What’s My Flow?

Joe Caterini
Executive Vice President, Sales

PostWorks, New York

For many years we were basically an Avid-only facility. We had certainly done plenty of work with people who had offlined on their own Final Cut. When they showed up here to do a final online, however, we would take an industry standard EDL out of their final FCP project and convert it into an Avid workflow for finishing. In the past year we decided it would be wise to invest in some Final Cut systems that would give us alternate ways of working with those kinds of projects.

We decided to do it now because we thought Final Cut had improved finally to a level that we trusted it to handle an online-type environment and high-resolution video (SD and HD). A few years ago the system itself wasn’t as stable- the CPUs that were handling it weren’t where they needed to be and the third-party video cards you need in order to get video in and out were not up to the level we wanted them to be. But Final Cut, with a top-of-the-line Apple CPU and a KONA 3 card, provides a pretty powerful editing solution and a high-quality I/O.

Now it has a robust HD implementation. It handles all the different flavors of HD very well, including some of them, like DVCPRO HD and HDV, natively. Because of that, with HD projects, it was becoming a little more complicated and cumbersome getting those converted over to an Avid platform for final finishing. When people were just doing standard definition it was a little easier for us to execute the transition over to the Avid. But now people are much more likely to be working in FCP in HD. This allows us to take hard drives from them that have media in a FCP project and take their projects in and do final finishing. We’ll still be doing tape-to-tape da Vinci-style color correct in many cases, but to be able to get from where they have left off in Final Cut and onto D5 or HDCAM tapes in a smoother fashion has helped.

The other thing is, people are much more likely now to build effects and do layering and titling on their own in FCP rather than the traditional way of converting to an Avid where the EDL did not let you access all the work that had already been done. You’d basically lose it all and just have the cuts.

We had a feature film (Slippery Slope – pictured above) in here where some of the work had already been done ahead of time- an extensive amount of repositioning, basic effects work, compositing and some titles and color correct- in an offline. We were able to bring everything up to HD resolution by reloading through the KONA 3 card back into the same FCP project and all of that work that the editor and director had done was instantly converted into HD. They continued to work in Final Cut in HD doing some further color correction in FCP and then went out to D5 tape and did a final tweak with a da Vinci color correct. They took the project as far as they could on lower-cost equipment and then just spent one day doing a final pass on the more expensive, dedicated hardware color corrector.