Some editors believe that sometimes the less expensive gear will help achieve the better work. One of those is Ian Jenkins, one of three senior editors at Vancouver’s Coast Mountain Post Production, which specializes in commercials.

This is not to say Coast Mountain doesn’t have high-end equipment. In fact, the facility is outfitted with an Avid system for offline editing, and a system from Madrid-based Jaleo for online, graphics and finishing.

The shop also recently acquired an Apple Power Mac G4, on which it runs Adobe After Effects for motion graphics and visual effects. The system is enhanced with two cards from Ice, the Massachusetts manufacturer recently purchased by streaming technology company Media 100. The first card speeds up After Effects by a factor of 50, and the other allows uncompressed digital Betacam images to be loaded onto a hard drive, manipulated in After Effects, then outputted back to Betacam in realtime.

A high-end alternative to this system would be a Flame, Montreal-headquartered Discreet’s realtime online digital effects toolset.

‘Doing graphics on the Mac is definitely cheaper than a Flame, where you’re paying $800 an hour,’ Jenkins says. ‘If art directors have laid out their type, the Mac’s pretty intuitive about inputting Photoshop, Illustrator or any other Adobe files, and if they want movement or some kind of effect on it, it’s pretty easy.’

Jenkins says commercials originated on 35mm film remain a large part of Coast Mountain’s business, and it uses After Effects to design graphic endings for these spots. Working on the Mac has bought them the time to try different approaches.

‘If someone wants to come up with a graphic or logo treatment, Viggo Van Der Merwe, our freelance graphics guy, can play with it for a few days and it still hasn’t cost what a Flame costs for an hour,’ Jenkins explains. ‘Many times when you go into a Flame suite, because of your budget, you have to live with what you get. In our case, we will experiment a lot with After Effects, and then maybe go into a Flame suite if we have to, but [at that point] we have a clearer idea where we want to go with it.’

Coast Mountain’s choice of a G4 seems to represent a trend among editing houses towards desktop machines. Not only are costs of high-end machines daunting to start-ups, but also to established companies looking down the road at upgrades and additions.

Andy Ames, partner and senior editor at Toronto shop Panic & Bob, is also impressed with what he’s seen of After Effects. Although the focus at P&B is offline editing, each room is equipped with a G4 and they run After Effects.

‘Right now we’re fortunate,’ says Ames. ‘We’re very busy editing and we haven’t really looked into a sideline doing graphics. But for some lower-end things and for timings for cuts we use After Effects.’

Ames says although P&B’s Avid equipment ‘is serving us with most of our needs,’ his curiosity is piqued by Final Cut Pro, Apple’s editing, compositing, and special effects application. P&B plans to run some tests in the new year.

‘It seems impressive,’ Ames says. ‘You can do a few more effects and it’s resolution-independent. We want to have a system set up so we can do a job simultaneously [on Final Cut Pro and Avid] and see the strengths and weaknesses of it, because to just look at a manual or a demo, you can’t really tell.’

According to Ames, the integration of After Effects and Final Cut Pro ‘is why we’re looking into it – so we could merge things more with a faster system.’

Ames remains cautious, however, about any future gear commitments.

‘We’re just doing what we do,’ Ames says. ‘The equipment we have is good – we’re just getting ready for future expansion when it’s required.’ *

-www.coastmtnpost.com