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By Michael Suh In the 20-plus years it has been in business, Cap TV has always taken pride in embracing new technologies. “That’s what we’ve gotten our edge from,” says Matthew Dessner. Based in Gramercy Park in downtown Manhattan, Cap TV produces test commercials for such ad agency clients as Saatchi & Saatchi, Bates Worldwide, and Young & Rubicam, and Matthew Dessner is its director of production and a designer. Having adopted the Macintosh platform three years ago to create its “animatics”— rough, animated sequences used to test a TV ad before full production—the company is now eagerly embracing the rich possibilities of DVD. It may, in fact, be the first company of its kind to do so in New York. “Apple is changing the face of advertising,” says Dessner, his hand resting on a PowerMac G4 equipped with a SuperDrive and DVD Studio Pro. “There’s a lot of buzz over DVD in the ad industry, and a lot of that has to do with Apple bringing it to the foreground and making it so affordable.” 
The work Cap TV delivers to clients forms the crucial link between the birth of an ad agency’s idea and its final production (many steps later) in broadcast form. “Our job is to execute what an agency’s creative director or art director envisions,” says Dessner. “They get to see their idea come to life for the first time.” But the purpose of test commercials extends beyond this—animatics allow agencies to gauge the potential broadcast success of their ideas. Shown to focus groups whose reactions ad agencies use to measure the effectiveness of their ideas, test commercials don’t reach public airwaves but can determine whether a commercial will be produced at all. That’s why the quality of Cap TV’s work is of vital importance. The traditional way of finishing video content is to copy it onto three-quarter inch tape, and many in the ad industry still use this format. As Dessner sees it, though, the limitations of tape are now becoming very evident—especially given the availability of DVD. 
“When we used three-quarter inch tape, we’d spend a lot of money and time to produce this pretty digital image, but then we’d end up dumping it onto an inferior format, analog tape,” he says. “But now, using DVD Studio Pro to present the finished product to clients, there’s no loss of quality at all because it all stays digital, and of course it looks great. There’s just no comparison with the older format—with DVD, the images are digital, crisp, and the sound is always right on.” And in addition to the superiority of the video and audio quality, you have the convenience of never having to rewind or fast-forward. Say you have three versions of a spot your agency wants to present its client; you make each of them accessible via a menu in the DVD you send a client, and you never have to rewind or fast-forward. “Now, that’s a very simplistic example of the benefits of DVD, but in the process of day-to-day business, it actually goes a very long way.” |
Cap TV’s day-to-day business requires its design team to put its Power Mac G4 workstations through their paces—not only to create DVDs but for all their design and editing work. To create its animatics—which the team has done for such products as Lucky Charms, Pillsbury cookie dough, GMC Trucks (to name just a few)—the workflow typically begins with an image scanned into Photoshop, where designers separate the various elements of the image into layers.
 If special effects (such as morphing) need to be incorporated into the scene, the design team often uses Avid Elastic Reality to create realtime morphing effects. (The Pillsbury cookie dough animatic, for example, required that a chunk of cookie dough be transformed into a finished cookie.) When all the pieces are in place, designers bring the files into After Effects, where the animation takes place. They then import digital audio tracks from a DAT or CD via a Media 100 card. The finished animation is then rendered in QuickTime, where it is encoded in the MPEG 2 format.  The sequence is now ready for DVD Studio Pro. To author a DVD for presentation purposes, Cap TV often uses Adobe After Effects to create the animated images that in DVD Studio Pro, become the backgrounds for motion menus. The agency then places menu buttons (created in Photoshop) over the dynamic background. “DVD Studio Pro makes it really easy to tackle this process,” says Dessner. “Because it is so easy, the learning curve is almost non-existent, and everything seems pretty close to realtime—that’s what makes DVD Studio Pro something that we can actually have as a finishing option. If it weren’t for the ease of use, we could never have implemented it as quickly as we have.” Though animatics constitute the majority of Cap TV’s work, the company also creates photomatics (sequences pulled together from photographic stills), ripomatics (sequences confected from various non-original sources), and live tests (live action spots that the company films and edits). When doing the last, Dessner and his team will often shoot in mini-DV using a Canon XL1 and edit the footage in Final Cut Pro, which Dessner finds one of the most intuitive and problem-free ways of editing digital video. Whatever form the company’s test spots ultimately take, though, Dessner enthuses over the fact that, with DVD, the final quality of the work needn’t be compromised. “It’s so important to get a clear message through,” he says, “the last thing you want is some three-quarter inch dub with noise on it.” |
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