mnartists.marketplace is a mini-store within the Walker Shop devoted to the presentation and sales of local art, artistic wares, and art inspired objects.  In addition to inviting artists to submit designs for a twice-annual juried call, mnartists.marketplace offers a curated rotating selection of local artist-made wares.

Here’s a little more about the Summer 2012 mnartists.marketplace artists and their work:

Scott & Dave Meyer, Meyer and Sons Design
Chanhassen and Cottage Grove, MN

http://www.quarterhorseracinggame.com/

Brothers Scott and Dave Meyer are originally from Austin, Minnesota. They currently reside in Chanhassen and Cottage Grove respectfully. Throughout their lives, they learned the value of working together. Thus, a couple of years ago, they started Meyer & Sons Design L.L.P and launched the Quarter Horse Racing Game.

Growing up they would play a version of the horse game with family at holiday gatherings. It was on a large home-made board and the pieces were stored in a zip top bag. While looking for a version of their own, they noticed all the ones for sale were large and cheaply made imports. After many drawings and numerous prototypes they finally landed on what is sold here today. They partnered with local artists Tim Pawelk and John Cassady (Buffalo, MN) for the millwork and laser etch detail. You may recognize Tim’s laser craftsmanship at Target Field. The boards are then assembled in Cottage Grove in Dave’s garage.  In two years they’ve sold almost 400 games; everywhere from Minnesota to Canada and even Ireland

Andy Larson, Trash Bags
Minneapolis, MN

http://trashmessengerbags.com/about-us/

Trash Bags is a Minneapolis based bagsmith owned and operated by Andy Larson, a decade long Minneapolis bike messenger.  Established in 2008, Trash Bags strives to not only make tough, durable items valued for their practical use,  but also to take those items of utility and turn them into a vehicle for expression using a multitude of custom color options and, often, full appliqué art.  Handmade, one by one in a NorthLoop warehouse space, you can spot Trash Bags by the distinctive hand stitched Trash logo on the streets of Minneapolis, but also scattered on the backs of cyclists across the country and world.

Luci Kandler, Celebi
Minneapolis, MN

http://fauxpoco.blogspot.com/

Celebi is the new label for Twin Cities designer Luci Kandler. The name comes from an old Turkish adventurer who was known for writing about his travels with great detail, but also with a flair for storytelling that now makes it hard to tell truth from fiction. He signifies the way Luci feels about exploring the world through print design and using it to re-tell a story. The scientific, historic, and story-like screen prints that appear on Celebi products are drawn by hand and printed in small quantities at Faux Poco studios.

The imagery in this collection of home and personal accessories was taken from Frida Kahlo’s self portraits. By displaying just a piece of each painting (nails, cut off braids, monkeys, Mexican embroidery) the screen prints give you a bit of the story without revealing too much.

Johnnie Schmidt, Fruitionlab
Litchfield, MN

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Fruitionlab

Johnnie Schmidt is a skill-collecting craftsman from Litchfield, Minnesota. As a studio art major at St. Olaf College he took as many classes in as many different disciplines as he could until they eventually cut him off. After working mainly as an architectural model and prototype builder all over the country, he returned to his native Litchfield and equipped a workshop suitable for the creation of almost anything: Fruitionlab.

Each LP Record Puzzle is completely handmade and assembled by Johnnie. The puzzle, box and logo designs, drawn on the computer, are sent to a 50 watt CO2 laser where they are cut into the vinyl records and album covers. After about 30-steps of pre-and-post-processing, printing, cutting and assembly these 70 piece puzzles are ready to entertain and confound. Enjoy!

William Dohman, Oh Dier
West Saint Paul, MN

http://ohdier.com/

Minnesota native William Dohman wants you to love the place you live and work. So he founded Oh Dier, a St. Paul–based home-décor company, where he often uses up-cycled or recycled materials for his designs. He was voted Best Etsy Artist for Midwest Home magazine in 2011 and his work has been recognized in several national magazines, books, and design blogs. Powered by a Masters degree in architecture, as well as a few laser beams, hand saws, and sanding blocks, he strives to design cheeky, urbane objects to beautify your world.

Jen Hanlon Ash
Roseville, MN

http://jenhanlonash.com/

The photography and digital images of Jen Hanlon Ash portray subjects in slow decay: falling down structures, abandoned houses, rusty vehicles and old signage. That aesthetic can be found throughout her work even when the subject itself is pristine. Many of Jen’s images are digitally layered with textures to create this effect. She has a keen interest in product development and is exploring the use of her images on fabric, accessories and home items.

Jen has a degree in Fashion Design & Merchandising from the University of Northern Iowa which is not the fashion capital of anywhere, but it suited her well at the time. By day she works at Minnesota Public Radio and by night/weekends she works on her art.

Ranae Redenius, Trigo
Roseville, MN

http://www.etsy.com/shop/Trigo

Renae’s creative story started when she joined the Army.  While deployed in Iraq, she insisted that her real purpose for being there was to make macaroni pictures and marionette goats from random bits found around her work space.  After her stint the Army, Renae studied apparel Design & Development at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.  Frustrated at having graduated during a recession, she decided to create her own job designing monster themed catch-alls.

Inspired by the book Stupid Sock Creatures, as well as all the Pee Wee’s Playhouse she watched as a kid, all of her monster coin purses are handmade by Renae. She is grateful for the positive feedback she has received as it keeps her from becoming another homeless veteran. Renae is a team leader for HandmadeMN.

Melissa Gausmann, Earth Grown Crayons
Minnetonka, MN

http://earthgrowncrayons.com/

Melissa Gausmann makes her handmade soy crayons by blending natural soy waxes and nontoxic mineral and organic pigments. Earthgrown Crayons are hand-poured into nature-inspired shapes.

Why soy crayons? Soy is an all-natural, renewable resource that is one-hundred percent biodegradable, making it an earth-friendly choice for kids. Soy beans have been a part of Melissa’s life since she can remember. Growing up she spent time on her grandparents’ farm in rural Minnesota. She watched her grandpa plant and harvest soy beans in the fields behind his home. Now, many years later, Melissa makes her own creations from soy, inspired by a love for animals and other living things.

For more updates and information about mnartsits.marketplace follow @mnartistsdotorg on Twitter and like the Walker Shop and mnartstist.org on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/walkershop and http://www.facebook.com/mnartists.org

About the Walker Shop
The Walker Shop supports the mission of the Walker Art Center through the sale of merchandise from around the globe. It offers a unique assortment of award-winning contemporary home and office accessories; artisan jewelry; books about multidisciplinary contemporary art, design, and culture; creative toys; and exclusive Walker products. All proceeds support the Walker’s artistic and educational programs.

Walker Shop Hours
Tuesday-Sunday, 11 am – 6 pm
Open Late Thursday, 11 am – 9 pm
Closed Monday
612.375.7633
mnartists.marketplace Walker Shop Online: http://shop.walkerart.org/collections/mnartists-marketplace

About mnartists.org
The mission of mnartists.org is to improve the lives of Minnesota artists and provide access to and engagement with Minnesota’s arts culture.

mnartists.org is a joint project of the Walker Art Center and McKnight Foundation.

Second #2790, 46:30, Image © Studio Canal

In a matter of moments, Holly and Anna will be plunged even deeper into an abyss of murder and corruption, but for now they’re offered a melancholy moment of togetherness and reflection. The subject of their revery, of course, is Harry Lime, the unseen phantom who reigns over The Third Man, guiding the action without even appearing onscreen. As Jeremy noted on Tuesday, “Harry is the man that brought this unlikely pair together, but it is Anna’s erstwhile feelings for him that are keeping them apart.” That bitter irony, which is surely tormenting both Holly and Anna, may be more powerfully conveyed in this scene than any other in the film. Their platonic relationship gains great emotional depth as they share in each other’s loneliness, even while both of them are doubtlessly aware of Holly’s unrequited love for her. After Anna drearily professes that she doesn’t ever want to fall in love again, Holly — ever the gentleman — suggests they drink away their troubles. But the suggestion only makes Harry’s absence-as-presence more deeply felt, as Anna says that was always his go-to solution.

Holly has, up until now, been patiently understanding towards Anna’s all-consuming loneliness, but now he becomes visibly exasperated. “Well, I didn’t learn that from him,” he flatly says as he walks away from Anna, towards the door. His frustration grows a few moments later as Anna, hoping to brighten Holly’s mood and tag along with him to visit the porter (already dead, unbeknownst to them), admits, “We’re both in this Harry.” Holly pauses emphatically before he corrects her: “Holly… Might get my name right.” The look on Anna’s face once she realizes her mistake is heartbreaking: she recognizes Holly’s heartache even as she finds herself unable to escape her maudlin memories of Harry. She behaves towards Holly the way a loving sister might towards a sibling, a fond intimacy that likely gives Holly no comfort. This all leads to one of The Third Man‘s sweetest lines of dialogue: before exiting, Anna teasingly tells Holly, “You know, you ought to find yourself a girl.”

Visually, there’s nothing overtly striking about this scene: it forges an “invisible” style that the Hollywood system of narrative filmmaking prioritized, devoted to characters and dialogue and linearity of space and time. Mostly, the scene is comprised of medium shots (or medium close-ups) that allow us to discern the actors’ facial expressions fairly clearly (save for an unexpectedly powerful close-up of Anna after Holly’s suggestion that they get a drink reminds her, once again, of Harry). But the scene is still stylistically powerfully thanks to its mise en scène, the term applied to cinema by a number of French theorists to describe the arrangement of visual elements before the camera (composition, set design, props, the blocking of actors, costume design, and lighting). Though the Viennese vista visible through Anna’s window provides a semi-romantic backdrop, director Carol Reed includes subtle visual elements — the bare, dying flowers on Anna’s windowsill (indicators, perhaps, of Anna’s apathetic neglect of the immediate world around her following Harry’s death); the heavily scarred wall visible in today’s still, a figurative sign of violence that presages the danger that Anna and Holly will experience in the following scene — in order to convey the impression of foreboding doom. These elements might be subtle, and the viewer may pick up on them only subconsciously, but they nevertheless serve an emotional and even thematic purpose.

As such, Carol Reed and The Third Man reflect the emphasis on meticulous composition espoused by French critics such as André Bazin, who, in his 1948 essay “William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing,” defined the utmost purpose of mise en scène: this “styleless style” achieves a self-effacement in which “the story and the actors are at their clearest and most powerful” (Bazin at Work, 2). Bazin used Wyler’s masterful 1941 film The Little Foxes to argue that “the highest level of cinematic art coincides with the lowest level of mise en scène… It is the camera itself that organizes the action by means of the frame and the ideal coordinates of its dramatic geometry” (4; The Third Man‘s “dramatic geometry” is something we’ll be addressing very shortly in Still Dots). A year after Bazin wrote this essay, Carol Reed would utilize both a “styleless” mise en scène as well as a plethora of striking cinematographic tricks (canted and distorted angles, deep focus, low-key chiaroscuro lighting) to alternate between emotional/narrative clarity and visceral impact in The Third Man. Our current scene displays Reed’s skill with subtle mise en scène at its most effective.

The Third Man is, as we’ve discussed before, quite the genre chameleon: it’s both comedy and tragedy, film noir thriller and fast-paced whodunit, breathlessly entertaining and utterly serious in its existential commentary on postwar dread. Underlying all of this is another strand: The Third Man is also a romance tinged with sadness. Holly, Harry, and Anna form a doomed love triangle, their passions and emotional yearnings smoldering beneath the movie’s more overt genre trappings. (Indeed, the last shot of the movie — one of the most emotionally resonant in the history of film, I would wager — powerfully brings this tragic romance to the surface.) As Anton Karas’ zither score reflects this dynamic shuffling of tones and styles, Holly’s spurned love for Anna (and her pained attachment to Harry) deepens the movie’s angst-ridden deconstruction of postwar amorality (and counterbalances its more comedic moments). The fact that The Third Man‘s male and female protagonists don’t end up together aligns their non-romance with the doomed relationships in such films noir as Laura (1944), The Woman in the Window (1944), In a Lonely Place (1950), or Orson Welles’ own The Lady from Shanghai (1947), not to mention the classic non-union that closes Casablanca (1944, with which The Third Man has a few other things in common). If it’s true that, as Bazin suggested, utilizing the subtle mise en scène style in The Third Man‘s dialogue and dramatic scenes allows “the story and the actors [to be] their clearest and most powerful,” maybe that’s why the romantic intrigues pulsing beneath the surface are so emotionally devastating; we become convinced that Anna and Holly are fully-formed lost souls, sharing an intimate kinship over their loneliness, confusion, alienation, and moral anguish (the very torments that ultimately keep them apart). In a better, alternate world, maybe Anna and Holly would have ended up together after all.

Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame as lovers who seem to know their relationship is doomed, in "In a Lonely Place" (1950) Image © Columbia Pictures

Over the absolute length of one year — two times per week — Still Dots will grab a frame every 62 seconds of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. This project will run until December 2012, when we finish at second 6324. For a complete archive of the project, click here. For an introduction to the project, click here.

It’s so different writing about something that’s just cool. Not super excited about it not super on fire about it — just cool. The Soul Project was cool but I will say that it made me feel my old soul. Especially when I arrived to see my parents and other elders in the dance community struggle with the format of standing and moving around and sitting on the floor. It pleased me greatly that David Zambrano reminded us to help each other view the solo dances. In the end, most of the moments I loved had to do with the soul music that ruled the evening’s playlist. So it was a cool night after all.

Dancer-wise, the two dudes, Evivaldo Ernesto and Horacio Macuacua, resonated with me — as I’m sure they resonated with everybody, but I wonder what the reasons really are? For me, these men interpreted the music, the spirit and the meaning and the groove, in a  way that made me feel like the weight of the soul ancestors was being touched or explored in a familial, respectful type way. For instance I loved the white fro and the trembling piece to the DreamGirls ballad. I actually kind of hate that song and I started to walk away but I’m glad I saw it. The physicalized vocal histrionics and the trembling movements were making me laugh so hard and then it was the moments of stillness that killed it*. Mr. Macuacua provided me with my “steps,” as I say, and I loved that the format allowed me to just go ahead and dance with him at certain points.

Let me go ahead and talk about the format. Because I always have to wonder, what do artists want and how much do they want when the invite us onto the stage. Because I feel like Minne should become known as the town to interact. Like “Don’t come to Minne if you don’t want people to dance with you when you invite them onstage.’” We are starting to loosen up and get that vibe, so I did appreciate all the people bopping their heads and dancing. If I had a boo there I would have been slow dancing for sure. I felt like the performers wanted it and Nina Fajdiga even jammed with me for a second during the group jam. They looked me in the eyes when they were walking around too. I felt like they wanted a lot of interaction and we could have given them more. I also liked the format but I thought it would have been nice to: 1.  have drinks onstage, 2. let the elders sit down**, 3. play some cuts after and let us dance more — or we could have just done that during the show, right?

Another point is that you invite cipher logic into the environment when you invite people on the stage. This means I get to talk, walk away, like it or not, and I get to jam the whole time if I want (as my friend Nancy was doing). Cipher logic is not the same as sitting in the theater seats  logic but I don’t know if the Soul Project peeps realized that some of us think like that.

Lastly I will say that it was just cool because of a lot of the dancing, although it was highly physical and mostly interesting, was lacking in the connection to the music that I was feeling.  I mean, there were only like two or three songs that I didn’t know played on the sound set that evening and I can feel some of those lyrics like I wrote ‘em meself!!! There were some moments when I was ready to walk away. When you play cuts like that you have to perform the hell out of them. I’m not saying you have to dance every beat but there is a certain energy that has to interpret those stories. Especially if we are going to do solos in close quarters. When I asked Mr. Zambrano afterward he said that he grew up listening to that music but the dancers had to be introduced to it. I know they were trying to make it but something was missing.  It’s sad to say that some of them lacked soul — I wonder if that is what it is.

*the good  kind of ‘killed it’

**they did provide gallery chairs

Peace!

Ms. Kenna-Camara Cottman

by Emma Cohen    

    

At our April Free First Saturday event, we asked kids what they thought about the artworks in the exhibition Lifelike. Here is what Annie, age 6, said about one of her favorites:

   

Ron Mueck, Crouching Boy in Mirror

Pick one word to describe this work of art: Real.

Why did you pick that word? It looks so real because of hands and nails.

Tell us if there is something you don’t like and why.  His underwear is showing.

What does it make you think about?  Going under water.

Make up a story about this work of art… He is sitting like that because he wants to see sea creatures.

We’re collecting young people’s thoughts on art all the time. What does your child have to say? Come visit the Walker, pick up an ArtThink worksheet, and let him tell us what he thinks!

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it.  Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to katie(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Rosemary Furtak, 1986

Last week we celebrated a beloved colleague, Rosemary Furtak, who retired recently after a 29-year career at the Walker. Countless curators, scholars, writers, artists, designers, and others—both inside and outside the art center—have a special fondness for the Walker Library, which houses more than 35,000 publications in a wonderfully hushed, secluded underground space. This is thanks largely to Rosemary and the infectious enthusiasm she brought to her profession as a librarian–and, more to the point, to her role in establishing and building the library’s collection of some 1,600 artist’s books.

It was for her work in both of those capacities that she received a Distinguished Service Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) at its 2012 conference, held last March in Toronto. “In the early 1980s, Rosemary was among the few art museum librarians who recognized a fundamental difference between artists’ books and others, and who segregated them into special collections areas that would eventually become known as ‘Artists’ Book Collections’,” noted Janice Lea Lurie, head librarian at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, in presenting the award. “The idea that artists’ books are different, or as Rosemary stated, they are ‘books that refuse to behave like other books’, was a visionary step, as no well-defined precedents in the early 1980s existed for establishing artists’ book collections. Consequently, Rosemary was a pioneer in this area, which later became part of the “collection development” mainstream of the late 1980s and early ’90s.”

In their nomination letter, Lurie and a host of other ARLIS colleagues wrote of the ongoing impact of Rosemary’s “early and visionary leadership” not just in art museum librarianship, but also in the books arts community and “the strongly rooted ‘book-scene’ culture of the Twin Cities.” They cited her as both a “well-known local personality in the art, library, and book arts circles” and “a highly respected and beloved figure internationally”; and, finally, noting her “very quiet way” and “great modesty”—something that endeared her to so many—they proposed for her the title of “The Quiet Revolutionary.” More than 30 of Furtak’s fellow art librarians and other colleagues in book arts and museums supported the nomination.

Many of us at the Walker already miss Rosemary’s sharp insights and vast knowledge, not to mention her connoisseurship of chocolate and her sartorial flair (on any given day she could easily take the award for best-dressed Walker staffer). We will also sorely miss her miniature exhibitions of artists’ books, an ongoing series presented in a specially built display case right outside the library. Fortunately, all of these exhibitions dating back to 2005 have been documented in photos–click here to see the full collection on Flickr.

For more on Rosemary and the artists’ book collection – including 13 great examples of works—see this interview from 2008, conducted as she was co-curating the exhibition Text/Messages with Walker curator Siri Engberg; and her article, “Adventures in Collecting, originally published in Walker magazine.

Recent artist's book display, organized by Rosemary Furtak

A collaborative coloring book:

“This book invites you to collaborate with 15 Minnesota artists—a project conceived in the spirit of Drawing Club at Walker Open Field, where artists and the public add to a pool of collectively created artworks. Rip a page out and color it for yourself, hang it up on your wall and photograph it, or tear it up and use it to make a new piece—but whatever you do, share it by uploading the results to mnartists.org/coloringbook. There you’ll be able to view, contribute, and comment on the work, participating in the social experience of art-making, collaboration, and play.”

Featured Minnesota artists:

Emily Bennett Beck   Saman Bemel-Benrud    Cornelius Coons   Brandon Cramm   Kristina Estell   Hot Sundae   HOT TEA   Karen Kvitek   Max Mose   Terrence Payne   Casey Seijas   Angela Sprunger   Melissa Stang   Peter Steineck   Lex Thompson

Hot Sundae

Cornelius Coons

Angela Sprunger

Saman Bemel-Benrud

Brandon Cramm

Peter Steineck

Design:

For the cover we opted to reproduce all the works featured in the book in bright neon inks, all layered on top of each other. The typeface, Maple by Process Type Foundry, is designed by a Minnesotan. The book was printed in Minnesota. Everything about this book is straight Minnesota.

Each of the pages containing the artwork was perforated so the user could easily share or use the art in a way other than just simply coloring it.

Availability:

On sale now at Walker Shop and online at shop.walkerart.org

 

Chyna

 

Kitchen at Gather by D’Amico by Ashley

 

 

Then it was down the hill to the Sculpture Garden next – of course, the iconic Spoon Bridge has to be part of the fun.

Studio by Rachel

Studio by Chyna

 

Studio by Ashley

 Although we took photos of the same things, with the Pentax’s amazing array of modes and options, we each took a different approach and came out with some wonderful images.

Come try this camera for yourself at the Walker Shop from 5-9pm this Thursday (May 10). Use it to capture a Minneapolis spring evening and get advice and tips from Pentax pros. The first 100 test photogs receive a free memory card and cocktail, compliments of Cool Hunting.

 

At the heart of our process is a Panasonic AV-HS400 video mixer, which accepts both an HD-SDI camera feed and a VGA feed from the presenter’s laptop.  The video mixer allows us to cut live between the speaker and his or her presentation materials, either with fades or straight cuts. In addition, the mixer’s picture-in-picture capability allows us to insert presentation materials into the frame, next to the speaker.  Doing so gives viewers both the expressiveness of the presenter and the visual references live audiences are seeing. One thing to note: if a speaker begins moving around the stage, it becomes difficult to frame a picture-in-picture, so the technique works better when people stand still.

The camera we use is a Sony PMW-350K, which is part of the XDCAM family. We shoot from the back of the room in all of our public spaces, putting a lot of distance between the camera and the subject. As a result, we need all the zoom our camera lens can give. Presently our lens is a Fujinon 8mm–128mm (16x), but realistically we could use something longer for better close-ups of the speaker. This is an important factor when considering cameras: where will your camera be positioned in relation to the subject, and how much reach is needed to get a good shot. Having a camera close to the speaker isn’t always practical with a live audience present, so many of shooters push the limits of their camera lens. Being so far out also puts a lot of strain on a tripod head. It is very easy to jiggle the frame when making slight camera moves fully zoomed out, so a good tripod head should go hand in hand with a long video lens.

For audio, our presenter’s microphone first hits the house soundboard and then travels to our camera where levels are monitored and adjusted. At that point, both the audio and the camera’s images travel through a single HD-SDI BNC cable to our video mixer where audio and video signals split up once again. This happens because the mixer draws audio from whatever source is selected. As such, if a non-camera source is selected, such as the PowerPoint, no audio is present. To resolve this, an HD-SDI direct out from the camera source on the mixer is used to feed a device that re-embeds the audio with the final mixed video signal. The embedding device we use is an AJA FS-1 frame synchronizer.

With the frame synchronizer now kicking out a finished program, complete with embedded audio, our AJA KiPro records the content to an Apple ProRes file. We use a solid-state hard drive module as media, which pops out after an event is over and plugs directly into a computer for file transferring. An important thing to remember for anyone considering a mixer is that an external recording device is necessary to capture the final product.

To webcast, our FS-1 frame synchronizer simultaneously sends out a second finished signal to our Apple laptop. The laptop is outfitted with a video capture card, in our case a Matrox MXO2 LE breakout box, that attaches via the ExpressCard slot. Once the computer recognizes the video signal, it is ready for webcasting. The particular service we use is called Ustream. A link to our Ustream account is embedded in the Walker’s video page, titled The Channel, and viewers can watch the event live through their browser. Live viewership can run the gamut from just a few people to more than 75 viewers. Design-related programs–like the popular lecture by designer Aaron Draplin in March–tend to attract the biggest audiences. Once an event has concluded, Ustream stores a recording of the event within the account. We have the option to link to this recorded Ustream file through our website, but we don’t. Instead we try to quickly process our own recording to improve the quality before uploading it to YouTube.

The most frustrating part of our webcasting experiment has been bandwidth. The Walker has very little of it and thus we share a DSL line with the FTP server for webcasting. The upload speed on this DSL line tops out at 750 kbps. In real life, we get more like 500 kbps, leaving us to broadcast around 400 kbps. These are essentially dial-up numbers, which means the image quality is poor and our stream is periodically lost, even when the bit rate is kept down. Viewers at home are therefore prone to multiple disruptions while watching an event. We do hope to increase bandwidth in the coming months to make our service more reliable.

Earlier I mentioned that the Walker does as little post-production as possible for event documentation, but we still do some. Once the final ProRes file is transferred to an editing station, it is opened up in Final Cut 7. The audio track is then exported as a stand-alone stereo file and opened with Soundtrack Pro where it is normalized to 0db and given a layer of compression. With live events, speakers often turn their head or move away from the microphone periodically. This can make audio levels uneven.  Compression helps bring the softer moments in line with the louder ones, thus limiting dynamic range and delivering a more consistent product.

After the audio track is finished, it is dropped back into the timeline and the program’s front and back end are trimmed. We try to cut out all topical announcements and unnecessary introductions. Viewers don’t need to hear about this weekend’s events two years from now, so we don’t waste their time with it. In addition to tightening up the top of the show, an opening title slide is added including the program’s name and date. The timeline is then exported as a reference file and converted to an MP4 through the shareware program MPEG streamclip.

MPEG streamclip is a favorite of mine because it lists the final file size and lets users easily adjust the bit rate. With a 2GB file size limit on YouTube uploads, we try to maximize bitrate (typically 1800–3000 kbps) for our 1280 x 720p files. Using a constant bit rate for encoding instead of a variable bit rate also saves us a lot of time. With the runtime of our events averaging 90 minutes, the sacrifice in image quality for a constant bit rate seems justified considering how long an HD variable bit rate encode can take.

Once we have the final MP4 file it is uploaded to YouTube and embedded in the Walker’s video page.