LOS ANGELES -- Complete Post is one of those Los Angeles facilities that has always enjoyed a solid reputation as a sitcom post house. One of Hollywood's first post production facilities, it now lives under the umbrella of Technicolor Creative Services, which in turn is owned by Thomson Multimedia.
However, smart companies, no matter what their size, reputation or owners, know when to adapt to market forces. This past fall, Complete Post made some significant changes. Mike Doggett, one of the owners of the former Anderson Video, came on board as president. Two new telecine artists were hired. The facility added a lot of tools to handle high definition work - a third Spirit DataCine bay, a standalone tape-to-tape environment and the complementary routing that goes with that. Several HD Z-5 cameras already had been added.
High definition is the focus.
Complete's roster of post clients includes six shows that this season, for the first time, are shooting 24p HD video as their acquisition source. They include The Bernie Mac Show, Dharma and Greg and My Wife and Kids. The Hughleys started the season on 16mm transferred to Digi Beta and changed midseason to 24p acquisition. The lab and telecine steps have been traded for digitizing sessions; Complete provides clients with media to load into their Avids for editing.
"That's been a big change," says Doggett. "As it relates to Complete Post, which has been such a large sitcom house, obviously that changes the structure of what we're doing because in those cases there's no telecine involved. So with my background and Technicolor's goal to expand the market reach of Complete, we've started expanding into other areas. We're getting into longform television now and feature mastering, in the HD realm. We're not limiting that -- that's where the market is primarily, especially in the feature side. On the one-hour side, we're seeing that the shows we are doing are HD."
One of those shows was a two-hour Hallmark special My Sister's Keeper which aired in January. Another is an upcoming Jerry Bruckheimer pilot.
"Our basic theme going forward is to diversify what we're doing. It was a tough market," Doggett says. "We saw a lot of production last summer, people stockpiled and then we went through a fairly lean time here. We've tightened the belt, we've made some adjustments with overhead and made our systems stronger and more efficient. We're looking at workflow, evaluating how we do procedures, asking, ‘Are there ways we can automate functions?' The investment we are making is on the HD side, we still see some need and growth there."
In addition to the three Spirit HD telecines, Complete Post has five da Vinci 2K color correctors, two linear bays which use Snell & Wilcox HD1012 switchers, plus four linear bays with Grass Valley switchers, two 2200 and two 4000 switchers. All rooms have either Axial 3000 or 2020 editors. There are four Ursa suites with da Vinci 8:8:8.
Complete Post has a division, Studio Advertising Services (SAS), that will handle nearly 500 broadcast trailers for Sony, its main client, this year. These jobs are great examples of how cohesively Complete Post works with its sister companies, in this case with CFI D-Film. A trailer is scanned at 2K off a Spirit DataCine, worked on with any of Complete's two Discreet Fires, Inferno or bevy of Macs at 2K resolution, composited and then recorded back out to film at CFI D-Film.
Complete Post is located on the same corner in Hollywood with Complete Sound and Miles of Fun, Technicolor's new sound/audio division. Also under the Technicolor umbrella are Technique, the new digital intermediate film mastering facility in Burbank, CFI Video and CGI D-Film in Hollywood, and the newest acquisitions Vidfilm (Glendale.) and Still in Motion (Burbank). Technicolor likes to consider itself a horizontal grouping of companies, a "value chain" of services for filmmakers and producers, from the lab to the sound and everything in between.
"We're getting a lot of good feedback from clients that they like that ability for people to work together in the sense that their project will be handled from start to finish, smooth handoffs and coordination between the companies. That's a goal we have and we work toward that," says Doggett.