Projects
XDCAM HAS THE X FACTOR HotCam’s Trevor Hotz on the thinking behind The X Fac- tor’s move to shooting on the PDW-F800 and PMW-EX3
Trevor Hotz, joint md at hire company HotCam, has been planning the move of ITV juggernaut The X Factor to file-based production for some time with the network. So when ITV decided to make the leap to HD this year Hotz had already done plenty of thinking about which camera was best suited to the task. The PDW-F800, Sony’s top of the range XDCAM camcorder – equipped with three 2/3-inch type 2.2- megapixel HD CCDs (also used on Sony’s well- established systems camera the HDC-1500) – was the camera for the job in Hotz’s view.
“If you are shooting the amount of footage we do on this show (around 6,000 hours) file -based formats were ideal, because they don’t need to be ingested into the edit, which speeds things up considerably.” On a fast turnaround show such as The X Factor the immediacy of editing using XDCAM Dual Layer Professional Discs was a huge factor, says Hotz. “Shot
at 50Mb/s the footage is unbelievably good, you can edit immediately and at the end of the shoot transfer everything from XDCAM disc onto an IT tape format for archive. This means you can re-format the discs and use them again next year. The cost savings can be phenomenal and –in the long run –it’s a cheaper format than tape.”
HotCam hired out 15 F800s to producer Talkback
Thames/Syco, hooked up with fibre optic cable with output monitored by an engineer so there was no need for a grade –which would have been too time consuming on this fast-moving entertainment format. These main cameras were backed up by eight producer/directors kitted out with compact PMW-EX3s shooting to solid state memory cards, which were used to follow contestants backstage before and after their auditions and for shooting their interviews with Dermot O’Leary, as well as taking footage from outside the
venues. The one complication was using Nanoflash to up the bit rate on the EX3s to 50Mb/s and then transferring the EX3 footage from SxS Memory Cards onto XDCAM disc for editing at The Farm. “We used a media manager because to do the
transfers and to log the footage properly was crucial in keeping track of a job of this scale.” The Farm’s group technical director Dave Klafkowski adds: “Because The X Factoris such a monster show downloading all the footage from disc and keeping it all active on a drive would have taken up Terabytes of space. That’s why we kept the footage on XDCAM discs, and pulled it in when required.” “We used to fill the floor of our edit suites with tapes, on previous series, but with the physically smaller XDCAM media we only take up half a table. XDCAM was the obvious and probably the only choice.”
Autumn 2010 theproducer 25
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