It’s been a cruel, cruel summer for Toronto post shops, but the forecast calls for a sunnier fall, thanks mostly to a busy domestic TV sector.

It’s been a roller-coaster year, starting with the threatened SAG strike, the resolution of which led to an influx of U.S. TV pilots, followed by a lull, then finally a flurry of indigenous TV series that got late orders from cautious broadcasters. Post houses have had to navigate through business cycles dictated by an increasingly unpredictable production sector.

‘It becomes very difficult to make sure you have the correct amount of resources and talent to complete projects on the timelines they need,’ says Louis Major, VP and GM of Technicolor Toronto. ‘It would be great if we could find a way in this business to fill holes when there are production shortfalls.’

One option for Technicolor is to look for more work from out-of-province, as it has on the Alberta-shot CBC family drama Heartland, for which it performs processing, transfer and sound. On the local front, Major says the fall workload from Canadian TV and movies seems ‘very promising.’ Foreign shoots remain a question mark, however.

Technicolor has been handling front-end dailies, video completion, sound mix and deliverables for Toronto-shot dramas Flashpoint, The Bridge and Murdoch Mysteries, and processing, dailies and full video post and deliverables for the forthcoming Copper.

Technicolor and rival Deluxe have traditionally relied primarily on Hollywood features, but it is the domestic TV producers who have been most active in town. Deluxe is seeing TV work from both sides of the border, including front-end servicing on the DreamWorks Television/TNT untitled alien invasion pilot shooting in Hamilton. It is also involved in the forthcoming CBC Kids in the Hall reunion Death Comes to Town.

‘For the larger service companies like Deluxe, that pays a few bills, but it doesn’t pay all of them,’ says Dan McLellan, Deluxe Postproduction EVP. ‘We really need the Hollywood [movie] guys back here to maintain the infrastructure that’s been built.’

As slow as the feature work has been, Deluxe has performed front-end lab, dailies and editorial work on Universal Pictures’ Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and recently segued from a DI on Atom Egoyan’s Chloe to a DI and mix on Saw 6. McLellan foresees a busier fall and is encouraged by the Ontario government’s newly expanded tax credit for foreign producers, which has the phone ringing.

At Tattersall Sound & Picture summer’s been ‘a bit dead,’ says David McCallum, partner and supervising sound editor. The shop is usually wrapping pictures headed for TIFF, but this time around those films, including Dilip Mehta’s Cooking with Stella, finished post earlier on. But the downtime is welcome ahead of what he expects will be ‘an extremely busy’ fall.

Recent and upcoming projects for Tattersall include sound editing on Flashpoint – which earned McCallum and his team a recent Gemini nom – picture editing on Little Mosque on the Prairie, sound editing and mixing on CBC’s The Tudors and Canwest’s forthcoming Copper, as well as picture and sound editing on its Crash & Burn.

‘Tattersall made a conscious effort to focus on the Canadian industry a long time ago,’ McCallum explains. ‘There’s an awful lot of good television being produced in Toronto right now.’