2009

For more information about how Final Cut Pro, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, and Color
work together to output to any of these delivery media, see “Output and Delivery.”
Why Design Your Workflow in Advance?
Final Cut Studio provides numerous tools for performing the many tasks that each program
requires, along with features for integrating industry-standard, third-party applications
into your post-production workflow. A bit of forethought will allow you to use these tools
most efficiently and to their best advantage.
What are the advantages of careful attention to workflow design?
You’ll save money
Working out what you’ll need at each stage of post-production can help you control your
post-production budget. As you can imagine, there are many ways of spending money
during post-production, whether by renting equipment like video decks for high-end
tape ingest, booking time at a facility to do film-to-tape transfers, or hiring talent to
perform specialized tasks that are outside your domain of expertise. The workflows you
choose have a big effect on how much money you’ll spend on these types of details. For
example, something as simple as choosing an appropriate ingest strategy can save you
money down the road. You can determine the format of video that would be most
cost-effective to ingest based on how long it takes for different offline formats to be
reconformed, the amount and type of disk storage that is available to you, what degree
of finishing and what mastering elements your program requires, and the video decks
to which you and any facility you’re working with have access. During post-production,
nearly every choice you make has the potential to impact your budget.
You’ll save time
Being careful about your workflow also eliminates unnecessary steps. For example, if you
determine that the duration of your program is such that you can fit all the necessary
media on your available storage disks, and the acquisition format is easily handled by
your system at online quality, you may elect to work right from the beginning at online
quality. This simple decision eliminates the entire step of reconforming offline-quality
media to online quality, which can be a significant time savings. However, if you determine
that the online-quality media will be so processor- and space-intensive to work with that
you’ll lose time during editing, it may make sense to go with an offline/online ingest
strategy after all.
13Chapter 1 Developing a Post-Production Strategy