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Markee Interview
June 2006 by Christine Bunish |
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| Rafael Rivera, owner and main editor at two-year old Don Fito Productions in San Jose, California, readily admits that “one reason we exist is desktop solutions.” On staff at Yahoo! for six years, Rivera recalls using the first version of Final Cut. He and his colleagues were “all very excited” by the software’s potential and as Final Cut matured, he “decided to go in that direction” and launch his own production and post company. Don Fito’s main edit suite runs Apple’s full Production Studio suite of software on a 2.7 dual CPU Mac with 4.5 gigs of RAM and Black Magic Design Deck Link Extreme SDI I/O card. Apple’s XServe RAID acts as the company’s technical backbone. Don Fito also has a Mac-based Avid Xpress Pro which Rivera often uses as an offline system. It’s also compatible with clients’ own Avids for completing projects clients begin. “Xpress Pro has some nice media-management solutions. Final Cut still needs to mature to that point,” notes Rivera. “But I’m really new school. You can see the ease of use that Apple is famous for in Final Cut’s interface and GUI elements and in the way they write their manuals. And Production Studio is so well integrated." |
Studio’s integration was ably demonstrated when a major computer hardware vendor in Silicon Valley needed to synthesize several videos to create content for a big-screen display at a trade show booth. The client handed Rivera six to eight hours of DVCAM and DVCPRO material and a deadline of 48 hours to complete the new content. “That’s quite typical of corporate clients,” he says. “They need things relatively fast so the tight integration of Studio is an advantage. When you have a short amount of time Studio can really deliver.” Rivera tapped Final Cut to edit the footage, Motion to craft the logo for custom transitions, Sound Track to create custom sound effects for the wipe-style transition, and DVD Studio Pro to author the DVD for playback. He also used Motion to animate the DVD menus and Sound Track to build simple sound beds for the menus. “The client was so happy with the results that they’re also showing the DVD internally,” Rivera reports. Don Fito also came to the rescue of a documentary filmmaker who had shot 50 hours of DVCPRO 50 footage with Panasonic’s SDX900 24p camera and wanted to do a film out. “He tried several things on a PC but couldn’t |
get back to 24 fps,” Rivera explains. “We captured all 50 hours on our RAID and using Studio’s Cinema Tools we were able to take the original tapes and go back to 24 fps to get him the material he needed.” To handle the 50 hours of footage efficiently, Rivera distributed FireWire drives to freelance editors, issued workflow instructions and let them at it. |
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