Thanassi Panagiotaras C.S.I. is a Melbourne-based post-production finishing specialist and founder of TP Studio, with 25 years of experience across colour grading, online editing, mastering, deliverables, archival restoration and AI and synthetic production. His work spans feature documentary, broadcast television, streaming platforms, branded content and campaign production.

He came into the industry at the exact moment it flipped from analog to digital. His first tools were Final Cut Pro 1, After Effects 1, Premiere before it was Pro, and miniDV. He didn't inherit a career. He built one from the ground up, learning compositing, motion graphics, and offline editing through sheer obsession with the craft.

After completing a video production course and co-founding a production company through the early 2000s, he joined La Trobe University in 2004 as part of a full studio production team. For ten years the work was daily and relentless: multi-camera shoots, live switching, location sound, camera work, post production across every format the era could produce. It built a technical foundation most practitioners never get.

It was at La Trobe that colour grading became an obsession. Apple's Final Cut Studio introduced Color, a node-based grading application, and Thanassi was immediately drawn in. When Apple killed Final Cut Studio and Color along with it, he found DaVinci Resolve 9 and started putting himself through training on his own time and at his own expense. Master class after master class, working colourists at the top of the industry. By the time he left La Trobe in 2014, with a redundancy package that gave him the runway to go independent, he was ready.

His first freelance job was a feature film as colourist. He hasn't looked back.

Since 2014, operating as TP Studio, he has finished longform projects for Stan, ABC, and Amazon Prime Video, graded campaigns for major Australian and international brands, and delivered broadcast-ready work to every major Australian network. His credits span the full post pipeline: offline editing, colour grading, online finishing, archival restoration, mastering, and deliverables, often as the sole finishing specialist across a project from first assembly to final delivery.

The archival restoration work deserves particular mention. On Suzi Q, Love in Bright Landscapes and Abebe Butterfly Song, he spent hundreds of hours processing decades-old documentary footage: Betacam, standard definition and interlaced material from the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, processed frame by frame and brought up to a standard that held up on cinema screens and streaming platforms. TP Studio brings older, damaged or mixed-format footage into modern finishing pipelines through restoration, colour correction, clean-up, online finishing and delivery. It is painstaking, technically demanding work that requires both technical care and visual sensitivity. Most finishing houses won't take it on.

The AI integration came in late 2025, not from curiosity about the technology but from a client brief that demanded it. An Ocean Spray campaign for Spencer Street Station in Melbourne required animated product reveals across three physically separate screens treated as a single continuous display. There was no footage, only stills. He identified, evaluated and deployed AI generation tools under live production conditions and delivered on deadline. That first job opened the door to a discipline that has since become a core part of the studio offering.

He is now the AI production lead on The Nullarbor, a feature documentary directed by Stephen Amis, where fully synthetic AI-generated reenactments of the 1988 Knowles family UFO incident are being produced and integrated into a broadcast-standard pipeline alongside traditional documentary footage.

Post Production
DaVinci Resolve Studio · Premiere Pro · After Effects · Photoshop

AI Pipeline
Higgsfield · Kling · Seedance · ElevenLabs · Suno · Topaz Video AI · ACE Studio

TP Studio is a fully calibrated boutique post-production studio operating from Melbourne. It is not a freelancer with a laptop. It is a specialist operation with 25 years of craft behind it, capable of taking a project from first cut to final delivery and now, from concept to synthetic image.