Digital Video - March 2009 - (Page 24)

SLICE/DICE ularly enjoys. “I love how collaborative it is,” she says. “We all sit down and talk about the arc of each show and the entire season. This season, for example, has 14 episodes in all, and we’ll all be working on different sections. One of us might be doing the ‘Quickfire’ test and another is doing the Elimination Challenge and another doing the Judges’ Table, but we can all discuss how we’re massaging each of the story arcs along the way so there’s a real consistency throughout the whole season.” Workstations had all been based on Mac boxes until this season, when the majority of editors switched to HP xw8600s running Windows XP Professional. “We have fewer crashes,” Leffler says of the change. “We would lose a lot of work before. We still run Macs and PCs; Katherine is working on a Mac. But we’ve found that these PCs are better at running Avid. With the Macs, we’d have a lot of glitches and trouble labeling clips. The PCs also run faster and smoother.” “We’d have five or six crashes a day,” Lichtenstein recalls. “We’d save every 15 minutes, and on the Macs that would take so long to do, you’d lose momentum. You’d forget where you were.” The editors speculate that Avid has been able to work more intricately in the development stage with the PC systems than with Mac and that Apple might be more concerned with making its own Final Cut Pro work with the newest hardware and operating systems than the competing product Avid makes. (It should also be mentioned that this changeover occurred before the release of Avid 3.0.5, which was designed specifically with the Apple OS v10.5, Leopard.) The Magical Elves editors are also expected to lay in the score for episodes from among the hundreds of cues composer Biff Sanders continues to create for the series. “Biff starts each season creating new music,” Lichtenstein explains. “We ask for specific cues like for a Christmas theme or a Hawaiian setting, and then we can manipulate those a bit.” They also work to create a “best audio” pass. “We have an effects library,” Leffler says. “We have sounds like ‘frying’ and ‘sizzling,’ but we rarely use audio effects to embellish the sounds that were recorded on set in the kitchen. We also have dramatic booms and cymbal effects we use in particular areas of the show.” Online conforming with the native DVCPRO material as well as color correction is done in-house using Avid’s Nitris DX system. Griffin, a veteran of editing reality TV, started at Magical Elves in the early seasons of Project Runway. “I like the approach Magical Elves takes with all its shows,” she says. “They really investigate the people’s talents and look at what drives them to do what they do. I worked on reality shows before I came here where the producers weren’t all that interested in having the audience get a real impression of the people and situations in the show, where they would just push personalities to get a certain pre-determined outcome. “Working on that kind of show really didn’t feel good in my soul,” Griffin concludes. “I didn’t like what I was part of. But on Project Runway and now Top Chef, I think we’re showing the audience real personalities and focusing on their real talents, and it kind of warms my heart to work on these shows.” DV http://www.lcdracks.com http://www.lcdracks.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - March 2009

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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