Projects
COOKING UP A STORM
How the PDW-700 answered The F Word’s challenge to
cuts costs without the results showing on screen
Gordon Ramsay wasn’t the only one
using the f-word on the latest series of Optomen’s hit With a large number of ISO audio feeds required for
cookery show. As Phil Wade from hire firm Fat Dog Gordon Ramsay, the Maitre’D, all contestants and the
Solutions jokes: “There was less f-ing money!” guests in the restaurant, recording direct to XDCAM
That was the challenge of the show, reveals Wade; saved a huge amount of time in post because there was
how to cut costs yet maintain the quality of The F no need to marry up video and audio, recalls Wade.
Word, now in its fifth series on Channel 4. “Also in post there are big savings because you can
Shot as live in a kitchen and restaurant environment, digitise XDCAM rushes faster than real time. We saved
Optomen needed five cameras on the floor to cover an estimated 40-50% of the time on digitising. This
what was a complicated shoot. With pans of boiling made a big difference when posting at Evolutions, with
water and a busy kitchen, cables were out and each show generating up to 80 hours of material.”
microwave camera systems were in. Another benefit of XDCAM was its disc cache
One major contribution to lowering the cost was the exchange, which allows discs to be changed without
introduction of XDCAM in the shape of the PDW-700 interrupting video or sound acquisition. Wade explains:
hired from Sony specialist dealer Visual Impact. Wade “As long as it’s set up right, the disc will automatically
realised there was another saving to be made – the eject giving the cameraman 20 seconds to change the
recording of up to eight channels of audio direct onto disc. When the new disc is loaded the first thing it does
XDCAM rather than on the computer audio systems. is to download the cached material.”
24 theproducer Winter 2010
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