The press behind the paper
The Public Record is the newspaper; Civic Media Studio is the press that makes it. The Studio is a desktop suite that fetches, transcribes, translates, describes and cuts civic video on your own machine — your files, your GPU, nothing uploaded. Everything those tools produce that can be read already lives here on the record; the tools themselves stay at the desk, because they touch local media and local compute — and below, for each one, is why.
the civic media suite
Community Highlighterfinds the moments
Highlighter reads a meeting on your machine and cuts a reel from the tape — the fetch, the read, and the cut are local. its work already lives here → the moments it found, kept in the record
Video Grabberbrings the meeting home
Grabber downloads civic recordings to your disk and conforms them for air — a fetch pipeline the browser can't and won't run. its work already lives here → how every tape here got onto the record
Community Publishergets it seen
Publisher renders clips and burns captions from your program file — an ffmpeg pass on footage the web app never uploads. its work already lives here → a publish kit for every meeting
Community Interpretercarries it across
Interpreter translates a meeting on your own API key, with your town's glossary — the making happens at the desk; the tracks it makes are served right here. its work already lives here → the language menu on every meeting page
Community Narratorsays what's on screen
Narrator drafts descriptions with vision on your key and speaks them in a local voice — the render is desk work; the descriptions it writes read here as text. its work already lives here → the described transcript on any narrated meeting
control-z — the finishing tools
Pivotfollows the subject
Pivot reframes your own master files — footage that lives on your disk, not on the record.
Stencilcuts the stencil
Stencil runs SAM 2 on your GPU against your clip — a model runtime and footage that never leave the desk.
Scribewrites it all down
Scribe listens to your audio on-device — the transcribe pass is local compute on files you hold. its work already lives here → every transcript you're reading here
Clearrescues the take
Clear rescues your dialogue with local DSP — it works on the audio file in your hand.
Riserestores the detail
Rise upscales your masters with a local model — the frames are yours and the compute is on-device.
Depthmaps the scene
Depth reads your footage into a depth map on-device and writes Fusion templates for your Resolve.
Indexknows where everything is
Index catalogs the folders on your own drives — it searches files only your machine can see.
Slatemakes it official
Slate renders broadcast graphics — ProRes and PNG files written to your disk for your air chain.
Get the desktop app — macOS
macOS 12+ · Apple silicon · signed & notarized
Civic Media Studio and The Public Record are a Community AI Project — designed + developed by Stephen Walter with Brookline Interactive Group & Neighborhood AI · CC BY-SA 4.0.