As you may recall, The Ride is a reality TV show produced by Backfield Productions, a joint venture of AIC and All American Games, currently airing on Fox Sports Net and Comcast Sports Net across America. One of the little-known facts about the show is the quick turnaround between shooting and airing each episode. For many reality television programs, a single episode can take weeks to shoot, and a month or more to cut into a viable story. The average episode of The Ride is shot in three days and edited in the following seven. The reason for this remarkable turnaround rate is that the show’s airdates are carefully coordinated with actual events, some of which air live on television. Both the Aloha Prep Bowl and the US Army All-American Bowl would reveal plot points in the show if certain episodes did not air before these events occurred.
The turnaround time is a difficult challenge when we are fortunate enough to be shooting just miles from our office, and we have the ability to dump footage directly into our system and can transcode overnight on our Mac Pro computers. However, when the show travels, as it frequently does, we approach an entirely new level of complexity. Something as simple as flying down to Florida for CJ Bennett’s home visit became a much more worrisome trip because our editors would have one less day with the footage than they were accustomed to, as the footage would be traveling back with us the day AFTER filming was finished. Thankfully our lead editors, Chris Sladek and Fred Segro, worked at superhuman speed through all hours of the night to make sure the final product met the level of quality we expect and thoroughly told the story director Enrique Mendoza intended.
Brett Zuckerman shooting with the HPX3000 in Hawaii.
The Aloha Prep Bowl presented problems of another order of magnitude. We planned to shoot for six days in Hawaii and cut two episodes from the trip. The first episode would be due only four days after we returned, which would effectively give the editors half the time to cut an episode as they had had previously. In addition, we would have to have all the footage transcoded before returning to even give them a chance at meeting the deadline. The only option was clearly to send back footage throughout the course of the week and let them cut as we shot. However, being in Hawaii also meant that we were 5 hours behind the East Coast and about 5,600 miles away. Shipping footage meant that editors would have Tuesday’s footage on Friday, and wouldn’t even see Friday’s footage until the following Monday. We needed them to be cutting at the same pace as we were shooting, so uploading every night was our only hope.
The solution was ultimately provided by the camera that we have carried through the show, the Panasonic HPX 3700 and HPX 3000 (see our camera selection process). As many know, this particular line of camera records directly to solid state P2 Cards. A lesser-known fact about this camera is also that it can create proxy files on the fly that are readily ingestible in Final Cut Pro. These are, of course, low-resolution files (320×240), and we set the camera to record at 1.5Mbps. The proxy video is recorded to both the P2 cards and an optional SD card that is inserted into the side of the camera body. I suggest that you always shoot to the SD card as well as the P2s, because you automatically have the proxies backed up in two places. As a cinematographer, I find this option particularly appealing because I do not like having to interrupt or slow down the data manager to get a look at the day’s footage—instead, either myself or the director can take the SD card home at the end of the night.
Images above taken from Panasonic White Paper
Reviewing the footage from the SD cards/P2 Cards is as easy as one would expect, you simply click and play the QuickTimes. The downside is the resolution, also as expected. For those hopefully few times when a shot is not properly exposed or has questionable focus, the proxies will not confirm or abate your deepest fears.
The most difficult part of creating the proxies themselves had nothing to do with the camera, or even the data management. Unlike the Red One, the HPX 3000 does not automatically create these proxies—the technology is not even built into the camera. An “Encoder Card” is required to tell the camera to create the proxies. Once you have the card, it could not be much easier to use; you put the card into the card reader on the top of the camera, set up in the menu which data rate you want to record at, and start recording. Finding a place to rent these encoder cards is another story. At a retail of $1229.95 (B&H Photo.com), a rental was the only way for me to go, but not the easiest. I asked the rental house for The Ride to see what they could find, but it seemed that no one on the East Coast had either heard of them or cared to purchase one—and I needed two. After a desperate Google search I found that Cinequipt, a camera rental house out of Minneapolis, had a number of them that they handed out as a standard part of their rental package for a P2 camera. I also found out no one knew they were including them—not even the cinematographers on the jobs. We agreed on a weekly rental rate and the hard part was over.
Written by Cinematographer of The Ride Brett Zuckerman
More to come in Part II…