We See Our Final Cut Pro Systems as . . . “Engines?”

We here at Video Labs recently acquired another Final Cut Pro HD (FCP) system. Are we turning into something other than our reputation as a reliable media disseminator?

No, not really. Although, sure, some clients ask us to shoot and edit their video projects, we have not strayed too far from our “media replication” roots.

We just are further living up to our an additonal part of our mission: provide media replication and related multimedia services.”

Now, we won’t enter the dangerous waters of trying to defend Final Cut Pro over AVID. We serve clients who have both systems.

But we do llike the ease, robustness and versatility that Final Cut Pro offers in allowing us to ingest, manipulate, and export media. So, given that, we look at the systems as "engines." Here are a couple of examples:

Where clients used to give us dBeta or BetacamSP masters, they are increasingly providing a hard drive with either a ProResHQ or other form of QuickTime file of a sequence on a hard drive.

From there, as mentioned in last month’s eNewsletter, a lot of clients are asking us to make H.264 files and assorted other compressions for web-posting, like Flash or compressed QT. We do that a lot for our PSA-producing clients.

And our FCP systems often get involved earlier in the process as well.

Many of our independent producer clients have their own Final Cut Pro systems (which they chose over AVID because of price as well as other reasons). But the price points are also such that while they can afford the editing system, they often don’t have the equipment nor the time to input the footage into their system.

For example, we have fulfilled many requests from clients to digitize either HDCAM or DVCproHD field tapes into our FCP as ProResHQ files and transfer those to their hard drive from which they can edit on their own FCP system.

And then when they are finished with the editing, those same clients often send us a ProResHQ of their edited sequence and have us output to HDCAM and perhaps add captions.

And it doesn’t stop there . . .

As we further follow that phrase, “. . . and related multimedia services,” another popular service of ours is making authored (aka “navigable” DVDs). So, from the above ProResHQ sequence, we have a variety of ways of creating the necessary anamorphic widescreen SD MPEG2 and AC-3 audio files . . . but again, our Final Cut Pro systems are almost always the starting point.

So yeah, while we have the talented team to edit projects for you, hopefully you can see how we at Video Labs also love to call our Final Cut Pro systems, our “engines.”

Contact us for a price quote as you need to use one of those “engines.”