The Post Atlanta Conference opens this weekend at the historic Plaza Theatre, and it exists because of a gap nobody in Georgia’s film industry wanted to admit out loud: the state built one of the busiest production economies in the country, then kept shipping the finishing work — the editing, the color, the sound, the visual effects — somewhere else.
A Post-Production Hub Without a Front Door
Georgia’s tax incentives have pulled feature and TV production south for nearly two decades, but the post side of that pipeline never got its own infrastructure. ProVideo Coalition’s Scott Simmons summed it up plainly: the editors, colorists, VFX artists, and sound designers who actually finish that work “hasn’t had a dedicated gathering of its own until now.” Simmons called the inaugural event “the kind of event Atlanta has needed for a while,” pointing to a lineup of more than 50 speakers across 20-plus panels that reads less like a local meetup and more like a statement of intent. He’s sorry to miss it himself: “I was hoping to go myself but I won’t be able to head south for the event.”
The Tax Credit That Made This Necessary
The timing isn’t a coincidence. Georgia’s postproduction tax credit expired in 2023 and stayed dead through the worst stretch the state’s industry has seen this decade — production spending there fell from $4.4 billion in 2022 to $2.6 billion in 2024 after the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Lawmakers revived it this year through House Bill 129: a 20 percent credit on qualified in-state post spending above $500,000, with another 10 percent if the underlying production also shot in Georgia and a 5 percent rural bonus on top. It covers editorial, color grading, sound mixing, visual effects, finishing, and format transfers, done by companies physically based in the state. The annual cap landed at $10 million, well short of the $60 million some had pushed for, but lawmakers treated the bill as existential. “An entire industry is at your hands,” Sen. Matt Brass told colleagues before the vote. Producer Honnie Korngold made the competitive case directly: other states and countries “are aggressively coming after Georgia,” and the postproduction credit was what would “get them to stay in Georgia long-term.” Sen. Brandon Beach put the ambition even more bluntly: “We want a soup-to-nuts complete film business.”
Who’s Actually Running the Panels
Strip away the policy framing and the conference is really about whether Atlanta’s post talent has anywhere to compare notes. It was founded by editor Josh Lipkin, who also runs the Atlanta Editors Collective, and Shawn Ventura. The keynote goes to Drew Sawyer, who built Moonshine Post into the city’s full-service finishing house after a producing career with credits at Netflix, AMC, and Warner Bros. — a bet, more than a decade ago, that serious post work could actually happen in Atlanta instead of flying out of it. Deanna Nowell, A.C.E., who cut Marvel’s “Ironheart” along with “Grand Crew” and “Beauty in Black,” is on the bill, alongside advertising editor Kristina Kromer, VFX supervisor Art David, and editor Sean Albertson, who carries more than 70 credits. The panels split across editing, color grading, sound design, animation, and AI-assisted workflows, sponsored by a toolchain any working colorist will recognize: Blackmagic Design, Adobe, Signiant, Shade, and CineFi.
None of that guarantees Georgia keeps the work. A tax credit moves productions; it doesn’t automatically build the deep bench of finishing artists a studio needs before it trusts a state with an entire show instead of just its stunt unit. That’s the actual bet underneath the Post Atlanta Conference: an industry doesn’t get built by incentive language alone. It gets built by the editors and colorists in a room deciding they don’t have to leave town to do the work they’re already doing.
Sources:
Scott Simmons, ProVideo Coalition — “Are You Heading to the Post Atlanta Conference?”
Post Atlanta Conference — official event site
State Affairs Pro — “Film credit restoration passed amid industry struggles”
Fallbrook Financial Services — “Georgia Post-Production Tax Credit 2026: HB 129 Guide”
