An Odd Delight: A Corporate Editor's Leap Into Broadcast

Creative COW by Kylee Wall

Seeing a stack of tapes labeled and ready to gather dust on a shelf is a feeling of accomplishment I've never had before last week. A full season of This American Land, in glorious HDCAM

Not because I've never really had physical copies of any of my work (although outside of a DVD or two, that's definitely true), but because this was my first time cutting for broadcast and I'm pleased to announce I didn't screw any of it up.

Before this show, I only occasionally had to worry about title safe lower thirds or broadcast safe colors -- when I worked those DVD projects. But finishing a 1080i show for TV and a simple DVD for an internal training video are basically night and day when you look at the delivery specifications for PBS. Most of my work before this had been a mishmash of stuff in a sequence that eventually got spit out into a 720p H264 file for YouTube, the kind of thing where you can easily hide mistakes and inadequacies. There's not a whole lot of hiding when you're delivering 1080i. You're pretty much just naked to the world there.

There have been a couple of blog posts and press things floating around, but I couldn't let this milestone pass by without my own personal blog post to mark the occasion that I finished a television series and didn't screw up anything major.

The season storyboarded, daunting at first with every checkbox now filled. YAY.

THE TRIP FROM INDIANAPOLIS TO ATLANTA, AND FROM CORPORATE TO BROADCAST
I ended work at my last job on a Thursday. The following Thursday, I drove from Indianapolis to Atlanta to start work with Creative COW's Walter Biscardi at Biscardi Creative Media. By Monday afternoon, I was editing This American Land for PBS. read more...