MACHINE SONG

STUDIO SEE - PBS Kids Show 1979

Technical Behind-the-Scenes from STUDIO SEE - PBS - South Carolina ETV

Film & Television Director-Writer-Editor Keoni Tyler in Hollywood
Excerpt, Recorded in Hawaii on Betamax and VHS off-air from KHET-TV 11 PBS

From Keoni Tyler on YouTube
"STUDIO SEE" was one of those cool kids shows back in the 1970s that PBS aired - it showed all the great,
positive things that kids did in their lives.

Videotape editing was done after splicing (1950s-60s) and before non-linear computer systems like the
AVID. Some linear editing still exists today, especially for live or day-of-air quick rush broadcasting
where there is no time to ingest to hard-drives before editing can be started.
It is also interesting to note for many new generation editors, directors and producers that when the AVID
non-linear edit system first debuted in the early 1990's, its $100,000 price tag and limited hard-drive
storage space and RAM, as well as general limitations of the early Mac it ran on forced quality at about
VHS consumer quality - not good enough for air or finishing. But it was great for revisions and changes in
off-line (editorial) - similar to the difference of typing on a manual typewriter and having to re-type a
whole page to insert one sentence - compared to on a word-processor like Microsoft Word and just
cutting-and-pasting the sentence before printing.
It took many years for technology to allow the Avid to have higher-capacity and high-speed hard drives and
better video cards to do near-broadcast quality for air, so on-line editing (the expensive finishing
session) was still done linearly. You would take the Avid edit decision list (EDL) into an on-line suite
and assemble like in this Studio See on-line session. For younger kids: "on-line" and "off-line" has
nothing to do with the internet. It meant best-quality expensive gear controlled by computers (on-line)
compared to cheaper gear with poorer quality (off-line) to sit and take time making decisions about edits
- therefore not burning expensive on-line time fiddling around with experimental edits.