Building Out Effects for This Old House and Now, This New House

In its 30 seasons on the air, the PBS series This Old House has become as much of an American classic as the homes its craftsmen restore from one episode to the next. The show has 17 Emmy wins and 83 nominations, including yet another announced this week, to its credit.

Michael Svirsky, TOH‘s post supervisor and also its primary motion graphics artist, manages a team of six editors who cut the show in HD on Final Cut and create effects in both Final Cut and After Effects with a range of filters in Boris Continuum Complete 6 AE.

When TOH won its latest Emmy in 2009, Svirsky and his team had a very short window to add an animated award bug before the next episode aired. “Because I was able to work directly in After Effects and had all my Boris 3D tools readily available, that was a huge time saver,” he says. “The same goes for working in Final Cut. On some renders, in fact, I actually prefer compositing in Final Cut using Boris plug-ins, rather than in After Effects, because it’s faster and I already get my real-time playback right then and there without having to export and doing yet another render.”

TOH went fully HD two years ago. The year before that, the facility switched from Avid to Final Cut. “It was an enterprise-wide decision and I came on board while that was happening,” explains Svirsky. “One of the main goals was shared storage, so the Xsan gave us that.”

Svirsky began his career, like most of his colleagues, as an Avid editor. He also spent three and half years at Avid before joining TOH. “When we moved to Final Cut, we were all starting out with a similar knowledge base,” he says. “I found it fairly easy to grasp. In fact, a lot of the contract and part-time editors we’ve brought on here since are Avid editors but feel just as comfortable using Final Cut.”

Each application has its moments, he admits, and “every once in a while you hit a snag. But I think editing isn’t about the applications. It’s about technique. A capable editor should be able to use either or both.” Some of TOH‘s older material are archived as Avid projects, he says. “We have to restore them periodically and use Automatic Duck to bring them into Final Cut.”

Classic Digs

Located in the historic New England town of Concord, MA, the TOH production facility is, fittingly, just yards from Minute Man National Historic Park. “Our offices are just as you’d imagine for This Old House,” says Svirsky. “We’re in a restored, red barn that has a weathervane with a cow on top. It really is a picturesque setting, though it’s not the barn you see on TV.” TOH also shoots its studio wrap-around segments for Ask This Old House, a weekly viewer Q+A show, on the building’s top floor.

Owners Time Inc., which publishes the spin-off magazine and Web site, purchased the This Old House brand and television production unit of the show from WGBH ten years ago. Being owned by a publishing company-albeit one with corporate siblings like HBO and Warner Bros.-means tight budgets and fast workflows. It also means folding in the rolling process of creating short FLV deliverables for the show’s Web site into the daily grind. “Two years ago, there was a huge initiative to populate that site with content from our shows,” he says. “We spent about a year cutting down our shows and delivered almost 300 three-to-four minute segments to them. It’s become a rolling process. Once a show is cut and airs, a producer will determine which piece needs to be featured. It’s the most popular aspect of the site, and we’re constantly asked to do more and more of it.”

TOH also operates for hire and has sold its next venture, This New House, to Scripps. It is scheduled to air the last week of July on The DIY Network. “As a magazine style show with short, compressed stories, it’s a very different show from our two flagships,” says Svirsky. In each 30-minute episode we highlight new technology, new gadgets, new building styles and techniques-anything ‘wow’ in build-it-yourself or professional construction. We’ll have shows on green construction, LEDs, smart houses, small houses, folding houses-you name it.”

The animations for the new show, which appear as three-dimensional blueprints and product diagrams, are cut with a quick pace to match the show’s fast camera moves and edgier overall style. Says Svirsky, “We’re using a lot of BCC Swish Pan, a real favorite here. The show’s a complete reversal, actually, of This Old House. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but it helps us examine both styles in a new light. Now that we’re working on this new show, we look at our edits on TOH and ask, ‘Does that segment feel too long? Is that just too slow?’ Certainly TOH has evolved in the past few years to match viewers’ own evolving tastes. But we’re not looking to change it and make it become what This New House is. These two shows can happily co-exist.”

Despite the robust 3D features already in his plug-in toolset, he says he decided to purchase MAXON CINEMA 4D to help him create the volume of animated diagrams demanded by the new show. “We looked initially at how we could do these in After Effects, and even Boris BCC Extruded EPS, a tool we use a lot on TOH. Without a dedicated 3D app like CINEMA 4D, I was fully prepared and perfectly happy to create these diagrams and illustrations with Boris’s 3D tools. There are very elegant workflows between CINEMA 4D and After Effects, but I still find it somewhat of a task to jump back and forth from CINEMA 4D to After Effects in order to composite and then back again into Final Cut. It just stops your creative flow or whatever momentum or cadence you’ve got going, even if you’re fully comfortable in each of those apps separately.”

Expanding Roles

TOH continues to benefit from new software bundles and music resources that Svirsky and his team use in house. “One reason my own role here has evolved into being both a post supervisor and motion graphics artist is that Final Cut came with this extensive graphics package, with Motion and Color. Suddenly, there’s an expectation that your editors really do have the potential and capability to create slicker, better-produced graphics. And we can.”

He creates some graphics and lower-thirds, including the show opens, as templates in Motion. “But I create the backgrounds and other design elements in After Effects,” he says. “Then we create the templates in Motion so the editors can dynamically interchange without having me do it.”

“We’re a very small, efficient group,” adds Svirsky. “We’ve ballooned a little bit to accommodate the new show. It would be inconceivable for us to hire an external graphics company. But the fact that we have access to these tools to create great content has let us do it in house. Five or ten years ago, these kinds of plug-ins just weren’t available.”

The downside? “We’re pretty much under the gun for our deliverables all the time.”