Twin Cities Public Television: Makers in Motion
Fusing Formats
When makers look at a box of parts, they don’t see a jumbled mess. They see a project waiting to happen. That’s how the TPT crew approached the clips that would eventually come together as Make: television. “We started with a FileMaker database that tracked every person and every story element and helped organize each episode. “We had the VariCam footage, the HDV clips from our studio, and everything imaginable from the makers themselves,” says Hinck. “Putting it together was a challenge, but we could do it with Final Cut.”
Hinck and his team imported the VariCam and HDV footage into Final Cut Pro with ProRes compression, using AJA Kona cards and HD decks. Then they incorporated the assorted footage from makers using an uncompressed timeline. “We encoded it all as ProRes to make editing easier,” says Hinck. “ProRes allows us to edit uncompressed and work with layers and graphics without losing quality.”
The team received mostly 4:3 aspect ratio, DV-quality footage. Instead of zooming the footage, the TPT producers created a graphic template to fill the extra space around the picture in their 16:9 project. “If the editors needed to tweak the template, they could just click a menu option in Final Cut and open the Photoshop file,” says Hinck. “That flexibility was essential to working the maker footage into the show.”
Balancing color between the various clips was a cinch, thanks to Final Cut Pro 6 color-correction tools and powerful eight-core Mac Pros. “Before, we would never think about doing secondary color correction,” says Sturm. “The time and expertise involved put it out of reach. With Final Cut Pro suite, all of our editors can color-correct.”
Final Cut Pro 6 color-correction tools and color plug-ins have even made shooting easier for TPT video crews. “We can tell the people in the field not to use any filters when they’re shooting,” says Sturm. “We’d rather fix it in post. The tools in Final Cut work that well.”
MAKE meets Motion
To ensure that Make: television was consistent with MAKE magazine, the TPT team crafted graphics and closing sequences using Apple’s Motion software. Once the basic Motion files were created, any editor could modify them from within Final Cut Pro 6. “That sped things up incredibly,” says Hinck. “For the end credits of Make: television, names fall into the colored boxes. We had to either shrink or increase the size of those boxes depending on the names. It was an easy fix—our editors could just pull up the Motion file, make the box smaller or bigger, and keep editing.”
Once color correction and graphics were finished, the TPT team used Compressor to export the finished product in multiple formats for broadcast, DVD release, and web playback. “We would just drag files off into Compressor and the editor could go back to working on the timeline,” says Hinck. “Compressor runs in the background without slowing us down at all. The Mac Pros, Final Cut, and Compressor are truly amazing.”
TPT wrapped up production on Make: television in about a year overall. The show is now playing on public television stations across the United States, and can be seen on the MAKE magazine website. Hinck and his team hope the show will inspire more people to get creative and, simply put, make things. It certainly worked for them. “This project inspired the whole staff,” says Hinck. “If we had staff members who weren’t makers before this, they are now.”
