 If it weren’t for Pinnacle Systems, Will Cox would still be just a Final Cut Pro engineer at the Oxygen Network, not co-founder of his own postproduction company in New York City. He and his partner Youna Kwak founded Final Frame and retained Oxygen as a client, and he has his CinéWave system to thank.
Pinnacle Systems alone has reduced the barrier of accessibility to open a post production company with a single major client without having to incur huge leasing costs or spend a lot of money, said Cox. If it weren’t for the CinéWave card, there’s no way we could have done this.
Since March of this year, Final Frame has successfully delivered the entire second season of The Isaac Mizrahi Show, the highest rated show on the Oxygen Network. The charismatic Mizrahi, a well-known fashion designer turned entertainer, invites celebrities, artists, and accomplished friends to join him for various activities, both on his all-white studio set and out in the world. Guests as varied as Natalie Portman, Janeane Garofalo, John Leguizamo, and chef Rocco DiSpirito participate in antiquing, clubbing, or cooking, all the while revealing the funny, accidental, and intimate details of their lives to Mizrahi. A hybrid between documentary verite, and glamorous talk show, the Mizrahi Show has a unique sensibility that makes it both refreshing to watch and a challenge to edit.
 The show had a rough first season – the white set was difficult to color correct, said Cox. At that time, the editing was done erratically on Final Cut Pro, but in three different locations, and it was finished on an Avid Symphony. I pitched the idea of doing everything on Final Cut Pro since version 3 had color correction. It had come far enough to take high-end finishing away from Avid. With CinéWave and Final Cut Pro 3 we could offer uncompressed workflow with real-time color correction and no rendering. The quality was similar to Avid for substantially less money and it was faster.
Everything shot in the studio for The Isaac Mizrahi Show is on high-end DV Cam, while any remote footage is shot on PD150’s. We digitize edits in DV because it’s easy – we can do the entire edit in four rooms, with four suites and four editors, said Cox.
Final Frame’s facility is built on a Rorke fiber channel array that ingests data all day, and all four suites work from a common pool of that data. They have a Sony DSR1500 with SDI output, so they can take DV footage up to uncompressed and edit all of their material in real time.
The entire workflow is digital start to finish to preserve the high quality of both audio and video, said Cox. DigiBeta is the digital format for broadcast, so we can take directly from CinéWave into DigiBeta without conversions to DV; we don’t have to run converters from analog to SDI. So we deliver DigiBeta with the least artifacts and generational loss.
In the short amount of time that Final Frame has been in business, Cox has already seen the huge advantage that CinéWave has over other systems he has used in the past, particularly in the area of time and cost savings.
Once in the middle of a color correct session, we had to accommodate an emergency picture edit. We were able to seamlessly send the digital material into another edit room, where one editor made the picture change while we continued color correcting, without interruption, recalled Cox. It saved us a half a day, and saved the client a lot of money. And it was all seamless with Final Cut Pro.
From network clients to independent filmmakers, his clients have been satisfied with the results he has been able to achieve and the budget with which he is able to do it.
Basically, we are able to offer high-end workflow using CinéWave and save people an extraordinary amount of money, said Cox. Across the board, Oxygen has been exceedingly pleased with the results. They’ve been able to maintain Symphony-level quality, at a much lower budget.
In addition, adding seats doesn’t cost a lot, so we can work with independent filmmakers who don’t have the luxury of big post budgets. We’re providing access to high-end technology to people who could have not afforded it in the past.
Cox has been in the editing business for a long time and has worked with a lot of different editing packages. By leaps and bounds, I’ve had the most success with CinéWave, he said. It offers more features and generates more consistent work than any other hardware I’ve used.
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