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INSTANT EXPERT 10 TOP DATA RECORDERS

IN REVIEW MATROX MX02 TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE FOR THE INDEPENDENT PROFESSIONAL MARCH 2009 DV.COM EXTENDED-EDITION REVIEWS ANDAND FEATURES EXCLUSIVE

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Bravo series hosts Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi
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The judges’ table, anchored Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi (center), offers a reali- ty 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 ow in its fifth season, Bravo’s Top Chef has captured the imaginations of would-be culinary artists — and people N 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 prepa- rations 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 pres- sures involved in the very competitive, high-stakes world of top-level restaurants. Cheftestants are judged and either advanced or dropped Editors Kevin Leffler and based on the judges’ take on the taste, presentation and creativity of Katherine Griffin of Magical Elves. the dishes they prepare. The material — 100 to 125 hours per one-hour episode — is way the challenges have unfolded as well as on how the relationships recorded on Panasonic AJ-HDX900 cameras this season in DVCPRO among the cheftestants are evolving. Although episodes are being HD. (Previously it was done in standard definition on SDX900s.) The edited before the culmination of a season, the producers and editors material then goes to the company Magical Elves, home of such still know how things will play out a few episodes down the road and other reality shows as Project Runway, Air Guitar Nation and Last they can choose with their edit to highlight or underplay specific Comic Standing. behavior and reactions in order to subtly foreshadow what’s to come. Located on two floors of 12-story building in the old “bank dis- The editors work in Avid Media Composer 3.0 tied via Avid Unity trict” of Los Angeles, Magical Elves edits, sweetens and onlines its to a 16TB server. Everything is in Avid’s 10:1 compression, and the series on the premises. When lead editors Steve Lichtenstein, Kevin editors make extensive use of Avid’s group clip function, which uses Leffler and Katherine Griffin start work, some of the many hours of timecode indicators to allow editors to simultaneously view all the raw material has already been weeded out. Producers, using paper camera vantage points for any given moment onscreen. transcripts, have given some initial shape to the edit based on the The three truly work as a team, which is something Griffin partic-

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