Post-production has had its ups and downs of late – and coming off last year’s rough ride, it’s certainly seen better days. But there’s a lot of buzz happening on this technical side of production in the lead-up to NAB, everything from the opportunities of the 3D revolution to finding a collective voice for the post community. Those were just some of the topics raised at a recent roundtable with reps from five Toronto-based post houses, who gathered together for an in-depth discussion to voice their opinions and concerns on the state of the industry.

We’re coming out of a particularly dismal period for some parts of our industry, particularly for services such as post and VFX. How bad did it get?

Dan McLellan: Two thousand and nine was a very difficult year in my books. Certainly we survived it, but a company like Deluxe requires a certain amount of domestic work and certainly an amount of Hollywood runaway productions, and that just did not materialize.

It had to be the worst year in the history of film in Toronto for feature-based production. I think in total, we had maybe five features in Toronto that came here from Hollywood, and in our heyday, in 2004 to 2006, we’d be dealing with anywhere from 20 to 30 feature films. Obviously for a company focused on film, it made it difficult for us.

But, candidly, that’s post-production. We’ve signed up for post, it’s the crazy club in a lot of ways. The post side of the industry is inherent with ups and downs, and we’ve made some investments in other parts of the business.

The impact of the tax credits late last year, we almost felt immediate improvement, and right now, our Q1 is probably the best first quarter we’ve had in eight years. And it’s no surprise, we’ve got three big feature films [Red, Dream House, The Thing] shooting in Toronto in February, March and April, and a few more on the way. Certainly that works in our favor, and the cycle continues.

Have things picked up for everyone?

Jane Tattersall: We run a much smaller operation than these gentlemen here. So we’re much more fiscally cautious because we don’t have a corporate entity behind us. [And] because we are fiscally conscious, it didn’t really get that bad.

That being said, last summer was extremely quiet and it stayed quiet for a much longer time than we anticipated. But summer’s generally quieter, at least until the fall or winter.

It’s a seasonal business, so naturally we’re busier right now.

Vinit Borrison: We do a lot of Canadian stuff, but we’ve been getting a lot of features from around the world. We finished one from Ireland, did a lot of commercial stuff, and we’ve been getting that worldwide, too – China, Germany, we have clients from all over the place. Which keeps us steady, which is nice. Even if it’s sort of dead here, we have people calling us from the outside.

Tom Burns: Technicolor Toronto was luckier than Technicolor Vancouver or Technicolor Montreal, in that we had more business units. Front-end was completely collapsed because no one was shooting, but we were lucky enough to be finishing post on a lot of television stuff, so that basically paid the bills. That and audio paid the bills while nothing else was coming in.

Are there any lingering effects from the downturn or the strikes of 2009?

Burns: It’s like one of those laws of unintended consequences, because if you were shooting digital you could hire actors who were signatories to ACTRA, while SAG had not yet signed. That, to me, was the start of the [digital] boom.

Pilot season for us was almost all digital this year, and I think it’s all from pilot season ’09, when everyone realized that if they shot digital, they could work. That boosted the adoption of digital production methodologies.

What’s interesting about pilot season this year is the U.S. pilots are going tape-based because of speed. Nothing to do with technology – it’s speed – because they have to put a mini-feature into a 10-day production schedule for a pilot, and tape is the one everyone’s comfortable with.

McLellan: I think technology is starting to have a pretty dramatic impact on what post-production is going to look like in the future. We’ve always had competitors, but two years ago, we didn’t anticipate half of those competitors. Technology has enabled business to be more nimble than it used to be. And certainly for some of the larger facility operations, we’re trying to figure all that out.

Borrison: And, with Red and all these digital cameras coming out that are… easier to shoot with, people are expecting to pay less for post as well.

When the Canon 5D came out, people jumped on it. It’s a camera you can buy for $3,000 and no one wants to, in the end, go out and pay $100,000 to finish a project you shot on a camera you bought for $3,000 at Henry’s.

So I think most of what we’ve seen in the last year is this trend of everyone trying to jump on the newest, fastest, quickest way to do things. As a result, it seems like a lot of people want to spend a lot less in that regard.

McLellan: Certainly at one time we were able to have a conversation with a customer and say, ‘What do you want: service, quality, price?’, and we’d hit two of the three. But now all our clients want all three.

Tattersall: I actually find that if you spend a really small amount of money on production, the relative benefit to the film from post-production is enormous… If you put the equivalent amount on a budget of a film into post-production, you can make an amazing, outstanding project. That’s the thing that’s really wonderful about post: even as production costs are down, you can see the potential, you can sell the value of post. You’re not talking about huge sums.

McLellan: We all sound like enormous fans of this new tech, and I get it. I get why people are using these cameras. But I find it amazing that if any of us in the VFX or post industry added during our process the kinds of artifacts that we’d have to deal with in some company’s lower-end cameras, we’d all be shot.

We spend an enormous amount of time dealing with artifacts that start on set. A lot of these low-end cameras just can’t quite do it yet, and I think sometimes that gets lost on the production end.

The most obvious new tech to talk about is 3D. Is it a gimmick, or a fad? Is it here to stay?

McLellan: Hopefully it’s going to be real and not a fad. Because if it’s a fad, I’ll lose the last 15 hairs on my head.

Tattersall: I think it’s probably here to stay. I think it will be much like the recording industry when it went from mono to stereo. The first recordings were gimmicky, where you hear the drums over here, hear the guitars over here and the voice on one side, and if you put those old recordings into your car, you can really hear it. Then they became much more naturalistic.

Burns: I hold great promise for 3D. I hope everyone gets together and realizes we’re not all trying to make Avatar, we’re trying to put tools in the hands of the filmmakers to allow us to determine what the new film grammar is.

Editing has changed ever since My Bloody Valentine, when they realized they could do a dissolve through convergence. MBV was Christmas ’08, so that’s a pretty short time for somebody to build in a new technique that’s now standard for 3D filmmakers. I love periods of rapid change – hold on for the ride.

Allan Magled: Part of me thinks it’s a gimmick, and the reason I say that is because it’s been around before. It’s not new. It’s been tried. And everyone’s using it to no end, and Avatar is the only reason for it.

Film is film. It’s got a look and feel to it, you try to replicate it, but you know what? There’s just certain things that can only be done [in film].

Tattersall: It’s like MP3s. MP3s don’t sound very good, but do your kids care?

Magled: Well, maybe that’s the [real] point. Quality doesn’t matter. Quality [only] matters at a certain point.

I like to watch movies. At home, I have a very decent setup for watching movies. But some people came over who are musicians and said that the sound was off. And then they started playing with the settings and it sounded a lot better. But when I watched it, I didn’t notice.

Borrison: [3D] is something we’re looking into, we’re not really set up for it just yet, but we’ve been exploring our options. It’s such a weird thing with technology because as we all know, jumping onto something too quick might be a mistake – or it could be a really good thing. Technology changes so fast that something you buy today could be obsolete in three weeks. We are looking at what’s coming out and we’re going to NAB this year.

McLellan: It has great promise, the technology is there. It’s real, I think it’s past the gimmick stage. We’ve been working on an IMAX project that has to do with the Hubble telescope – a 3D camera sitting in the window of the space shuttle recording two astronauts changing the lens on the Hubble telescope. You almost feel like you’re sitting on the wing of the shuttle. I think it has applications beyond the obvious.

Burns: I completely agree. And one thing we haven’t mentioned so far is venue-oriented 3D, such as sports, opera and theater. I think there’s a tremendous market. As we learn the grammar and learn how to produce in real time, I think that’s going to go huge. We’re not even close to understanding how to do that yet.

How is 3D affecting your infrastructure?

McLellan: You spend more money on storage. You hire more people to process it. It’s like choking a horse, quite frankly.

We’re in the middle of Saw VII dailies, we’re into day 30 of 44 days and we’re seeing almost two terabytes of data every day. It’s enormous. So, the challenge winds up falling on us on the post side. It’s all working – we’re confident that we can turn around dailies on an overnight basis: editors get their elements, everyone on set can see what they want to see on the large screen. So the workflow is there. And we’re looking forward to going through the final color correct stages and all that for the next couple of months.

As an industry, what other changes would you like to see?

McLellan: I’m not sure as an industry that we’re as well organized as we need to be. And this has been on my mind for a while. Our industry is a dog-eat-dog business. There’s competition everywhere, even the VFX guys managed to cobble themselves together in Ontario and form a voice. I’ve heard some constructive things that have come out of it.

I’ve tried to get a little involved more politically over the last year, sitting on boards like Film Ontario and so on, and I always find myself sitting in those meetings and pounding on tables saying, ‘Well, what about the post guys?’

In our business for so long, it’s always been about the producer. And I get that, I understand that. But we kill each other. And we’ve killed each other for so long I’m not sure we can ever find a way out. We’ve got to get past that at some point. We need to look at what Hollywood has done with the Hollywood Post Alliance, or how the London industry works in Soho. At one time, a number of years ago, we used to have this casual little credit forum amongst five or six companies in the city so we could compare notes on who was ripping us off.

I think my point is, somehow, as an industry, we’re always going to be competitors, but there are things that we could be doing as a collective voice, and that’s just telling our stories better and marketing ourselves more effectively, even to our own community.