| Page (1) of 2 - 06/29/06 |
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Milagro Post is based in Southfield, Michigan, just outside Detroit. The company's primary business is creating high-level national and regional television spots for the Big Three car manufacturers: GM, Ford and DaimlerChrysler. In Part 2 of this three-part interview, Mike Suggs, President of Milagro Post goes into detail about the workflow his facility uses to create 3000 commercials each year.
DMN: You have a lot of people, you mentioned -- you have 30 people at Milagro Post. Are all these people specialists? For example, would someone who does compositing on After Effects also be comfortable with working on one of the Discreet Flint systems?
Suggs: We have what you could call a "pool," I suppose, of technology. Anyone here, no matter what level you're at, is free to learn any technology we have here. It's encouraged. If you have the drive and the ambition to learn this stuff, then that's only going to make you that much better at what you do. We look for people to contribute to what Milagro is. And whether they realize it or not, they really do contribute -- good or bad -- to what we are and what we do here. We encourage personal and professional growth here.
DMN: Let's talk about the equipment. You have a lot of different brand names you're dealing with there, different file types -- can you tell me about how you get all of them to work together, and maybe tell us about some of the snags you run into and how you've been able to solve those problems?
Suggs: Well, we originally opened the facility with Quantel's new equipment. We started with an eQ and a QEdit Pro, and two Q Effects desktop applications for support stations for the EQ in the QEdit Pro.
DMN: Q Effects are PC-based, right?
Suggs: They're souped-up PCs with large amounts of storage, high-end video cards, fast processors. It's the desktop version of an eQ or something like that. These applications don't have video I/O attached to them, but we can share files across our network. As far as Quantel platforms, we have 13 flavors altogether. The support workstations work really well with the bigger Quantel platforms like the iQ and the eQ and the QEdit Pro. We can look at each other's libraries and share things back and forth, and move stuff over our network quite efficiently.
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| One of the Quantel eQ suites at Milagro Post |
DMN: How you store all the files? Do you have to have some kind of special equipment to make it so they can all talk to each other and share the same files, and perhaps even work on the same files at the same time?
Suggs: Well, the Quantel equipment in particular is built on the PC. Actually, they're Quantel's hardware and software with a PC shoved in the back of it. So all the benefits of Windows networking environments are realized in that fashion.
DMN: So they're all AVI files?
Suggs: Well, Quantel has a proprietary file type they work with which is recognized inside it. But they can import and export a variety of different file types.
DMN: Including QuickTime and AVI?
Suggs: Yes, absolutely, it can import as well as export those. We have network-attached storage that we send stuff to, back and forth, for archiving purposes and things like that. We have larger running footage packages and spots that sit on our storage that are accessible over the network, rather than having to go to the library and get a tape machine and load it up in there and ingest it. It's a much more efficient way of working. Really, the only time tape is involved is if it's something from out of house that we have to bring in from tape, or when we're done with the job ? then it gets laid off to tape. But our typical workflow for 90% of the work we do, we originate campaigns in our Avids, for instance. We scan the film as data, we create the special effects work, we do the compositing work, we do the color correction work, and we do the versioning of that work as well.
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| Hive 1 |
DMN: Wow. That's impressive.
Suggs: It's very, very efficient. And to get back to the people, it only works that way because of the people -- the editors and the assistants, specifically -- and how they work with each other, taking advantage of the technologies that we've put in place there.
DMN: In those Avid rooms, are you using some of the connectivity benefits of Avid there as well?
Suggs: Right now, Avid is an island. We have a LanShare set up, so that the three Avids can access that low-rez material. You asked me earlier about the stumbling blocks with integration here. Really, that's the big one right there. We've been trying for a long time to figure out a way to multipurpose a single ingest of material, to repurpose it for all the different platforms that need it, whether it's Quantel, whether it's Discreet, whether it's Avid. There are solutions, but wow, are they expensive!
DMN: What are some of the solutions to that problem that you've considered?
Suggs: There are several integration companies that we've talked to, and every time we've brought it up, they've been excited, they've scratched their heads, and then they've left wondering how to accomplish it. A couple have come back with solutions that have been a bit clumsy. There's a company called Bright Systems, which probably has the best approach so far. You have to decide what file type will be used to derive all others from. In our case we would use DPX. Then you determine the file type you need. For instance, "I need to take this file and repurpose it for Avid," Then the file conversion process takes place. This particular file would be something that Avid recognizes, and then the Avids can use it. Right now we are still using our existing workflow until we are able to implement a technology such as this. Avid is still a bit of an island but it doesn?t hinder our work.
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