Meet Fred Helm, a director and editor at PinnedTV. Fred started PinnedTV in 2006 when he and two of his high school friends decided to leave their day jobs to pursue their passion – filming highlight videos for off-road racing clients. In short time, their business took off and the team found themselves making a 30-minute TV show for local television.

Pinned TV

In 2008, PinnedTV was hired as the production unit for “Best in the Desert” television show, airing nationally on America One Sports. Most recently, PinnedTV Productions produced an episode for the national off-road endurance series, “King of the Hammers” which aired on Spike TV to over 8 million viewers.

For Helm’s latest project, he decided to try something dramatically different from the extreme world of off road racing: golf. He created a company, Virtual Links that specializes in golf course media, producing breathtaking tours of golf courses that are informational as well as beautiful. Virtual Links hosts the videos on its own servers for golf courses to lease and use. Pinned Productions handles all video production for Virtual Links.

To capture golf course footage, Helm shoots in HD, much of it from helicopters. He then edits it in Sony Vegas Pro. While editing some golf course sequences, Helm was presented with a unique challenge: Because golf courses around the country are experiencing severe water rationing, the grass is often not very appealing. Helm’s solution was to use the Film Look plugin from NewBlue Film Effects. He found that the preset ‘Bright Colors’ was the perfect base for correcting most of the images.

Explains Helm,

“With so many dials present within the plugin, we can achieve many different levels of enhancement. Our clients are amazed at the quality they see in the end.”

PinnedTV has used NewBlueFX since discovering the plugins in early 2007. Explains Helm,

“We loved the fact that our preview frame rates were not slowed when the effects were in use.”

He adds that he finds NewBlueFX well suited for HD work: “As HD becomes more consumer oriented, effect plug-ins need to continue to enhance images. Using an effect on HD clips that reduces image quality is not acceptable for broadcast environments. We couldn’t be happier with NewBlueFX in post and will continue to use the product line in all our productions. The FX packages from NewBlueFX allow for our editors to increase creativity with no loss to the clip or segment.”

To check out more of more Fred Helm’s work with Virtual Links, please visit www.virtual-links.com/media. To learn more about PinnedTV please go to www.pinnedtv.com.