My first post college employment experience came as a big surprise to me when I received a phone call mid August from my friend Justin Molter. He told me that our previous Post Production teacher Erik Talbert, was looking for someone to cover for the Quality Control position on the TLC show Little People Big World.
Quality Control required me to watch all of the raw footage captured in the field and ensure it was technically clean before sending the tapes to L.A. to be edited. Because the cameras the production shot on recorded to both tape and hard drive, I made sure there were no problems or “hits” on the footage from the tapes. Since the environment we were filming in sometimes caused these digital “hits” to occur on the tape footage, It was my job to record new tapes from the hard drive footage which are called Sub-masters.
Basically, if there was a “hit” 10 :00 minutes into the first tape, I would load footage from 9:30 to 10:30 from the hard drive and record it to a new tape which was then sent with the footage to editors in L.A. so they would have a clean copy for the footage from the 10:00 minute.
Kinda confusing to explain and it was a tech job I was not too familiar with but I picked it up quickly. It entailed watching all raw footage, interviews, car cams, B-roll, time lapses, as well as handling the appearance and location releases. I tied up all the loose ends in the field and sent everything from Oregon to L.A.
Though I only worked on the last 3 weeks of the production, the time I spent there was filled with problem solving, networking, and great experience working on a real production.
A big thank you to Erik Talbert, Justin Molter, the crew of LPBW and the Roloff family for welcoming me aboard. I would have liked to include more pictures from my time there, but the Roloffs value their privacy.