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For many, reality TV is a guilty pleasure. Television viewers love the unscripted nature of the genre, the (perceived) unpredictability and the chance that anything can (and sometimes does) happen. For studios involved in the production and post of these shows, a streamlined workflow is essential. Managing the hundreds of hours of footage captured on various video formats is just one of the challenges faced when creating reality programming. This month, Post spoke with a number of companies that are creating some of the most popular and lesser know unscripted programming on TV. Read on to see how they are doing it. BUNIM-MURRAY Many credit Van Nuys, CA's Bunim-Murray Productions with creating the reality television genre when it launched The Real World on MTV back in 1992. The show, now in its 27th season, brings strangers together to live under one roof. The Real World later led to Bunim-Murray (www.bunim-murray.com) producing Road Rules, and more recently, The Challenge. The company is also producing and posting Bad Girls and Love Games — Even Bad Girls Need Love (Oxygen), Project Runway and Project Runway All-Stars (Lifetime), Saddle Ranch (VH1) and all of E!'s Kardashian shows, includ- ing Keeping Up With The Kardashians, Khloe & Lamar and Kourtney & Kim Take New York. Senior VP of post production Mark Raudo- nis has been with the company since season 3 of The Real World (remember San Francis- co?). At press time, he was overseeing a stu- dio-wide transition from Apple's Final Cut Pro to Avid Media Composer 6 and Sym- phony 6, along with Avid ISIS 5000 storage. Shows that are already in production will finish their broadcast run using Final Cut, but any work starting up this year will make use of the new Avid systems, which Raudonis says will number more than a 100 come the spring, when the studio is busiest. It's interesting to note that Bunim-Murray had famously transitioned from Avid to Apple years back — it's all come full circle. "I oversee all the technical process and editing," he says of his role. "I don't stick my head in the creative much anymore because there are too many shows to be involved in, so I do an overall 'guiding hand' of the whole process." Bunim-Murray is a one-stop shop for the production and deliv- ery of reality programming, from concepting to production and field work to final post and delivery. Some of the shows in its portfolio were developed in-house and pitched to networks, others may have been designed specifically to meet a network's request. "Every project has a unique history, a unique genesis and a unique way of making it to the air," says Raudonis. "Some are inter- nal, some are external," he notes of the development. "It's hard to say that there's a steadfast rule of 'this is how things get on the air.'" While one might think that Bunim-Murray has a formula down for the production of programming, the gear they use can vary from one show to another. "We use the right tool for the job — everything from tiny throwaway GoPro cameras to Sony HDCAM SR packages. So it really does run the gamut." Bunim-Murray has used Red cameras to create title sequences, but when it comes to capturing the sheer volume of material that reality shows generate, the company relies on XDCAM HD discs. "It's a wonderful camera," he says of the Red, "but it's overkill for a large majority of what we do. The file sizes it generates are too huge and it's unwieldy. It's not a run-and-gun sort of camera. Our The Real World San Diego is just one of many reality shows produced by Bunim-Murray. Mark Raudonis is inset with his new Avids. prime acquisition format is XDCAM HD disc, and in a sense it is tapeless because it isn't a tape, it's a disc." The tapeless trend is definitely something Raudonis has noticed over the past three years. "File-based is here to stay and growing by the minute," he notes. Bunim-Murray has already incorporated different solid-state cameras — from Sony, Canon and GoPro — into its productions. "They are becoming much more a part of the process," he notes. They do rely on tape for archiving, choosing to go with LTO-5. "Most producers think that 'tapeless' means 'free.' It does not. It basically means postponing going to tape until the post process and not in the field. LTO is a big part of what we are now doing." The editing talent the company uses often comes from a free- lance pool, though the company's long history means many of Director of photography Zac Halberd is shooting the premiere season of Season on the Edge (www.seasonontheedge.com) with Panasonic AG-AF100 large imager HD cinema cameras. The travel adventure fishing show is airing on the NBC Sports Channel and is the creation of director/ host/fisherman Ken Baldwin and producer Brett Gordon. So far, Halberd has shot in New Orleans, the Everglades, the Amazon, Alaska and Mexico. Shoots involve two AF100s and the team makes extensive use of the cameras' variable frame rate capabilities, capturing a lot of action at 60fps. www.postmagazine.com Post • February 2012 25