Shooting Star: Shining bright

Sydney, Australia: As a full service film and video production house, Shooting Star is the name behind an enormous number of highly successful productions. An Audience with Marcia Hines, Billy Connolly’s World Tour of Australia and Burn The Floor are a mere sampling of the television programmes produced by Shooting Star. But these represent only one part of the company’s full service offering, with DVD authoring, broadcast media duplication, digital delivery and post-production being integral components in the Shooting Star service line-up. The enabling technology? Apple Final Cut Studio 2 editing suites and a high performance Apple Xserve RAID and Xsan storage solution.

Bring it in-house
It wasn’t always the case that Shooting Star’s full service offering was achieved totally in-house. In 2004, the company’s executive producer, Peter Skillman, who had a strong background in post-production, made the decision to introduce an in-house post-production facility based on Final Cut Studio.

According to Shooting Star’s Jonathan Mortlock, cost was only one of the crucial factors. “Having an in-house facility that is relatively inexpensive to set up makes perfect sense,” he says.

While the financial advantages are certainly strong points in favour of maintaining an in-house post-production environment, there are numerous other benefits that are seen by the company as every bit as important – if not more. Key among those is the ability for production teams to spend time fine-tuning their projects and experimenting on special effects. These are luxuries that under the previous out-sourced scenario simply weren’t possible - unless the teams were prepared to spend thousands of dollars.

Forward Motion
With the newfound ability to devote more time and effort to refining their productions, Shooting Star team members are exploring the enormous potential of the new features incorporated in Final Cut Studio 2. Key among these are the 3D compositing effects that can be created in Motion 3.

“Prior to the introduction of the most recent version of Final Cut Studio, our team used a separate tool for 3D compositing,” Mortlock says. “What they’re now discovering is that with the new 3D cameras in Motion 3 and a fairly straightforward learning curve, they can now achieve even better and more sophisticated effects – and in less time.”

Be gone format problems
In commenting on the various timesaving features of Final Cut Studio 2, Mortlock unhesitatingly talks about the ability to use different media formats without being forced to render each time a new file is brought into a project. “Quite often we utilise a mix of content, such as high-definition, standard definition and widescreen, in a single project,” he says.

“The advantage of using Final Cut Studio 2 is that content, regardless of its original format, can be imported to the project, viewed and edited without the initial need to render. That’s something we can now leave to the final stages of the project.”