Twin Cities Public Television: Makers in Motion
When Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) in St. Paul, Minnesota partnered with O’Reilly Media and Geek Squad to create a public television series based on MAKE magazine, it was a perfect fit. The Mac-based production team is full of born “makers”—people compelled to craft, create, and tinker. “I’m a woodworker, and almost everyone on staff for this project is a maker of some sort,” says Ted Hinck, managing producer at TPT, “so it was easy to feel a connection.”
MAKE magazine documents the efforts of makers across the world, featuring their projects and exploring techniques for creating everything from robots to knitted scarves. It celebrates the maker’s zeal for invention and spirit of whimsy. To put the magazine in motion, the team at TPT used their preferred tools for making media—Final Cut Studio and Motion on the Mac.
Each episode of Make: television features an in-depth interview, a how-to segment, and homemade project footage from makers across the world. The diverse nature of the project presented an interesting technical challenge for TPT: “We ended up with multiple formats, from VariCam clips to HDV to DV,” says Hinck. “Final Cut is the perfect solution for us. We can mix formats, edit uncompressed with ProRes, and color-correct to make it all fit together. Final Cut lets us do it all.”
Producing Inspiration
TPT has a history of making educational, entertaining programming. Their science show Newton’s Apple is the longest-running family science series on TV. They launched their first Final Cut Studio-based show, DragonflyTV, in 2001. The fast-paced, music-driven series has run for seven seasons and won a Daytime Emmy for the TPT editing team. TPT has also produced dozens of award-winning documentaries, from the recent NOVA two-hour special, “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold,” to a profile of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz for American Masters. “Our mission is to inspire, educate, and entertain,” says Bob Sturm, senior manager production operations at TPT. “We want to encourage families to learn together.”
Make: television matches the TPT mission perfectly, says Hinck. “MAKE magazine features inspiring projects that few of us could pull off, but there are also simple projects that anyone can do. It has something for everyone—woodworking, electronics, metalwork, sewing.” The show is broken into three segments: A maker profile, a how-to segment shot in the TPT workshop studio, and homemade footage submitted by makers.
To cover it all, MAKE magazine searched through thousands of potential projects and chose a few dozen makers to profile for the show’s first season. The TPT team asked Actual Films in San Francisco to shoot the profiles. “Many of the makers are in the San Francisco area, so it made sense to work with Actual Films,” says Hinck. “They shot the profiles with a Panasonic VariCam and sent them to us for editing.”
The TPT crew converted its scene shop into a maker’s paradise and shot the how-to segments with HDV cameras. “HDV picture is very good, and the small format makes it easy to get the cameras into places that big cameras simply can’t go,” Hinck explains. “There’s a segment where a shopping cart is turned into a go-cart. We could get in and underneath and through the cart with the HDV cameras. They made the show much more dynamic.”
Finally, TPT collected home-brewed footage in a hodgepodge of video formats from tinkerers and hobbyists across the nation, and began assembling the show with Final Cut Studio. “We use Final Cut for everything we do here,” says Hinck, “but it was indispensable for Make: television .” The editing suite allowed the TPT team to merge a myriad of formats into one seamless high-definition show.
