Players in the post industry are sometimes hesitant to talk about the future; partially because it’s a competition-sensitive topic, partially because it forces them to confront their existential angst, and partially because they barely have time to keep up with what they report as an intensely busy present.

When they do gaze into their silicon balls (!), they see themselves ushering in the future by accurately reading and extrapolating on current trends and investing therein. Many also see globalization, multimedia, disc-based technology, one-stop shops and an expanded role for post-production in the scheme of the universe.

By all accounts, most sectors of the post business are enjoying good health, with growth areas in long-form projects, particularly tv movies, and most anticipate the trend to continue.

Stan Ford, vp of post-production at deluxe Toronto, says the facility saw an increase in volume in 1995 and forecasts growth for this year. Ford says deluxe is looking toward video and by year’s end will be able to accommodate video transfers. He says the mow market is growing and deluxe has expanded its lab capacity as well as recently building a new mixing stage and screening room.

A side effect of the change to digital formats and non-linear editing, according to Ford, has been a decrease in film mixing, with fewer film dailies being done, even on the feature side.

Colin Minor, gm and vp of Edmonton’s Studio Post, also reports brisk business. ‘It’s been a cold winter but it’s been a hot time at Studio Post,’ he says.

Minor says the facility had its best year ever in fiscal 1995, followed up by record production in the first half of fiscal ’96.

‘Three or four years ago we looked at where post was going,’ says Minor. ‘We decided to concentrate on long form and that’s where it’s gone. We’re doing more long form, episodic tv and film.’

Minor agrees with the one-stop school of post; Studio Post has continued to add services, including a film lab almost two years ago, and Minor anticipates the spread of animation and special effects business, prevalent on the West Coast to the Prairies.

Francois Garcia, gm of Montreal’s Supersuite Post Production, says while that facility was initially commercial-centric, of late there has been a stronger emphasis on tv projects. Garcia says Supersuite invested in technology to fill the high-end tv production niche in Quebec and the move continues to prove lucrative.

Claude Brien, director of the post-production center at Montreal’s Astral Tech, says the animation sector will be the major source of growth for Astral Tech in the coming years. According to Brien, the facility is planning to double or triple its capacity in terms of hardware infrastructure by summer to accommodate the animation projects expected.

While competitive shyness accounts for the reticence of many facilities to engage in detailed discussions of strategies which will lead them into the next millennium and beyond, it is also difficult for post facilities to make commitments to trends until they can determine supplier directions and standards are applied to new technologies.

‘Manufacturers aren’t going to put r&d into a product that won’t get to the approval stage,’ says Tony Meerakker, vp engineering and operations at Toronto’s Magnetic Enterprises. ‘Standards committees have to keep up with the changes in technology, a tough job at the best of times, to allow us to go forth and make a significant investment in something we know will be around. If it’s not standardized, it might not be around long.’

With digital capability de rigueur in the industry, disc-based technology and video servers are acknowledged as the way of the future.

‘The future will be in video servers,’ says Francois Deschamps, vp of Cinar Studios, Montreal. It’s a opinion repeated throughout the industry. The key, he says, is to provide multiple services but to integrate them, ensuring compatibility of files.

Meerakker also cites video-server technology as a trend that many facilities may follow into the near future. ‘It allows manipulation of information by more than one source, so you could have graphics people, titling people, editorial people working on something at the same time, rather than a piece of tape that only allows one user at a time,’ he explains.

Meerakker doesn’t predict the imminent demise of tape as a cheap, accessible format, but points to the declining price and increasing capabilities of drives and storage media as factors contributing to the adoption of video-server technology. ‘In the future,’ he says, ‘you might be looking at tv networks logging on to file servers as well and then downloading content that we just completed.’

Reflecting the increasing amount of international coproduction and the dismantling of economic boundaries as a whole worldwide, post facilities are setting their sights globally and looking to u.s. and international projects to expand their business horizons.

Bob Scarabelli, president of Vancouver’s Rainmaker Digital Pictures, which encompasses Gastown Post, Gastown Labs and Rainmaker Imaging and Rainmaker Interactive, says roughly 80% of Rainmaker’s business is American or international in origin and the company expects to expand further into the global marketplace, with Asian deals pending and work done recently on the u.k. production Mr. Stitch from Rysher Productions.

Coproductions

Astral Tech’s Brien says an overwhelming portion of the facility’s work is, and will continue to be, generated by coproductions.

Sylvain Taillon, president of Toronto’s Mad Dog Digital, says u.s. and Mexican work currently accounts for about 20% of the facility’s business and he will be actively pursuing more. Taillon says the future also holds expansion for the just-over-a-year-old facility, expected to double in size by next year with the addition of another suite.

Toronto-based Dan Krech Productions has long been dipping its beak into the u.s. market, and according to founder Dan Krech is moving toward becoming a global post facility, looking toward Central America and Europe.

Krech says roughly 60% of the facility’s business is international and he has been working toward globalization with a production association with l.a. supported by dkp’s networked Infinity Optics visual effects system.

The post industry will continue to be lean and mean, says Krech, and the future will belong to those with cutting-edge expertise and those who are looking at global markets.

Post companies are also looking to multimedia to round out services. Minor says multimedia is another service large, comprehensive shops will offer producers who want to spin tv and film projects into other media, and says Studio Post is currently undertaking a preliminary venture into the multimedia arena.

Scarabelli also points to new media as a direction for post; bringing traditional image quality to different formats.

Toward this end, in addition to capabilities for film-resolution scanning, Rainmaker has developed proprietary technologies to enhance the images in new media formats that he says give the facility the opportunity to be a partner in content.

Rainmaker has developed live (lucid interactive video engine), a realtime compositing engine for interactive products that enables creators to interact with full-motion video, as well as a proprietary compression technology.

The company’s technological developments allow delivery of the finished product onto a number of formats, says Scarabelli. ‘We’ve taken traditional image qualities and built a compression technique that allows us to put the finished product onto servers, phone lines, the Internet, etc., and do it with the best possible image quality.’

While Scarabelli says boutique shops will likely continue, he says Rainmaker has been looking toward a one-stop environment where the whole process, from film processing and film-resolution scanning to delivery in digital formats, can be accommodated.

Curtis Staples, vp of business development for Rainmaker, says in the short term the open-architecture networked systems used in 3D animation and effects compositing will come to apply to the video post-production business.

‘I see technology developing so that we’ll be able to integrate the many things we do a lot more in the future,’ says Staples.

Scarabelli says post-production is, or should be, taking a more active role in the whole production process. ‘There’s a closer marriage from script writing all the way through to the final packaging of the product. Our mandate is to become more proactive in the creation of content.’

Integral part

Taillon says with the increasing power of post-production it will, and already is, moving from an afterthought to an integral part of the production process.

‘People are coming to us earlier in the process, and we can offer many more ways to approach a project,’ says Taillon. ‘It’s become a melting pot of techniques and creative suggestions. There are many more projects that two years ago you wouldn’t have thought were done in post – you look at them and have no idea how important post was in the process.’

Scarabelli illustrates the growing involvement of post companies; he says his facility has been working with game developers who are writing scripts based on the capabilities of tools developed by Rainmaker.

Taillon sees post-production professionals of the future as even more creative beings. With technology’s increasing sophistication, Taillon says machines are now more accessible, more artist oriented rather than operator oriented. Increasingly, Taillon says he is looking for artists rather than technicians to be the vanguard of the new post.

The end result will be a liberation of all the creative minds in the process, not just those in post, the advantage of which is obvious, the disadvantage of which, as Taillon says, will be ‘things will happen just because they can.’

‘There will be a new challenge to channel creativity,’ says Taillon. ‘As always, ultimately you need a good story.’