Timberwolf Productions
The Outdoorsman with Buck McNeely
"This new Axio system by Matrox is a slam dunk SUPER STAR in the game of post production. It's affordably priced and provides all the vital editing tools needed to produce a broadcast quality product. Our TV show looks the best technically and image wise it ever has in its 20+ years on the air. I am looking forward to the next step as we begin shooting the series in HD and using Axio on the next generation of our video productions."
Timberwolf Productions is the 21-year-old producer of the largest syndicated outdoor adventure series in the U.S. - The Outdoorsman with Buck McNeely. The Outdoorsman airs on over 320 TV stations, 4 networks, 8 weekly satellite feeds, and 200+ LP/cable TV entities reaching over 2.6 million viewers per week. The series also airs on international networks including the American forces network serving the US military worldwide, as well as Middle East and Far East TV. The format of the show is family oriented. It is shot on location in exotic venues around the world (one month's line up recently featured locations in Zimbabwe, the Amazon, New Zealand, and Siberia). Often celebrity guests from the sports and entertainment fields accompany Buck on his adventures. Hunting, fishing, and wilderness exploration expeditions are highlighted and important conservation issues are brought into focus.
For the past year, the Timberwolf Productions' post facility, located on Buck's 130-acre ranch near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, has relied on Matrox Axio SD for all its editing needs. Not only is Matrox Axio the cornerstone of the Outdoorsman series edit suite, it is also used to handle Timberwolf's complete range of commercial, music video, and corporate/industrial video production.
"We'd had some experience using Adobe Premiere in the past and were quite interested when Adobe Premiere Pro was announced. We particularly liked the promise of the integration among all the Adobe video applications. When we heard about Matrox introducing their next generation NLE that would bring realtime power, broadcast quality, and SDI input and output to the Adobe software, we got in line to get one of the first Axio systems released to the industry," said Buck McNeely, founder of Timberwolf Productions and Outdoorsman International.
"Our initial response was 'WOW' - the picture is sharper and cleaner with this new system. Keeping high image quality and audio quality throughout the editing process is very important to us. Once we started putting Axio through its paces we found that it also offered several editing tools that improved our efficiency and final product as well. The realtime editing capabilities are what is the most impressive. Cutting down the render times has really increased our productivity. Even when rendering is required, it's at a much higher speed, so we get back to editing quickly."
Timberwolf's Matrox Axio SD system features dual Intel 3.4 GB processors and a 2 TB external hard drive. Raw footage is captured over SDI in a compressed format, usually high-quality DVCPRO. The final project is laid back to a DVCPRO VTR.
"Most of our projects are long form, running 30-60 minutes, so we require a stable system that can handle a lot of footage and effects on the timeline," said production manager, Jerad Kimmel. "We run two shifts, so our Axio system is running 16 hard hours a day. It's a very reliable platform - we've experienced no crashes over the months we've been using it. We've found that the speed and responsiveness dramatically increase our workflow efficiency. Great color correction, high-quality effects, and versatile titling in real time - no rendering - are all great time savers, especially for our long form episodic productions."
"We also appreciate the realtime audio manipulation that we are able to do on our Axio system. The soundtrack stays crisp and we're able to manipulate it at will. Axio also maintains the closed captioning data when we use archival footage - another big time saver. The built-in vectorscope and waveform monitors are an added bonus."
Always a man with his eye on the bottom line, Buck sums up his experience with Matrox Axio, "This new Axio system by Matrox is a slam dunk SUPER STAR in the game of post production. It's affordably priced and provides all the vital editing tools needed to produce a broadcast quality product. Our TV show looks the best technically and image wise it ever has in its 20+ years on the air. I am looking forward to the next step as we begin shooting the series in HD and using Axio on the next generation of our video productions."
Timberwolf received their new Axio LE at the end of June, which will add much needed production capacity to the busy Timberwolf facility and ease the transition to HD that is now underway.
