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The Takeaway DV Production Process
Takeaway was a 13 x half-hour series devised and produced by the Farnham Film Company’s Ian Lewis at Rooftop Productions for the Carlton Food Network, and is now available for acquisition internationally through Carlton International. More about the content of the series on www.rooftop-productions.co.uk.
The series was filmed on a Sony DSR500W DVCAM camera, (with a broadcast lens), in 16:9 widescreen. We used 94 minute tapes, compromising between taking advantage of the camera’s ability to use long tapes and natural nervousness about having too much material recorded on a single tape - what happens if the single 180 minute tape containing all your rushes goes missing, or gets scrunched or wiped?
Rushes were then viewed and selected sections captured via Firewire on to PC hard disk. The programmes were then edited using Adobe Premiere, and played off through the Firewire interface to a DVCAM sub-master containing all bars and tone, clocks, idents., and captions, with final-mix audio tracks.
The DVCAM sub-master was then taken to a high-end facility house (with a copy of the broadcaster’s delivery specifications) and copied to the final Digital Betacam transmission tape. They made sure that all the levels were right, and that the programme time-code started at 10:00:00:00, as expected in the UK (which we couldn’t do on our DVCAM deck). Effectively the “on-line edit” was just a copying procedure.
Through a mixture of care, good luck and thorough planning, all the programmes were accepted by the channel’s quality control engineers.
It has become conventional to shoot on DV and then transfer the DV tapes to Beta SP or Digital Betacam for editing in a traditional off-line/on-line procedure. If most of your material is DV (or DVCAM, or DVCPRO etc) and you can edit in native DV, there seems very little point in doing this. The pictures aren’t going to get any better because they’ve been copied to more expensive gear. In fact, unless they’re copied digitally, via SDI, there’ll be a slight loss in quality.
We found that a few crucial elements saw to the success of our procedure:
- most important of all, we talked to our chosen facility house right at the beginning. We did a test using the equipment and the procedures that we planned to use on the final programmes, so that we could correct any problems, or potential problems that they saw.
- we took great care over black and peak white levels. DV can and does produce sub-black, and illegal white (as far as broadcast TV is concerned). “Legalisers” at your chosen facility can correct most, but not all problems. It’s essential to talk to them first, and know how to use the more arcane colour correction facilities of your edit software to make sure you get over these hurdles. We know of whole series of programmes that have been rejected by broadcasters for just these technical reasons.
- in spite of the above, the colour sampling compromises built in to the DV format do not make it good for colour-effects or multi-layer manipulation. The basic philosophy was to do as little manipulation of our original video material as we possibly could, and leave whatever we did to as late a stage as possible. That’s a good rule in any case, but particularly important when you haven’t got much spare quality to play with.
- producing a good audio mix can be harder than you expect. Do not forget that there is no “headroom” in digital audio. If it goes over the top, it sounds horrible and cannot be rescued. We found keeping the peaks around -12dB on Premiere’s meters seems to have worked.
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