Here, Playback visits some of Quebec’s key technical services operations, highlighting acquisitions and exploring key issues facing post-producers as they confront a rapidly changing market.

*Montage Metaphore

Stephane Lestage, president of Montreal-based Montage Metaphore and promotion group Initiative Quebec, says concentration is a major issue in the Quebec technical services market.

From Lestage’s perspective, ‘it’s quite normal’ for firms to get together to compete in bigger markets. ‘Some companies won’t survive, that’s for sure. But it doesn’t mean it’s bad for the market,’ he says.

If the trend to consolidation ‘puts the smaller companies in an awkward position,’ he says it hardly affects a highly specialized operation such as Metaphore.

As for the visual special-effects sector, Lestage says there is a growing number of players in Montreal.

‘Producers realize it’s not just a question of machines, but who is behind the machine. Post-production, even though it’s a capital-intensive business, is also very related to talent; this is our orientation. We’re going towards good staff with a lot of expertise and we’re trying to keep the expertise in the company,’ he says.

The proliferation of companies creates a huge demand for human resources, effectively pushing up salaries, but that doesn’t actually translate into new business or demand for services, says Lestage.

He says public subsidies have created an avalanche of new media companies, but the jury is still out on whether this will result in more a/v serviceable work.

‘This government action will create many companies,’ he says. ‘Some will probably survive, some will die. I just hope this won’t drain all the talent for no reason.’

Lestage says Montreal post-producers have to keep working on winning foreign clients.

Location shooting has doubled to more than $190 million between 1996 and 1998, but post-production hasn’t necessarily followed suit. ‘But we really have to make an effort to keep them [foreign producers] here for post-production.’

Exchange rate advantage

Lestage expects the Canadian exchange rate advantage to deepen, ‘so the difference between prices will increase, the quality should improve, [and] the knowledge that we can do things will improve, too,’ he says. ‘So I’m very optimistic. But we have to believe in it. If we still believe that [servicing foreign producers] is a big danger for our identity, well, that’s a problem.’

Aside from the need for daily rushes, Lestage says very few foreign films are buying multiple local post services.

‘I think that it is a good thing that our producers, like Telescene, Filmline, Allegro (Motion) are producing for the international market,’ he says. ‘It’s mostly the American market, but that’s where the money is, and government doesn’t have any more money to fund this [industry].’

‘Capital requirements for post-production are decreasing,’ says Lestage.

Keeping the talent

‘What is really going to be an issue in the future is a company’s ability to manage its talent, its personnel. When you look at a post-production company, salaries are as big an investment as anything else.’

Metaphore services include online and offline editing for tv drama, features and commercials. The shop uses the Softimage ds system, Avid nonlinear, online editing and compositing systems, and a Steenbeck film editing table.

Current jobs include Lyla Films’ Les Muses Orphelines; the Radio-Canada drama series Reseaux; the new Fabienne Larouche forensic crime series Fortier; two new tv series, Gypsy and Quadra, the latter from Bloom Films; the Charles Biname feature La Beaute de Pandore; and the src historical drama L’Ombre de l’Epervier ii, produced by Verseau International.

*Global Vision

Paul Bellerose, director of sales for Montreal post-production company Global Vision, says the shop is preparing to set up a front-end 16mm and 35mm film processing laboratory, with more details expected sometime this fall.

At this point, there is only one commercial film lab in the city, operated by Covitec (Sonolab and AstralTech).

Global Vision offers services in three broad areas – international transcoding and conversion and broadcast-packaging services, typically for the European market; post-production, including digital film-to-tape transfer; and new media including dvd production.

This year, Global purchased The Spirit, a bts (Phillips/Kodak) digital transfer unit, at a cost of over $2 million. The shop now has six full-time colorists and a second transfer unit, the BTS Quadra.

‘Basically, the Spirit scans at a higher resolution,’ says Bellerose. ‘Its main feature is the ccd couplers which can scan images at 2K-by-2K resolution. Bottom line – better quality images,’ he says.

Global Vision recently purchased an online Avid Symphony workstation.

‘It is uncompressed D1 quality online editing,’ says Bellerose. ‘We also have six offline stations, which are also Avid.’

Global Vision post assignments include Joseph Bonanno: Crime Family, shot by Productions La Fete for Showtime; film-to-video transfer and/or offline editing on Nuremberg, an Alliance Atlantis/La Fete miniseries for tnt; Heart: The Marilyn Bell Story (Cinar/ Zukerman); Kids Discover the World (Cinar); the YUL Productions feature film La Bouteille; and Muses Productions’ tv movie The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

The company has about 90 employees and is the organizer of the annual Fantasia Film Festival.

*Covitec Group

Earlier this month, Montreal-based Groupe Covitec, which merged with AstralTech following its earlier buyout of Supersuite and cme/Sonolab, acquired Studio Centre-Ville. The seller, Motion International, and Covitec signed a sidebar agreement guaranteeing ‘preferred supplier’ status to Covitec, one of Canada’s largest, if not the largest, technical service company. Covitec has annual sales in the order of $60 million to $65 million.

Covitec controls seven soundproofed Montreal soundstages, three of them (including a 14,000-square-foot studio) at Studio Lasalle, a coventure with Moli-Flex White; two Television Quatre Saisons studios, outsourced last summer to Covitec; and the two new Centre-Ville studios, used for specialty tv program production and filming tv commercials.

Covitec president Claude Gagnon says the company offers a complete range of film and tv post-production services at three different units (Supersuite, AstralTech and Sonolab), film laboratory services, digital film-to-tape transfer, sound and dubbing, 2D animation coloring, studios and video equipment rental, and a small video duplication service.

Covitec employs 450. Astral Communications holds 63% of the shares in the publicly traded company.

*Cinar Studios

Alain Roy, director, Cinar Studios, says recent acquisitions include Softimage ds, an Avid online, nonlinear video editor, the Discreet Logic Flint compositing and visual effects system, and a new foley mixing soundstage.

‘We’re starting to produce in pal because we deal a lot with Europe and we coproduce a lot with Europe and China,’ says Roy.

Cinar Studios’ services include audio and video post-production, everything from synching rushes and effects to delivery – video offline and online editing, audio post, audio effects and mixing.

New production posted at the studio includes a slew of Cinar animation series including Arthur, The Little Lulu Show and Mona the Vampire, and live-action drama such as Kids Discover the World, the Cinar/Zukerman tv movie Heart, and the fourth season of Emily of New Moon, coproduced with Halifax’s Salter Street Films.

Market goes boom

‘There’s a big boom in the last two years,’ says Roy. While much of the u.s. work is still posted back in the u.s., Roy says ‘on our side there’s probably an increase of about 20% to 25% in the last two to three years.’

Roy says there are plans for City of Montreal officials and Mayor Pierre Bourque to visit l.a. this fall to promote the city as a shooting location and its post-production services.

‘First of all, the American market is very closed, and there’s a lot of activity from different unions against the work that is being done in Canada,’ says Roy. ‘So it’s probably to counteract a bit of that there will be a delegation from Montreal, and probably other cities as well, to keep at least what we have and try to actually improve the amount of production coming to Canada, and also to promote post-production services that are not very well known,’ says Roy.

Capital spending is a primary issue, adds Roy. ‘We can’t compete with those big American productions, and most of the productions we’re working on are lower budget. When you know you’ll be working on a very big production, you can invest in hardware to cope with the demand of a big production. When you work only on local production with lower budgets, obviously you have to stay calm with the idea of getting fancy tools. It’s a different attitude in Canada, in Montreal. We buy only the necessary stuff and we use it down to the bone. We’re used to coping with little budgets and still have very good quality products.

‘There are a lot of small companies doing some aspect of post-production,’ says Roy. ‘And there are more and more people with small studios at home doing audio post-production, for example. We didn’t have that before. So now we sometimes look to these people to work on a series. As for visual effects, the tools are more expensive. So it’s rarer that you have people at home with a Flint or an Inferno.

‘When we [Cinar Studios] started 11 years ago, we were about 12 employees. Now just the entertainment section in Montreal is close to 325 people. So obviously, we have a bigger share of the market.’

*Telepoint & Audio Telepoint

Daniel Arie, president and founder of Telepoint and Telepoint Audio, sees two basic market tendencies developing: consolidation of service (more in video and film than audio) houses as producers themselves continue to acquire in-house tools such as the Avid editing systems.

‘I’ve been a director of post-production for 25, 30 years, and my job has evolved drastically because of these two tendencies. People are becoming more and more familiar with electronic editing. That is changing the rules of the game, and we have to adapt,’ says Arie, adding:

‘What affects us a lot is the creation of the large centres of post-production like Covitec. It’s harder and harder for individual service providers. It makes the market smaller.’

Telepoint offers online and offline video editing and audio post-production, but has no mixing facilities.

‘As a director of post-production, my role is changing from being a consultant to overseeing, checking more technical, less personal aspects of the profession. It’s not positive or negative, just something that we need to adapt to constantly,’ he says.

Digitization is having an impact on traditional audio post, notes Arie.

‘[Audio] is like video editing used to be,’ he says. ‘You see more and more main audio editors opening their own little editing houses and doing more and more craft-style work, while the tendency in video editing is more towards industrialization and less craft and less personal.’

Arie says developing skilled personnel to service the multimedia clientele is going to be a very big issue in the future. ‘It’s quite a new market, everything that has to do with the Internet. It’s really a period of adaptation.’

He says the bigger consolidated shops do not have the edge in multimedia and new media, while smaller shops may be better adapted to meet producers’ needs.

‘In fact, this new challenge will allow the smaller companies to survive,’ says Arie. ‘That will shift our role from renting out editing rooms to [that of] consulting post-production management. In audio terms, we’ll be going towards television.’

Arie says it’s tough for small shops to entice foreign producers, whom he says prefer one-stop service, even at higher prices.

‘The first challenge is to convince coproductions or American productions to shoot here. But the second challenge is to convince them to remain here for post-production,’ says Arie.

*PMT Video

Isabelle Gratton, PMT Video vp, says her company offers a complete range of post-production services in video, including editing and special effects.

pmt facilities include Sony digital camera-equipped soundstages, online and offline editing suites, a Flame (Discreet Logic) suite, and a computer graphics department. The company recently acquired a Quantel Edit Box.

Gratton says the Quantel unit is ‘one of the most sophisticated editing systems in the world. We looked at a lot of solutions in the last year, and when we looked at this one we realized it was what our customers were looking for in terms of the best quality for their product. To give you an example, American series like er, Ally McBeal, and The X-Files are edited on that kind of technology.’

With the Quantel, Gratton says pmt can now do high-quality tv format series. ‘One of the machine’s qualities is that you can memorize two hours of noncompressed video, which is fantastic because every time that you can [omit] a few technical steps, the creativity of the editor and the director is better. It’s a powerful, flexible and a very fast machine.

‘Since we acquired the company [from Group tva in 1996], we’ve invested almost $1.5 million, and it never stops. If we could have put in twice as much, we would have,’ she says.

Gratton has an interesting take on consolidation in the technical service sector.

‘For the moment it doesn’t affect us,’ she says. ‘We spoke with customers and to our surprise a lot of them are very skeptical about what will happen in the future with one big post-production company, because what they’re sending is a message that says the only thing they care about is business, their shares. People are looking for other solutions, so I think it is a good thing for us.’

Prepared by Michelle Gagnon and Leo Rice-Barker.