The wisdom of the real-estate mantra location, location, location was proven for Montreal’s Bureau de Post Productions when a strategic move into a desirable, agency-laden neighborhood helped put the shop on the spot post map.

In business since 1992, Bureau de Post has only taken on commercial post-production jobs since its move downtown in 1998. Renaud Cote, VP finance and development, says the company concentrated on long form before the move. Now it splits its commercial and long-form work 50:50.

‘All the big agencies are around us. Cossette is within walking distance. It makes it easy for us, especially for agency-direct work,’ Cote says.

While the convenience of proximity helped launch the spot efforts, now the convenience stakes have been raised by the competition from vertically integrated prodcos providing shoot-to-post services. Companies like Cinelande are offering this one-stop-shop convenience for commercial production.

To solidify and reinforce Bureau de Post’s market share, Cote says eventually the shop would like to have a one-stop appeal of its own and he is looking at bringing color correction into the house.

‘In the life of Bureau de Post it’s something we wish to do. Eventually, it’s our goal to be fully integrated where our clients can come here for commercial television purposes. They can come with their master tapes and do their whole [post]-production here – from offline to online editing, passing by the graphic design and color correction. We’d like to be fully integrated in that sense.’

For example, Bureau de Post recently completed post-production on a campaign for the Dairy Producers of Canada, through Cossette Communication-Marketing and Montreal prodco Kiss Films. The spots were directed by Jean-Marc Vallee. With the shop’s current configuration, producers had to deal with several post houses to complete the job.

Cote describes the work flow on a typical commercial job such as the Dairy Producers: ‘We don’t do transfer here. So we get the transfer from other post houses. Clients will book their offline here, and they’ll book somewhere else for transfer, and color correction. And then they’ll come back here to do their online and graphic design, if need be. They finish the product here and then go to an audio post-production facility to do their audio mix.’

Oftentimes, production companies will provide their own editor on projects, and Bureau de Post has both the suites and support staff to accommodate them. The company’s assistant editor department ‘targets those [out-of-house] editors,’ Cote says. ‘When they come here, they just have to sit down and do their editing. There is always an assistant editor to take care of the technical part.’

With 17 employees, six Avid suites (featuring the Avid 8000 with 3D module), and Discreet Logic’s Smoke and Flame systems, Bureau de Post has little trouble hosting more than one spot-maker at once. Among the three biggest commercial editing houses in Montreal, Bureau de Post serviced 125 spots last year, and hopes to keep the workload steady throughout the coming year.

-www.bureaudepost.com