About

I’ve spent 18 years making broadcast television. Now I’m rebuilding how I work.

I’m Rob Williams — a Senior Creative Producer and Editor based in Chicago with nearly two decades of experience in broadcast video, on-air promotions, and editorial storytelling.

My career has run through some of the biggest names in Chicago broadcasting. At Weigel Broadcasting, I’ve led creative campaigns that secured sponsorships from 30+ national brands — Paramount Pictures, Allstate, Chase Bank, Home Depot, Peloton, and more — and driven measurable revenue growth year over year. Before that, I spent years at WGN-TV localizing national campaigns across 20+ Tribune-owned stations, helped launch Antenna TV, and contributed to WGN America’s primetime expansion. Along the way I’ve picked up a Regional Emmy and multiple national AVA and VEGA Digital Awards for my work.

I also hold degrees in Independent Filmmaking and Marketing from Governors State University — the latter earned Summa Cum Laude — and I’ve spent years working as a Technical Video Producer for the Fedora Project at Red Hat, building and documenting post-production pipelines that run entirely on Linux.

I say all of this not to impress you, but to establish something simple: when I write a guide here, it comes from someone who has actually shipped the work — on deadline, at scale, for broadcast audiences in the millions.

So why this blog?

Because the tools I’ve relied on my entire career — Adobe, Avid, Apple — are rented. Subscription-gated. Locked to ecosystems I don’t own and can’t fully control.

That started bothering me. And the deeper I got into open source workflows through my work with the Fedora Project, the more I realized a complete professional pipeline — editing, compositing, audio, motion graphics, color — was not only possible outside the proprietary stack, it was genuinely viable.

This site is my public record of making that transition real.

I’m documenting everything: the tools that work, the ones that don’t, the workarounds, the surprises, and the moments where open source does something the expensive stuff can’t. It’s built on Fedora Linux, and it’s being written by someone who still cuts broadcast promos for a living while doing it.

This is not a finished product. It’s a working log — written by a working editor — of what creative independence actually looks like in practice.

What you’ll find here

Practical, experience-backed guides on open source creative tools — video editing, audio post, motion graphics, color workflows, and Linux as a production environment. No fluff. No “just use Kdenlive” without context. Real documentation from real production work.

If you’re a creative professional curious about whether open source tools can hold up — or a Linux user trying to build something serious — you’re in the right place.