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MillimeterThe Dirt (Literally) on Survivor in HD
Oct 14, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
Survivor has always been a show that has depended on exotic, lush, and colorful tropical locations. From a development standpoint, they’re simply running out of locations. The transition to HD has given the show’s location hunters a new map and given the postproduction crew new challenges.
“When we all first came back and started looking at [the initial Gabon footage], we were concerned like ‘Wow this looks like New Jersey,’” Atzinger says. “It just didn’t have giant peaks or volcanoes. It didn’t have a pristine white coast line. It lacked a lot of things that would pop out in a low-definition format. What we didn’t anticipate is how much HD exaggerated the subtleties, and how much we could manipulate, and I mean push, the color range of stuff. In fact, had we shot someplace that was more classically Survivor—you know, tons of palm trees and bright sunlight—I think it would have been garish.
“There’s this kind of phenomenon which we can now go for subtle in places, and get dramatic results,” Atzinger says. “There was something about—in order to give people the visual spectacle and make their eyes pop, we had to go over top of jagged points of rock and twisting around. Now we can drift over a field of grass in a helicopter and it has a sort of spectacular feeling. Whereas, that would have looked like behind-the-scenes footage [in SD].”
In a New Jersey-esque landscape, where some noted they thought Gabon really lacked vibrant colors and fantastic contrasts—the postproduction artists were allowed to expand their role by creating the dramatic look and feel of this season’s shows.
“With HD, the range of color correction just being able to say like: 'Let’s turn everything that is green, greener. Let’s turn everything that is blue, bluer.' The guys are able to push it and enhance it all—change it all to the contrast.” Atzinger says. “I noticed that when this stuff is finished, we had a main title sequence that was film-look, color-corrected, that looked like they took ink and sprayed it across on top of it. Our entire show looks like that now. It really does look like film.”
With a new understanding of the intricacies inherent in the HD footage itself, it will most likely cause all reality crews to rethink their entire process from preproduction to post. And, while Survivor started as the show that forged a successful path for so many other reality shows, Atzinger feels that this look and feel that HD provides once again gives them another point of separation from the rest of the reality shows on the air.
“I’ve always felt that Survivor has had a certain elegance to it, [a] sort of integrity, that some of the other less-developed shows didn't have,” Atzinger says. “And I think that what HD does is a couple of things. A lot of these reality shows kind of thrive in making out bits and clips—you can kind of portray things that aren’t there.
“So, I think what’ll happen is that as other shows begin to make the conversion to HD, what HD will reveal for some of the shows is, it’ll be a liability for them,” Atzinger says. “It’ll show the lack of depth in art departments and sets—and things like gaffer's tape. Shows that do go the extra mile to engineer with quality sets and quality locations and quality casts—it sort of exaggerates all of the good qualities, but it also exaggerates all of the bad qualities visually.”
On the technical side, Survivor Post Producer John Heard notes that for their transition to HD acquisition, the Survivor: Gabon team moved from Sony’s Digitbeta system to the Sony PDW-700 XDCAM workflow noting that they liked the potential of the workflow system and the opportunity for consistency as they continue to use HD technologies in the future. Some of the specifics that lead them to XDCAM include the 4:2:2 HD acquisition, cloning, recording of cuts back to an XD deck, and proxy files. But the number one benefit they saw in the XDCAM system was the archival storage on an XDCAM disc versus a flash card or memory drive—which allowed them to utilize similar location-to-post-facility workflow.
For post, XDCAM discs from the 15 different PDW-700s they use on location are shipped from Gabon back to the Los Angeles post facility where the footage is dubbed onto an Avid Unity system. Then, four editing teams sift through the hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage to cut together each episode—on average, they cut down 60 minutes of raw footage into two minutes of aired show. The editing is done via Avid Media Composers running off the Unity. The footage is acquired in 1080p 29.97 and the final show is delivered to CBS in 1080i 59.94.
For more on shooting HD in Gabon, read Focusing in HD.
