Company’s Technology Helps Film, TV Editors Call the Shots

Eugene Keane isn’t an actor, a stuntman or a scenery designer. He doesn’t write scripts or sew costumes. Nevertheless, he could play a vital role in the way the film and television industries function in the future.

Keane is president and chief executive of Video Products Group, a Ventura County firm that manufactures systems to transport high-quality video and audio data over fiber optic and public lines.

The technology is becoming the rage in Hollywood, allowing directors and editors at different locations to make changes and share ideas on video products as if they were sharing the same screen.

“If somebody from Paramount wants to collaborate with a post-production house in Santa Monica they can get hooked up,” Keane said. “It enables the industry to do the job in their natural form without co-locating.”

Business for the privately held company has increased 30% each of the last two years, Keane said. And hopes are high for continued gains.

To accommodate present and future growth, the company is in the process of relocating its headquarters and 55 employees from a 7,000-square-foot site on Business Center Circle in Newbury Park to a 30,000-square-foot building on Flynn Road in Camarillo. The move is expected to be complete by the end of the month.

“We had completely outgrown our present facility,” Keane said. “As a smaller high-tech company that grew from almost nothing four or five years ago, we were at a very constrained environment. We are now looking at the next stage of growth, looking at more of a professional environment.”

Video Products Group was formed in 1991 as a division of BT & D Technologies, a joint venture between British Telecom and DuPont. Hewlett-Packard acquired BT & D and the Video Products Group division in 1993.

Video Products Group has operated on its own since 1996, after a buyout of the Hewlett-Packard division. Over the past few years, the company has developed clients around the world.

Customers include British Telecom, which uses the Video Products Group technology to connect studios and other broadcast venues to its signal tower; NASA, for which it provides video transmission systems of space shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral and Patrick Air Force base; and Turner Entertainment Networks, which uses the technology for its Cartoon-Brazil network facility in Atlanta.

Among the company’s newest clients is Pacific Bell, which it provides with a system for transporting uncompressed digital signals.

“Our market is spread fairly evenly around the world,” Keane said. “Due to how regulatory issues limited what phone companies could do in the U.S., we are now catching up with some of the technology that was introduced in Europe and Asia.”

As the technology continues to catch on, Keane intends to be in a position both in size and expertise to supply the needed services. Company officials hope their new headquarters will provide them access to high-tech talent and a business network, within close range of Hollywood.

“We now have really found our market here locally, and we are looking forward to being able to expand in the Los Angeles market,” Keane said.

“Flynn Road has a good infrastructure of high-tech facilities and also a lot of technical people, resources and engineers to pull from when we need to,” he said. “Camarillo has done well in generating a kind of high-tech business environment.”

Andrew Behar, co-owner of Behar Sackner Multimedia of Ojai, said the Video Products Group system, or any other tool that can link editors and directors from different locations, could be of value to the film and television industries.

“It would be great if somebody was in Singapore and somebody was at a Los Angeles site and they could work together,” Behar said.

“Now everything is being edited digitally,” he said. “Right now you can cut [video] together, post it on the Internet and look at it in low-resolution, or you can hook it up by satellite. If you can improve on that, that could be good.”