EYE CANDY–Does the job of much larger editing houses by taking

Ogden Bass was a freelance editor working on a project for an ad agency when he happened to see an invoice from an outside editing house. Bass performed the same type of editing as the outside house, but without his own equipment and production company, his day rate didn’t come close to the $40,000 tab on the bill he saw. It didn’t take him long to remedy the situation. Within a year, Bass had hung a shingle on a 14-by-15-foot room his first post-production facility. Two years later, his Universal City company had grown to six editing rooms and $700,000 in annual revenues. This year, with a planned move to larger facilities and an expanded array of services, Eye Candy Post is projecting revenues to hit $4.4 million. “My goal is to be a one-stop shop where you can go and have all your needs met,” Bass said. “To do that, we have to be on top of technology and understand what comes down the line.” A few years ago, the cost of setting up a post-production house like Eye Candy Post would have made such a venture unthinkable for a small startup. Back then, even a small business required a huge capital investment in equipment. But Bass became one of the first adapters of a new technology that allows him to duplicate services available at much larger post-production houses for just a fraction of the cost. “This room cost me about $300,000 to set up,” Bass said of his facility. “I would have spent at least $1 million setting it up with the old equipment.” Post production, the process of putting a film or video together after it has been shot, involves assembling the scenes and adding special effects and other elements on a rough draft created “offline” and then translating those assembly instructions to a finished product using other “online equipment.” Most houses use an Avid Media Composer for offline editing, but online editing requires different pieces of equipment for each task, such as adding titles or correcting the color, and different technicians for each. A few years ago, Avid, the company that manufactures the offline editing equipment used by the vast majority of the industry, began making a new model for online editing, and many of those functions can now be handled by a single machine. Bass, who founded his shop with just offline editing capability, quickly leased the new Symphony online model. It’s not only a less expensive piece of equipment, it’s also a time-saver. Because it’s made by the same company as the Media Composer, where most offline editing is done, the two systems can interact, so online technicians don’t have to recreate the decisions made offline for another format. So offline rough drafts can be uploaded much more quickly and easily for the online finish work to be done. “A one-half-hour ‘Dilbert’ show took more than six hours to (edit) online (using traditional equipment),” Bass said. “I did the same show in one and a half hours (using Avid’s interactive offline/online system).” The time saved is particularly important to clients, whose production activities are taking longer to complete due to the increased number of digital and other special effects options available to them. While that may result in more-sophisticated raw footage, it also means that post-production houses have less time to turn around that footage into a finished product. “Time schedules are getting tighter,” said Robert Ball, post-production coordinator at Kaleidoscope Films Group. “(Production) executives want to finesse (the raw footage) as much as they can until the very end, and it’s not leaving us much time to deliver the (finished) product.” While Eye Candy Post has been able to adapt to that demand for quicker turnaround through use of its interactive offline/online system, some larger post-production houses have been slower to adapt partially because they have so much money tied up in older equipment. “Part of the reason we’ve grown is there’s been a backlash against the huge post-production houses,” Bass said. “We have a lot less overhead and we’re using newer technology.” Eye Candy has yet to snag a prime-time television series, among the most prestigious work for a video post-production house, but its portfolio of work is growing. The shop has done commercials for Mattel Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co.; television movies and documentaries including HBO’s “Witness Protection” and CNN’s “Children of Peace;” and upcoming work on Fox’s new series “Hidden Camera.” The company has just leased a 20,473-square-foot facility at Universal City Plaza, more than three times the space it currently occupies. With the move, Eye Candy will add telecine bays (for converting film to video) in regular and high-definition formats and a video-finishing facility services it is not currently equipped to provide. “When we move, we can compete apples to apples with what these other facilities have to offer,” Bass said. If Eye Candy Post can offer the newest technology and a full array of services, Bass figures the company can keep its competitive edge, regardless of its size. But what happens when the larger players catch up? “I think everything has a season, and we are fortunate enough to be in a time when the technology is on our side,” Bass said. Spotlight Eye Candy Post Year Founded: 1997 Revenues in 1998: $130,000 Revenues in 1999: $700,000 Employees in 1997: 2 Employees in 2000: 10 Core Business: Video post production Goal: To become a one-stop shop for post production Driving Force: The need to produce video programs quickly and inexpensively