Thirty Years of Motion Picture Archival Services
The origin of MCAF Media dates back to the 1990's when Founder Andy Pratt opened his Negative Cutting and Conforming company working out of the Alpha Cine film lab in Seattle, WA. Catering to the negative cutting needs of student, independent, corporate, and Hollywood studio customers, Andy and his staff began seeing their work transition from that of following cutting instructions and mirroring workprint edits to translating 30fps video edits into accurate 24fps film cut lists. In the early 2000s when Standard Definition video started to give way to High Definition, Andy anticipated the eventuality that productions mastered in SD would soon need to be re-mastered in HD. And not long after that did it become apparent that at some point HD productions would need to be remastered to 2k. Today the need is for 4K. We don't know what tomorrow will demand, but we do know that in order for content to remain relevant it must be available in a current standard.
With a focus on helping its customers to manage their assets for efficient "secondary postproduction", in 2004 Andy reorganized the company into Image Treasury. In 2007 Image Treasury was purchased by Deluxe Entertainment and operated, first under the name Deluxe Digital Media Film and Negative Services, and later as Deluxe Archive Solutions. In 2020 Andy and his long-time business and operations manager, Brandon Schaeffer, bought the company back from Deluxe and named it MCAF Media. Why MCAF? The honest answer is that in the early 2000s while operating as "Negative Cutting and Conforming" we started to receive our junkmail addressed to a misinterpretation of our name: Megadeath Cutting and Flooring. Over the course of the next 20 years we grew fond of that name as it represented very well, in our minds at least, our identity as malleable, progressive, creative and boundless technicians for our industry. We abbreviated it to MCAF, pronounced McAf, however if you'd rather we also answer to Media + Content + Archives + Forever. Your call.
MCAF currently employs a full time staff of 23 media specialists. The average tenure of our leadership is 20 years, and the average tenure of the general team is eight years. Collectively, MCAF's staff has completed the negative cutting and remastering prep on nearly 3,000 episodes of television content and hundreds of feature films for customers such as Warner Bros., Warner Bros. Discovery, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Sony Pictures, HBO and A&E. At the urging of its customers MCAF has developed workflows to address the many, and sometimes unpredictable, variables associated with revisiting feature and episodic productions from a bygone era.
From its home base in Seattle, WA, MCAF operates 15,000 square feet of warehouse space and 30,000 square feet of production space. In addition, our staff can perform many services off-site, on location at customer facilities and storage warehouses. Other services we offer to media archives of all types include motion picture scanning, still image scanning for archival purposes, physical storage, inventory curation, data migration, metadata-enrichment, and DAM platform development.