Fine design for post.. The IKEA story as told by EDIUS

There can be few companies in the world with greater brand awareness than Swedish-based IKEA, the business that has brought Scandinavian furniture design to the world. IKEA is now bringing its corporate history together in a series of videos and, as befits a highly design conscious company, it has chosen the Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS editing platform for the task.
The IKEA story starts in 1926 with the birth of the founder, Ingvar Kamprad. By the age of five he was in business, selling matches to his neighbors, and before he was 20 he had expanded his interests into furniture, the foundation of the IKEA empire. Remarkably, film footage exists going back to Kamprad’s earliest years, and the archive has grown since then as every innovation and development in the business has come about.
Sven-Gunnar Lennartsson is the Swedish freelance video editor brought in by IKEA to create a special end of year gift for the company’s staff worldwide: a DVD charting the history of the company from 1926 to 1986.
“There was a lot of material available,” said Lennardsson, “but of course it was in all sorts of formats. Because there was so much material, we really did not have time to transfer them all to a common format before starting the edit.”
The solution lay in the EDIUS nonlinear video editor, which allows you to mix any combination of formats on a single timeline. “The Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS was perfect,” said Lennartsson. “We did not have to think about what the original material was, and we could decide the output format later.”
It was not just the ease of integrating a wide variety of content that made EDIUS attractive for the project. Lennartsson liked the speed and power of the editor, and the fact that it is easy to build the complete workflow around EDIUS, from TitleMotion for sophisticated graphics to ProCoder 3 for uncompromised file conversion at the DVD authoring stage.
Unsurprisingly, Sven-Gunnar Lennartsson has been asked back to work on part two of the project, bringing the story up to date. The same functionality will be as important on this stage, as the last two decades have seen the transition from film to analogue video to digital video.
As for the future, that will of course be high definition. To capture future material for its archives and video productions, IKEA – the company of innovative design – has chosen the most innovative camcorder available today: the Thomson Grass Valley Infinity Digital Media Camcorder.
The Infinity Digital Media Camcorder is revolutionary in giving all the choices to the cinematographer: SD or HD in any format; compression schemes; and recording media are all easily selected at the time of shooting. Recording is on to IT standard media, including the Iomega REV PRO removable disk packs, CompactFlash cards or even USB sticks. By using these industry standard components, material is instantly available to the edit system without any time lost in transferring or loading.
“Using Infinity for the shooting means we gain a lot of opportunities in editing,” Lennartsson explained. “We get instant thumbnails of all the sequences, for example – it is a very fast way of working. And the new material can be easily integrated with the archive.”
The IKEA story has been one of remarkable innovation and growth. Charting that story – then, now and in the future – needs technologies that show remarkable innovation, too, which is why they rely on Thomson acquisition and editing.