The Finish Line

How was The Finish Line born?

I was working at a large London post-production company when I suffered from a mental breakdown. What led me there had to do with the fact that budgets were getting tighter and tighter and that meant doing the same tasks in less time. In addition, as we were cutting back on investment, we were also cutting back on the tools we had at our disposal to get the job done. No time or training was ever invested in our development as creatives, we were just ordered to get the job done. I worked a minimum of 14 hours sometimes, and very often 17 or more hours a day.

This caused me to start to think more about how post production was done and if there was potentially a healthier and better way to do it. I never stopped loving post, but the approach was making it impossible to do work to my standards and to have a life outside of work. I should be able to be a passionate creative person, but also have friends, a family and other

The Finish Line is a post-production company that has recently been awarded as the best TV-related site to work at in the whole of the UK. Despite what we might traditionally think, the company does not provide entertainment spaces in the office, nor does it have luxurious and comfortable post-production facilities in its work center. This company, made up of almost 30 professional high profile creatives, deserves this title because it cares for the worker above all else.

In an industry where times (and budgets) are getting smaller and smaller, and workloads bigger and bigger, The Finish Line, led by Zeb Chadfield, our interviewee; has managed to ensure that the people in their charge are not overwhelmed by 12-hour workdays, can enjoy their private lives and, at the same time, get a high-level job done. Read on to discover that technology has played a big part in this ability.

By Javier Tena

things that give my life value. This was the idea.

With a lot of thought, I realized that apart from talent, the only thing a creative like me needs is to have the best software and hardware available. The first thing to invest in was a high quality grade one reference monitor and with that I started my career again, by myself, because that was The Finish Line at the beginning: me trying to get my health back while trying to limit my work load.

How has the company grown from what it was to what it

is today?

It was just me and now, nearly 12 years on, it’s just under 30 people. We are well known for our healthy approach to post production, putting our talent first and looking after them so they can do their best work. We have been recognised as the best place to work in TV in the UK in 2023 and also received other awards for leadership.

We handle end to end post production services but our main services are picture finishing and delivery. We have the largest team of Finishing Artists in the country and work to deliver to the highest standards so we are very focused on technology like HDR with Dolby Vision and high end mastering monitors like our favourites from Flanders Scientific allowing us to deliver up to 4000nit HDR masters.

On the side of the tools we use, the truth is that everything has slowly evolved to make Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve the most complete tool in picture finishing. So we don’t jump from one software to another as much anymore. Resolve, in its development, became more accessible and they have continued to add more features to make it much more useful.

The combination of highend color management tools, with capabilities accelerated by neural engines and integrated with Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos and all the best mastering formats, offers the best solutions for us at this very moment. Being able to work with end-to-end camera originals and devise intelligent workflows with Dolby Vision has allowed us to make a big name for ourselves in the HDR finishing and delivery space.

How much added value does technology bring to The Finish Line?

Technology is very important to us, but we look at it through a different lens. We look for technologies that make life easier for our employees so they can spend more time with their loved ones, or that allow us to improve the quality of the images we produce. It’s often both: the tools and technology that allow us to have a better, more balanced life also allow us to do higher quality work.

Is it really possible to get the best results in your work and, at the same time, promote a healthy way of working among employees? Because, it really seems impossible!

Yes, it is. We decided to start planning the projects around 8 hour workdays, more shorter days rather than a few excessively long ones. That was the first thing we did. It’s hard to believe, but the truth is that grading shifts are often around 12 hours. And that’s really inefficient. Because with so many hours spent in the suite, there comes a point where you don’t think clearly and you end up needing even more hours than 12 and then you come in the next day and have to do it again, that can only last so long.

Sometimes the shorter workdays are difficult to maintain. In fact, more than once with certain projects, we suddenly see that the time planned was not enough to get the job done, often due to assets coming in late from one place or another. When we see that happening we sit down with the team and rework the costs and schedule to keep things moving forward in a healthy way. If we are up against a broadcast date or time that can mean throwing a lot more resources at it to get it on air, and then we need to look at what could have been done differently. This is a management failure and we need to be sure to learn from it so it can be avoided in future.

In addition to time management and organization, we have also devoted special attention to technology. We have observed its evolution and have adopted new technology always keeping in mind how we can make it possible for our employees to spend more time with their loved ones while improving the quality of the work.

Going deeper into this topic of technology and its evolution, do you think that the evolution of technology has taken into account this very human factor?

I think for the most part yes. The question is whether companies will decide to use it to improve the lives of the people they work with or for profit. Probably the majority of businesses will favor profit.

But it’s very important to look at technical evolution with a people-centric lens. Because no matter how smart the tools are, you will always need to combine them with creative talent to get the most out of them. I’m of the opinion that an AI can get the job done for you, but if you really want to get the best result, you’ll need a person as well as the AI.

So, technology is allowing us to do more with less effort. For example, Resolve has an AI-based depth tool. It will create a depth map based on an algorithm. You can use it to change the focus of the image or even to make a text appear behind someone, or use the object recognition to select a person or a car and use it to blur or obscure something. Before these tools we could spend a day or two rotoscoping. Now, all of a sudden, it’s done. In fact, in addition to the way technology gives us the ability to do more things with less effort, it also frees up talent, because it is no longer necessary for one of our artists to spend three days doing those minor jobs. They can focus on adding more value to the project and really harnessing their creativity.

What

are the technological challenges you usually face in your projects?

The main challenge for us with the kind of projects we are involved in, especially with UHD and HDR, where everything revolves around the speed of storage and computers. Also, it doesn’t help getting stuck waiting on master deliveries for final GFX or archive. However, these are things that are beyond our control. Regarding the former, as long as the equipment is up to par, higher resolutions are less important so we invest a lot in fast storage and systems.

Developing workflows in which we don’t have to convert files to lots of different formats or move them between different tools is essential to be able to work efficiently. Equally important is working with camera originals and having them available at all times. For example, our editorial team can conform all media through DaVinci Resolve, whether they are working in Final Cut, Resolve, Avid, Premiere, Lightworks or any other program. Our conforming process, regardless of how you edit, takes between 10 and 15 minutes which is a huge difference when compared to the alternatives.

In our case, instead of having to generate different files in different phases, we can work with a nested version of the timeline, i.e. work with a reduced version of the timeline, but still containing everything within it. That means we can do reversioning, remastering or international versioning at the same time. In fact, we do quality control and fixes on that original timeline, so everything we correct is corrected automatically within all the other versions.

You mentioned that you develop your content in HDR, how do you manage the different copies in different color standards?

Dolby Vision is the best for that. If you treat your HDR Master as primary, you can generate any version, even a theatrical version with Dolby Vision. It’s fantastic. We just have to finish a piece of content in the correct HDR standard and then we can output it into any deliverable format. It’s an automated process, really, where you just have to do minor manual adjustments to make sure everything comes out as intended. If you’ve done a good HDR finishing, the treatment you’ll have to give to the SDR version will be minimal. However, if the HDR finishing was not good, the automatic conversion process will not produce a great result. We do a visual pass to see if there are any strange flashes or cuts, correct what needs to be corrected and that’s it. As mentioned earlier, using this Dolby technique, we don’t have to generate different grade passes for each version. It is enough to do the primary version and use the metadata method to generate what’s needed for the different formats; the quality it produces is very good, I think aesthetically it’s even better than if we did each pass manually — though this is a personal opinion.

Remote production techniques, as well as post-production, have changed the landscape of our industry. They became commonplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. What workflows did you modify then? How did the technology help you adapt them? Which workflows have remained today?

We were developed and started running virtual edit suites back in 2014 so we were well positioned fortunately for the remote working approach. The main thing that changed over the past three years is that the client understanding about this shifted and it’s more common for production companies to take us up on lower rates for remote work because they know it can be done and trust us to deliver to the highest standards.

Regarding tools, which ones do you use to solve the challenges associated with remote post-production?

We rely in LucidLink. It works like a shared storage system within a traditional facility, but it’s cloud-based, and it’s very capable. You can even insert a change into a file, and it will only upload the changed bit of data inside the file.

On the other hand, regarding shared editing, our team members can work in shared timelines. To do this, we use the features provided by DaVinci Resolve. To give you an idea of its capabilities, if one of our colorists is working on a clip, it locks that clip for everyone else so you can have multiple colorists on the same timeline.

In addition, Blackmagic has now released cloud libraries with Blackmagic IDs. It gives us the ability to work from multiple locations on a shared project and timeline.

We can divide up the tasks as much as required. One person can be subtitling, others working on color, etc. It allows us to be much quicker when required on a fast turnaround project.

How do you see the industry evolving?

I think we’re in a space right now where there are not going to be big technology leaps. AI and ML-based tools will continue to enable more functionality, but ultimately the revolutions are inspired by users and consumer product demands. The next big thing may be just around the corner, but there is nothing obvious that is going to be a systemic change in the way things are done in the short term.

To conclude, will we come to rely solely on machine learning and artificial intelligence for post-production?

I am a bit of an optimist. I do think it will just create more content rather than reducing jobs. And I believe this because I maintain that the best content is created by the best talent and the best technology when combined. AI can write a perfect text, a text that gives you what you are looking for, but it doesn’t give that text your personality based on your life experience. That’s the gold dust you need to sprinkle on top and that’s why cooperation between these tools and human talent will always be necessary to elevate the creative output to the highest level.

However, I do think the industry is going to change. A lot of creatives are now in a pretty strong position to say what they want to do. In that sense, what you see is that there’s little interest in going back to big facilities, in fact, we all proved that you can do the same work from home. So they’re in the position of saying “I’m going to do it from home. If you don’t want me to do it at home, then I’ll work another job.”

The question here is clear, then, will the traditional facilities vanish? I think they probably won’t. There will be a need for creative hubs where the different parts of the production teams come together from time to time. But the viability of traditional facilities, which are based on providing as many services as possible under one roof might become more of a wework type model, you can hirer the right sort of creative space but all the resources are virtualised. This is already changing to a scenario where more and more professionals are working in a distributed way and you will get a better result by working with specialists in each field. Producers choose who they would like to work with at any given time and it won’t matter where they are. Even in the highest level productions, which always prefer that everyone works from the same systems for security reasons, they can already make that system adapt to the distributed production models we are talking about so hypothetically a large steaming service would just give limited access to specific tools for various creatives wherever they may be to do their bit of the job and then revoke access when that bit is done. Componentized talent services, perhaps?

Actually, the only thing holding back all this development is the mindset of the people making the decisions.

One hundred percent. When I set up the company, it was designed exactly the way it works now, but no one was willing to work that way when we tried to sell it to them. We ended up pretending that we were doing everything the same as everyone else, but in the background we were relying on all the virtualized systems like edit suites, cloud technology and glacier storage. 

Post-production with an eye on the future