Final Mastering . . .

In days of yore (okay, 10 years ago) editing was a simple two
stage affair - you sat with a big box of tapes in a dark, cramped, scary
cupboard by your lonesome and laboriously edited clips together to make your
cuts-only "off-line edit" for weeks on end. Then you took this rough cut work tape and a long list of edit decision timecodes into a hideously expensive "on-line" edit suite where three or four super-cool dude/magicians turned your ideas into a wonderful finished master tape for broadcast (between cigarette and coffee breaks).

Today everybody with a mac and an edit program believe they are masterful editors, but

the final step of the post-production process is one that only the most foolish attempt alone

- one that really does split the geese from the ganders.

Mastering is where we take your "final" timeline and all of your files, clean up all of the images and audio that fall below broadcast quality standards, enhance the program in every way we know how, and then once everything shows as legal on our scopes we very carefully record it to master tape. This is usually to

HDCAM

tape - the highest quality tape format - and it becomes the Locked Master for all broadcast, distribution, duplication and archiving for posterity (and for Film Festival showing).

Of course it isn't the only master we produce, we normally tweak everything to create HD versions of the program for edit backup and output (as ProRes 4:4:4:4 files), for HD viewing (as ProRes H.264), as HD and smaller versions for the Internet (as Flash and Quicktime files) and as a DVD version of the program - all from the same Master Timeline for the highest possible quality.