The Finish Line began with a core conviction: Post-production artists can prioritise their mental health and still produce great work. Our founder, Zeb Chadfield’s vision helped create a space where artists can thrive, while growing the business year on year. And, with the mental health crisis impacting the vast majority of post-production professionals, he’s hoping others will follow suit. 

This is a basic workflow or tips for ingesting media via DaVinci Resolve to be used externally in applications like Avid Media Composer. The goal of these steps isn’t to be the perfect workflow for all productions as we customise a lot of this for specific cameras and workflows but hopefully this will help any productions looking to manage their own media to do it in a way that should make the conform process more simple for us when the time comes for final post. If you need to talk to us about a specific project so we can create a more refined template please get in-touch.

Our current recommendation is to move all media management processes to Davinci Resolve, but if you are still ingesting any media these days with Avid Media Composer you should move to the DNxHR codecs. The beauty of this is that you can bring any frame rate in to any project and work natively throughout. We can then manage the mixed frame rate media appropriately for you in final post.

This is a basic guide on how to get your DaVinci Resolve Project over to us for Final Post

This is just a quick video tutorial for a cool way to keep your media more organised in Avid Media Composer when working locally off a drive.

I just wanted to share this tip for fixing drone footage that has heavy aliasing, it can actually be used for any Aliasing/Moire but we get a lot off the drone cameras. It’s something I have struggled with for a while and haven’t found an easy direct fix within avid, if you find one let me know! I tried replicating this process in Media Composer but it didn’t work so this is my best fix for now and does a pretty much perfect job with every shot I have put through so far.

I often hear young people who are trying to get into our industry or any industry for that matter refer to the chicken and egg situation that is how to get experience when every job is asking for people with experience. How do you get experience if no one will give you a job to get it?

• Disclaimer: This is an internal email that we are sharing in the interest of helping others. Howdy! I figured it was time to send one of my semi-(ir)regular motivational-ish emails. I hope all is well with everyone and you are all enjoying life at The Finish Line. If you aren’t please let us know, we want to continue to improve and you are the most important thing to the company, without you, more importantly without you bringing your best to everything you do, we wouldn’t be what we are. You could say you are our unfair advantage. What does that mean?

Robert Rodriguez has been a massive inspiration of mine since watching El mariachi in the early 90s and learning about how he made it for $7000 and went on to win at Sundance. This episode of The Tim Ferriss show is a great listen and covers a lot of why I think he is someone everyone needs to take a tip or two from. I had the pleasure of meeting him at IBC in 2014 which was great. Very hard not to be a massive fan boy but I got through it. If you haven’t read Rebel Without a Crew you should but at least listen to this show.

Well as much as I would like to completely lose them and just have a credit to say “For a list of cast and crew that worked on this programme go to ‘production company URL’.”, this is not about the complete end of end credits as much as the end of the common roller at least. Got to start somewhere.