Digital Video - March 2009 - (Page 22)

The judges’ table, anchored Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi (center), offers a reality check for the show’s “cheftestants.” SLICE/DICE THE WINNING RECIPE FOR EACH EPISODE OF TOP CHEF DEMANDS EXPERT AVID SKILLS AND PLENTY OF HP COMPUTING POWER. BY JON SILBERG N ow in its fifth season, Bravo’s Top Chef has captured the imaginations of would-be culinary artists — and people who couldn’t make a three-minute egg but get into the show’s big personalities, mini-dramas and spirit of competition. The reality series brings together a group of “cheftestants,” whose preparations are judged by host Padma Lakshmi, chef and entrepreneur Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons of Food & Wine magazine and food critic Toby Young. The show provides viewers with a taste of the pressures involved in the very competitive, high-stakes world of top-level restaurants. Cheftestants are judged and either advanced or dropped based on the judges’ take on the taste, presentation and creativity of the dishes they prepare. The material — 100 to 125 hours per one-hour episode — is recorded on Panasonic AJ-HDX900 cameras this season in DVCPRO HD. (Previously it was done in standard definition on SDX900s.) The material then goes to the company Magical Elves, home of such other reality shows as Project Runway, Air Guitar Nation and Last Comic Standing. Located on two floors of 12-story building in the old “bank district” of Los Angeles, Magical Elves edits, sweetens and onlines its series on the premises. When lead editors Steve Lichtenstein, Kevin Leffler and Katherine Griffin start work, some of the many hours of raw material has already been weeded out. Producers, using paper transcripts, have given some initial shape to the edit based on the dv march 2009 Editors Kevin Leffler and Katherine Griffin of Magical Elves. way the challenges have unfolded as well as on how the relationships among the cheftestants are evolving. Although episodes are being edited before the culmination of a season, the producers and editors still know how things will play out a few episodes down the road and they can choose with their edit to highlight or underplay specific behavior and reactions in order to subtly foreshadow what’s to come. The editors work in Avid Media Composer 3.0 tied via Avid Unity to a 16TB server. Everything is in Avid’s 10:1 compression, and the editors make extensive use of Avid’s group clip function, which uses timecode indicators to allow editors to simultaneously view all the camera vantage points for any given moment onscreen. The three truly work as a team, which is something Griffin particwww.dv.com 22 http://www.dv.com

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Digital Video - March 2009 Contents MX02 Instant Expert First Look: EOS 5D Mark II Powerlight 1735W Color by the Numbers A Versatile Disc Indeed Slice/Dice DV101 Production Diary

Digital Video - March 2009

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