Eric St. Martin is a longtime video and film veteran who is proving that your level of success is not tied solely to the amount of money you spend on technology.

St. Martin and his wife, Johanne Dubreuil, started video production shop ÜberMedia in Montreal in 2007. In just over two and a half years, they have shot and produced hundreds of corporate videos.

Since his start in the post business in 1988, St. Martin has worked as a colorist, editor and other related positions for companies including the TVA Network in Montreal, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He changed directions in the 1990s and set up an IT business with his wife. After many years in IT, St. Martin and Dubreuil pursued their true calling, which St. Martin describes as "quality HD video production for 'the rest of us.'"

"We felt the corporate video market was about to experience a rebirth. The technology needed to create complete file-based workflows was finally becoming affordable and ubiquitous. We saw this is as the perfect opportunity to go back to our first love—video—and set up an HD video production business," says St. Martin.

"There was no lack of choice. New technologies were sprouting all over the market, promising to do amazing things at amazing prices. With our background in IT, we were able to see though the vaporware, and our objective was to find the most reliable tools at the most affordable prices, without compromising on quality," adds St. Martin.

Within just a few weeks of being in business, they had one of their first significant contracts: the Mirabel Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI) annual gala night. The project required them to shoot, edit and produce more than 20 :90 video segments to present each of the finalists. They had to shoot on a greenscreen, presenting a challenge for a small corporate-focused shop. The team solved the greenscreen issue of chroma sub-sampling by bypassing the HDV codec using a Blackmagic Design Intensity card by feeding uncompressed images from the HDMI output of the Sony camera and captured it to Apple's ProRes 422 codec, a much better solution for keying.

The following year ÜberMedia again shot MCCI's gala. This time it was a live shoot requiring two cameras and a widescreen display. With a new camera and a second Blackmagic Intensity Pro card, the two cameras were fed into their Intensity Pro card via HDMI with Video Jockey software used to combine the feeds and projected onto a widescreen.

ÜberMedia has built other workflows with the Intensity Pro cards, including for clients needing to turn existing analog footage into digital formats, making good use of the card's analog video connections.

The ÜberMedia team uses a 55-inch Samsung 8000 LED HDTV monitor connected directly to an Intensity Pro card via HDMI, allowing them to work in full 1920x1080 HD resolution.

New projects include developing a broadcast documentary on the construction of a new bridge in Montreal for use by a large Canadian cable network.

St. Martin concludes, "The investment we made in these two Intensity Pro cards is one of the best things we have done for our business—they truly are the backbone of our entire workflow. We have other pieces of equipment that cost us several thousands of dollars that are not half as helpful to us as these highly affordable cards. These cards have paid for themselves a hundred times over. We use them every single day and they have never failed us!"