Press release from Well Above
The Best in Australia series of food programmes starring Ben O'Donoghue, Darren Simpson and Anna Gare has grown in popularity over three seasons to become one of the highest rating food series on Foxtel. The series also commenced screening on ABC1 late last year.
The Best in Australia is produced by Alun and Marian Bartsch and dIrected by Carmelo Musca. According to Alun Bartsch the show’s clever format backed up by great technology has been the recipe for its success. “At Mago Films we have used three JVC GY-HD251E cameras in each of the three series of 'The Best in Australia' (Lifestyle Channel, ABC, UKTV and International sales).
Mago Films also used a GY-HD251E on the International Award winning documentary The Fabulous Flag Sisters (Joint winner of Best Documentary at Roma Fiction Film Festival).
“With the GY-HD251E we used a Firestore hard-drive with the comfort of tapes as back-up. So we'd become used to getting the rushes digitally transferred from source to hard-drive within minutes rather than hours – as it was in the good old days of tape only.” he said.
With advances by JVC in solid state acquisition solutions Bartsch and his team decided to purchase some of JVC’s award winning GY-HM700E cameras with, what he describes as ‘very pleasing results indeed’.
Bartsch added, “We've recently made the leap to the new GY-HD700E series cameras. Using brand new GY-HD700E cameras was like the first time I rode a bike without the trainer wheels. Gone was security of a tape back-up, but in its place was the incredible simplicity of an SD card which was even easier to ingest into the edit system – and that's just the tech side of it, the pictures in full HD are mind-blowing!”
The compact shoulder GY-HM700E records 35Mbps high definition video and uncompressed audio directly to inexpensive SDHC media cards in the native QuickTime format used by Apple Final Cut Pro™. Users are able to drag video clips directly from the storage media onto the NLE timeline, eliminating the need for transcoding that can consume excessive time and disk space. With this workflow, video files maintain first-generation image quality. For the GY-HM700E JVC developed a proprietary codec capable of providing highly efficient compression up to 35Mb/s, a bit rate supporting full 1920×1080 encoding in the HQ mode. This results in recorded images of extremely high quality. MPEG-2 Long GOP encoding is the most widely implemented broadcast standard compression and is currently supported by all popular editing systems and broadcast servers. Additionally, the cameras can record 720p (19Mb/s and 35Mb/s) and 1080i (25Mb/s) in SP mode, assuring compatibility with today’s most popular professional NLE systems.
Alun Bartsch added, “The colours, the clarity, the sharpness, the depth. It's frightening to think that only a couple of years ago, a camera to capture pictures like this would have cost close to $100,000 to buy. We recently completed shooting a brand new series, ‘Quickies in my Kitchen’, starring The Best in Australia's Anna Gare and the filming was effortless and simple. The trick was to work out an efficient data transfer system and a clear, defined structure. We used three new GY-HD700E cameras on 'Quickies' and it was a breeze. We had an on-set assemble editor and got to review the footage on a regular basis throughout the filming day. If we needed a security blanket, the ability to review any take, virtually at will, made this production stress-free with rich, clean images.”
JVC Professional recently launched a new flagship to its ProHD camcorder line, the GY-HM790E. With an innovative modular design and a full complement of accessories, the new camera supports multi-core or fibre-based production.
Alun Bartsch concluded, “The GY-HM700E is an excellent camera and the GY-HM790E takes that level of excellence up a notch. The GY-HM790E features three 1/3-inch CCDs, which allow a lighter, more compact form factor for better maneuverability in the field and more flexibility with robotic camera control systems in the studio. It produces 1920×1080 images and can record in 1080i, 720p, and SD (480i). It’s also something Mago Films are very interested in for the future.”
For more information on The Best in Australia series 1, 2 and 3 go to: http://www.magofilms.com.au/theBest.html
For more information on Quickies in my Kitchen go to:http://www.magofilms.com.au/quickies.html.