Overview

Method Films is a music video and commercial production company entering its third year of existence. It has 15 employees including leading music and commercial directors such as Richard Anthony, Stephanie Buttle, Steve Dell, David Kerr, Popular Society and Phillip Stolzl. These directors have worked on projects for companies such as; Central Office of Information, Nurofen, Martini, Cinzano, Sony PS2, and Bacardi.

The issue

In order for Method Films to bring in more music video and commercial production projects, it creates demo reels which it gives to its sales reps to go out and demo work to advertising agencies.
Up until now, Method films used to create demo reels on UMAT, Beta SP or VHS tapes from existing footage. This was obviously a very time consuming and costly process, so what was needed was a way of capturing these analogue tapes digitally, so sequences could be edited in Final Cut Pro and then exported back to DVD format or analogue tapes if required.

The solution

“After looking through what was available on the market, we decided to choose the Miglia Directors Cut, it obviously met our requirements and it was very competitively priced”, commented Brown.
The Miglia Directors Cut enables Method Films to capture UMAT, Beta SP and VHS tapes into a digital format. Once in a digital format the films themselves can be edited in Final Cut Pro, so that demo reels can be created and given to the sales reps for business development. Also, the Directors Cut can be used to export digital video back to UMAT, Beta SP and VHS if required.

Brown continues: “The Miglia Directors Cut allows us to step into the world of digital video discs, show-reels and making mood tapes easily. We can now capture our director’s reels and burn them straight to DVD, we can also export from the Final Cut Pro timeline instead of pause/record tape2tape editing that would have been the standard when we originally created UMAT, Beta SP tapes.”

The Future

“The Miglia Directors Cut is an essential piece of kit for our business, it has saved us an enormous amount of time in terms of creating showreel dvd’s and now makes us look much more professional, as we can create new demo tapes much more easily when pitching for work from advertising agencies. By using the Miglia Directors Cut we hope to free up much more time allowing us to concentrate on producing great pieces film and closing more business!” continued Luke Brown.

Essentials

About the Miglia Directors Cut - Transform your computer into a video editing studio with Director’s Cut “Take 2”! Capture video and audio from any analogue source, like a camcorder or a VCR, edit the footage on your computer and output it back to a VCR or burn it onto a DVD-R. Director’s Cut converts any analogue video and sound material into DV format that can be captured by any computer equipped with a FireWire/IEEE 1394/iLink interface. Simply connect your camcorder or VCR to Director’s Cut with the sound and Composite or S-Video cable provided, and connect the unit to the FireWire port of your computer. You can now import, edit and export analogue footage!