Yolunda", an corporate video for the Goethe Institut in Turkey. The Goethe Institut is a non profit German cultural association promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and relations.

The video is in Turkish language and has german subtitles.

[studioistanbul]

ADR with Haluk Bilginer for Rosewater

Rosewater is an upcoming American drama written and directed by Jon Stewart and starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Haluk Bilginer. We proudly supported the post production process of the film with an ADR session with Haluk Bilginer in our studio.

The movie tells the story of Maziar Bahari, an Iranian Canadian journalist, film maker and human rights activist who was got imprisoned over 118 days by the Iranian government. An interview he did at The Daily Show was used as evidence that Bahari was in communication with an American Spy.

Due to the content of the fim, Iran's State Television accused Jon Stewart of being funded by Zionists and working with the CIA.

Rosewater will be released November 7th, 2014.

We want to thank Catherine Farrell, Rachel Jablin, Mary Ellen Porto, Haluk Bilginer and Jon Stewart  for working together with us.

Rosewater

[studioistanbul]

Arri Alexa - Avid Media Composer 7 Workflow

Select all the files and choose BIN -> AutoSyncAfter the transcoding is done, duplicate the transcoded files...…we can already import the audio files.

With Media Composer 8 we can natively work with 4K material - but what if you are still using Media Composer 7 for all of your post production needs? Recently we had an offline edit with Alexa material (ProRes4444, progressive, 25fps). We are still running Media Composer 7 (it's a perfect match with a Pro Tools 11 co installation) and had to find a workaround. This is how it's done.

First we create a new project with 1080p/25 setting.

We AMA link the material into a bin named "MASTER".

We then duplicate our clips and put them into a new bin called "EDIT".

To make the director happy we apply an Arri Alexa LUT on the clips.

Do this by right clicking the clips, choosing Source Settings and add the LUT to the clips (Apply to all). 

With the LUT applied we can transcode the huge files into a less demanding DNxHD36 codec.

WIth "Run in background" checked...

…we can already import the audio files.

After the transcoding is done, duplicate the transcoded files...

…and put them together with the duplicated audio in a bin named "SYNC".

Yes I like to play it safe .

Select all the files and choose BIN -> AutoSync

Make sure you had a great sound guy and sync your clips using Source Timecode.

With our synced clips we can now start our offline edit.

Once we are finished, go back to our MASTER bin and select the AMA linked clips...

…again we go to Source Settings...

…and this time delete the Arri Alexa LUTs on all clips (Apply to all).

Once done, we select our finished sequence and the master clips (make sure nothing else is selected)...

...right click and Relink selected itmes to "Selected items in ALL open bins".

This will give us a relinked sequence, which we now can export as AAF (enable AAF Edit Protocol) for conforming in Davinci Resolve.

We used the following settings in Davinci Resolve:

Make sure you had a great DIT, who took good care of all the Meta Data.

[studioistanbul]

AVID Media Composer and Pro Tools CO Installation

We just spend a couple of days trying to get Media Composer and Pro Tools to work with our Mojo DX. We had some issues with the AVID DX drivers and the online help from Avid was more confusing than helping. We wanted to quickly share the best approach with you.

First of all you should uninstall any AVID Media Composer and Pro Tools versions (here do the clean uninstall option). After the uninstallation process is done make sure you dele the AVID DX kernel extensions. You can find them in User/Library/Extensions and /System/Library/Extensions. This is crucial.

After you have done this turn off your MAC and turn off your Mojo DX hardware. Restart your MAC and install Pro Tools Version 11.2.2. After another restart install the AVID DX Driver Version 5.9 and again restart your MAC.

Now Pro Tools should start without any error messages and you should be able to use your Mojo DX hardware for video output.

Close Pro Tools and install Avid Media Composer Version 7.04 and restart your MAC. Just to be safe reopen Pro Tools and make sure video output is still available. Close Pro Tools and open Avid Media Composer. Both should be able to output video through the Mojo DX, just make sure that not both software are running at the same time.

We also tried other more up-to-date versions, but in our experience running Media Composer 7.04 with Pro Tools 11.2.2 and the AVID DX Driver 5.9 on a MAC OS 10.8.5 system is currently the most stable video and audio post production system.

AVID Device Drivers