Foxvideo Productions was started in 1989 by Dave and Sue Farrants who at the time were running a commercial photography business. In our spare time we "rehabilitated" orphan fox cubs back into the wild, having taken many still photos of these cubs we thought that video would make a good record of our successes and our first video camera was purchased. This Panasonic MS1 was the best that could be bought in the amateur / semi pro market at the time with many videographers using it for commercial work and so Foxvideo Productions was born.

Within a short space of time we found the limitations of the camera we'd bought and decided to upgrade to a pro '3 chip' Panasonic F350 camera with 2 Panasonic 7500 SVHS edit decks and an edit controller, still not satisfied with quality, we further upgraded to the MII format (Panasonic's equivalent to Betacam SP).

This now gave us the quality we were looking for, however the investment cost for the edit suite could not be justified and in answer to this we decided to offer our suite out to other video producers shooting on SVHS or Hi8 and then editing up to an MII master in our suite. This became very successful and we soon became well known as an alternative to the more expensive London facility houses.

In 1995, and in an effort to increase quality yet again, we investigated the possibility of replacing our analogue suite with the then, little known, non-linear computer based edit suite called Media 100 and mastering to Betacam SP. After extensive testing we decided to buy and in the summer of 1995 we were offering one of the first broadcast level computer based edit suites outside of London.

We continued to use Media 100 until late 2001, when we upgraded our suite to fully digital with a new Apple computer system and Final Cut Pro v2. We've stayed with Apple Mac right up till EOL with version 7 of Final Cut Pro. I moved to Final Cut Pro X (FCPX) in 2015 although in my opinion it wasn't what FCP 8 would have been but, I did stay with it and purchased a range of plugins and templates.

Come forward to 2019, I decided to retire from commercial work and concentrate only on pro-Bono work for Church, Charity, voluntary or non-profit organisations. When Covid-19 struck the UK many churches moved to online streaming, one church near me was having equipment issues and having problems getting online so I offered to loan them a tripod…….

Two weeks later they were sending me 10 to 12 video clips shot by church members at home on lockdown, via GoogleDrive, Dropbox or even WhatsApp to combine into a one hour service that I'd then upload to YouTube, I ended up producing 85 services for them.

FCPX was working for me but I was still unhappy about the way it worked so, around halfway through the 85 services, I downloaded the free version of Davinci Resolve and immediately felt at home with it, so much so I produced a blog piece about it explaining how much I liked working with it and wished I could afford the Studio version for £299 but as I'm now retired, I couldn't really justify the cost.

3 days later a box arrived by courier, opening the box there was a full version of Davinci Resolve Studio along with a Blackmagic Speed Editor - I eventually traced the sender by the contact phone number on the delivery label - it was from my son who had seen the blog post!