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February 2016

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FROM HEAVEN TO HELL www.postmagazine.com 24 POST FEBRUARY 2016 checks out the view from the platform mid-way through the show, a final big reveal of the finished treehouse is always a wow moment. Construction issues may crop up during the building process, often arising from the trees themselves, and problem solving always makes for compelling storytelling. Chainsaw does the conform and color correction on Avid Symphony. "Most of the color challenges come inside the treehouse after it's built," notes Shirey. "There is limited space for lighting so we depend on the sunlight; if it's super-bright we might need to bring it down so the look is pretty consistent." Although the show uses an array of cameras, Shirey says the different formats are "not bothersome" to viewers because they are accustomed to cam- eras being allocated for specific tasks. "You can tell the GoPro footage, but the GoPros are always used for unusual loca- tions," he explains. "And the beauty shots with the 5D are always beautiful." Location audio is "a tougher issue" to deal with, but production sound still comes in "pretty clean," Shirey reports. "Pete (Nelson) has a fairly decent-size crew, and we can't mic them all at the same time. There's also a lot of noise from the tools. But field audio and the mix by Chainsaw do a great job, and everything comes out clean and understandable." The show makes extensive use of mu- sic. "It's pretty much wall-to-wall," says Shirey. "We rarely dip to nothing unless it's for a joke. We use a combination of custom cues from David Vanacore and the Discovery Music Source library. David occasionally composes a song for a specific scene, too — like a Texas-themed country song for one of our episodes." Shows are archived on LTO-5 tape and source media is backed up on G-Technology drives. The show is deliv- ered to the network on HDCAM SR, "a robust delivery format," with LTO back up with QuickTime masters and audio stems. Part two of Season 4 will begin shoot- ing at the end of February and will air in the fall. Shirey doesn't foresee any work- flow changes; "We're a pretty well-oiled machine now," he declares. But, "If and when we move to 4K, we'll have to make some changes," he says. "I think we'd be going from 300 gigabytes to over 1 terabyte per day, so storage and back up are where the issues would be." HELL'S KITCHEN With Season 15 currently airing, this hit Fox cooking competition proves that if you can't stand the heat, you gotta get outta Hell's Kitchen. Hosted by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, the show pits chefs against one other in teams and later individually as Ramsay tasks them with cooking challenges and dinner services. Participating chefs reside in a dormitory on-set for the duration of the show. Hell's Kitchen migrated to HD acquisi- tion only with this current season. "When I started we were shooting standard definition 4:3," recalls post producer Rusty Austin, who joined the show in Season 2. "The following year we went to 16:9, but we remained SD until the end of Season 14." The show's current and upcoming seasons were shot on Sony PMW-F55 cameras in the fall of 2014 at Occidental Studios in Van Nuys, CA. There's a con- tinuity of look from season to season, although elements of the grand hall, kitchens and dorm are reconfigured. Hell's Kitchen sometimes goes on lo- cation — contestants have visited Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York in past years. Shooters acquire a tremendous amount of footage in the kitchens and dorm; in addition, there are at least 1,000 confessional and on-the-fly interviews per season. "We have seven handheld cameras, two jibs and 72 robocams feeding seven decks," says Austin. "We have 12 to 15 streams of video every day — maybe 3,500 hours in 10 episodes." He estimates a 400:1 shooting ratio. With that much footage to work with it's not surprising that Hell's Kitchen is extensively edited — but not manipulat- ed, says Austin. "Dinner service can run two-and-a-half hours, and we show 10 to 15 minutes of it, so it's highly edited. But we don't change the personalities of the people involved; we don't make them look good or bad. We may show examples of chefs doing things that led to their elimination, but we always show the dinner service that happened." Each show has a main producer, producer and two associate produc- ers whose responsibilities range from shooting through post. Two supervising producers oversee the series with an ex- ecutive producer at the top of the ranks. Thirteen editors and a roster of three to 10 assistant editors are tasked with cutting each season in post production Fox's Hell's Kitchen only recently migrated to HD. A 400:1 shooting ratio calls for considerable editing in post.

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