Post house, The Finish Line, has launched Production Buddy, a remote media platform that gives production teams one place to work with their media from the moment it comes off the shoot, and hands it to editors without a drive ever leaving the building.
The Finish Line’s founder Zeb Chadfield has already implemented the Cine Review client sign off platform, built around immediate review during final post and delivery.
Production Buddy is aimed at the production team and is free for all Finish Line customers if the facility is handling the project’s ingest and media processing.
The Production Buddy system works while a production is still on location, with footage offloaded directly to that production’s dedicated LucidLink filespace. Everything landing there is reviewable immediately while the crew is still shooting.
Every file is transcribed and every person and object in it detected as it arrives. Smart filtering is employed at the outset and where a shoot is running multiple mics, producers can switch between audio tracks as needed. The folder structure and metadata match exactly what the edit will see.
Directors, producers and edit producers review the rushes as they land, find what they need, and shape it, all in the browser and all before a frame reaches an edit suite.
Because the transcript is timecoded to the word, users can strike out what they don’t want and keep what they do. What’s left is a real edit, and playback skips the cut sections so users can hear a stringout in the browser before it goes anywhere. Speakers are detected and labelled as it transcribes, so a single click strips the silent sections or drops the interviewer’s questions to leave just the answers.
From there, producers can run through selects, build a rough assembly and rearrange it on a timeline, picking it up again later where they left it. Buddy is set up so the production team or an assistant do that first pass, so the editor starts with exactly what they need and without the cost of extra edit suites.
A stringout, a selects reel or a rough assembly goes straight into Resolve, Avid or Premiere, with nothing for the editor to relink or reconform, because it arrives pointing at media their system can already see. That’s because it’s the same media the production team was just working with, not a copy.
Each editor gets their own export folder in the production’s filespace, and whatever they drop into it is immediately available to anyone on the team who needs it. Notes from the production team come straight back to the editor inside their edit suite. Neither side has to leave the tools they prefer.
Every production gets its own filespace. No shared pool, no common library, each production has a dedicated and secure space to work from. Access is granted person by person, limited to only what they are allowed to see, and can be locked down to be accessible only from specific locations.
No processing runs in the cloud by default. Transcription, translation, image and object detection and speaker work all run in house, on The Finish Line’s own hardware with locally hosted models. No media, transcript or model input leaves those machines for a third party service.
When a job needs everything at once, and only with the production’s sign off, The Finish Line can burst the heaviest work onto additional GPU capacity to churn through it fast, then bring it all back in house. Nothing goes anywhere the production hasn’t approved, and it stays encrypted end to end regardless.
“Once we had proven Cine Review under the highest expectations in final post, I knew the same core system could be scaled into what I wanted to do for production,” said Zeb Chadfield, Founder and Chief Vision Officer at The Finish Line. “We genuinely wanted to make a little buddy, a friendly tool for production that actually does what others have been selling, but failing at, for years. Under its friendly exterior is the most advanced technology we have ever built, and something I am truly proud of. Hassle free interchange with any editing system, no manual uploads and no waiting for processing before review. And because we built it for ourselves, it costs a production nothing to use. Budgets are under real pressure right now, and being able to take some of that off is something we are glad to do.”
Staff Reporter
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