During the next four years, Eberhart traced house music to its roots, traveling to Rome, London, Los Angeles and Brussels to capture footage. “There were a lot of really creative people feeding off of each other,” he says. “You really can’t say that there was any one person or any one group that started house music.” “The Unusual Suspects” will be screened in Chicago in August, 2005.

Unusually Simple

Eberhart has plenty of experience with Final Cut Pro — he was the president of the Chicago chapter of the Final Cut Pro User Group. Still, he was impressed with the new Final Cut Pro 5 features that allowed him to edit “Unusual Suspects” with speed and accuracy.

“It’s so cost effective and so powerful to maintain an Apple pro workflow throughout, using Final Cut Pro for color correction, using Motion for my motion graphics, using LiveType for the titles, using Garage Band and Soundtrack for the audio. It’s just so intuitive. Not only are they all great products, but they all work well together.”

Multi-cam editing in Final Cut Pro 5 let Eberhart stitch his story together as easily as mixing two records. The producer could use feeds from up to 128 sources and add cameras whenever he wanted. “It’s really easy to switch back and forth to do more fluid editing between my primary interviews and my B-roll,” he says. “Now I can just cut between them using keyboard commands. It’s very fluid and very natural, almost like directing live TV.”

For Eberhart, pushing sliders and twisting knobs is as natural as breathing. He linked an external control surface — a TASCAM US-428 USB controller — to his Power Mac for audio editing and mixing. He used other external controllers to handle his video clips. “Now I can use the same type of control surfaces that I use for my audio editing with my video editing,” he says. “I can easily scrub with clips using an external control surface. I can also manipulate my audio levels in Final Cut Pro using faders on the mixer rather than being constrained by the mouse.”

Adding titles and text was also a cinch, thanks to LiveType. Eberhart tied his titles together throughout “Unusual Suspects.” “I can make a change in one place in LiveType and that change is updated everywhere in Final Cut Pro,” he says. “You just do it once.”

Final Cut Pro isn’t the only piece of Apple software that Eberhart uses in his studio. High Level Productions is an all-Apple shop. “It’s so cost effective and so powerful to maintain an Apple pro workflow throughout, using Final Cut Pro for color correction, using Motion for my motion graphics, using LiveType for the titles, using Garage Band and Soundtrack for the audio,” says Eberhart. “It’s just so intuitive. Not only are they all great products, but they all work well together.”

Going Deeper

Ramos and Eberhart are currently working on a special edition DVD companion for “Maestro” called “Go Deeper.” The DVD will feature some of the last footage of Grasso and Levan. “Grasso passed away shortly after the documentary was released,” says Ramos. “We have two hours of footage. It’s the only footage that exists, besides a 10-second clip in a Jane Fonda movie.” The DVD features extended interviews with both DJs and will be released in the fall of 2005.

Ramos is also writing a film called “John Jane.” “It’s the story of two friends growing up and going to college, how their dysfunctional families overlap and how one of them discovers their talent,” he says. “John Jane” will be Ramos’s first attempt at a scripted movie. The moviemaker is looking forward to controlling the set and learning more about cinematography. “I like controlling the environment, coming from still photography,” he says. “I like controlling the light, controlling the shot. And in a scripted movie, if you have to do it over, you just do it over. Documentaries you get one shot and that’s it.” Ramos plans to begin shooting the film in September 2005.