HIGH-END POST TO SUIT ALL BUDGETS
Quality post within the reach of all
For the price of a single editing system a decade ago, you can now build a professional HD editing, compositing and grading workstation complete with high quality monitor
Best of breed post production kit is in the hands of a far broader range of post houses today than a decade ago – the cost of a fully equipped HD workstation with editing, grading and vfx capabilities now comes in at far less than than you’d have paid for a single editing system a decade ago. “The early days of broadcast-quality nonlinear onlines were a nail biting affair,” recalls fi lmmaker and producer Jonathan Bird. “I had to take out a loan just to buy an edit system in 2001. The computers weren’t fast enough to do much of the video themselves and needed a hardware base. The drive had to be augmented with fast SCSI and video cards. It was a fi nicky, high performance machine in which everything had to be tuned just right or it would crash.” Outputting to tape was often crunch-time which could take several attempts to get right
without a dropped frame. “It was exasperating, though it beat the alternative which was editing on tape. In three years the machine was outdated and needed to be replaced,” says Bird. Even in 2004, when Bird cut his fi rst TV documentary on Final Cut Pro matters weren’t much improved. “The editing worked just fi ne but the problem again was output to Betacam,” he remembers. “I had to rent a box for capture and playback as a well as a tape deck because I couldn’t afford to buy one and sometimes it would take a whole weekend just to install it and get everything in sync. All the while the thing is costing me US$600 a day.”
A decade ago, solutions for visual effects, compositing or editing were turnkey, sold with dedicated hardware to which the user had to add outboard processing and software plug- ins. Interoperability was limited to a bespoke
piece of code written by a facility engineer. A support contract was added on top. “Basically everything was a lot of black boxes,” says Johnny Whitehead, director of operations, Deluxe142. “Facilities marketed themselves around the investments they had made on premium brands.” But it didn’t have to be this way. A group of
post production alumni formed Blackmagic Design and became the fi rst company to demonstrate uncompressed SD capture on a Mac. “I remember at IBC 2002 people saying they’d heard about it but that they didn’t think it possible,” says Stuart Ashton, then a post house editor, now Blackmagic Design’s EMEA director. “There was a huge opportunity out there to make affordable products without jeopardising quality.”
A year earlier Apple had launched Final Cut
Resolve
Blackmagic’s top-end grading product Resolve 8 now starts at just £615
There’s also a free, cut-down version of Resolve (Resolve Lite), which was launched at NAB 2011
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There was a huge opportunity out there to make affordable products without jeopardising quality
Stuart Ashton Blackmagic Design
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