how does it look so beautiful?

[andreas]

I've always wondered, how does Top Gear make even the rain in Guildford look so appealing and fresh? Rain usually looks depressing and grey.

I know the cameracrew uses some kind of filters, and you can tell that the editing team has "burned" the edges, making the image slightly round... Yet I still wonder, does anyone here know the specific recipie? If you can't understand what I'm on about, check out the Golf GTi review from 05x06 - jaw-droppingly gorgeous!

[Cobol74]

Experience, skill, flair, talent and very very good equipment. A good director who knows what he wants helps. Perhaps a bit general an answer for you, but I totally agree the photography of the show is outstanding.

[travbabble]

I would imagine that their cameras are of the very expensive variety too.

[Hugh Peters]

Originally Posted by andreas

I've always wondered, how does Top Gear make even the rain in Guildford look so appealing and fresh? Rain usually looks depressing and grey.

It's called "Lots of money"!

[halllo_fireball]

Good Postproduction - thats the key. There you can make the difference. Just compare a normal TV-production movie with a hollywood movie.

Jan

[AdvanTech]

A bunch of sony xdcams, a host of filters (grad, neutral density, etc.), heavy color correction, high contrast, a variety of shutterspeeds, a depth of field that is somtimes very shallow, vignetting, a VERY talented director of photography-you can go on forever!

[Buktu]

It's one of the things that makes Top Gear what it is, besides the excellent presenters. Everything is so beautifully done.

[Overheat]

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of post production in Top Gear - I think most of it is acheived with filters and things like that.

[No Boss]

Originally Posted by Overheat

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of post production in Top Gear - I think most of it is acheived with filters and things like that.

According to a Clarkson article sometime back (the one where he said TG has a 190,000 people inline to see the show), and he said that Andy Wilman pretty much never sees home and edits for very very long.

[Thraxes]

Originally Posted by No Boss

According to a Clarkson article sometime back (the one where he said TG has a 190,000 people inline to see the show), and he said that Andy Wilman pretty much never sees home and edits for very very long.

That I can believe. I do quite a bit of editing work myself with the AVID systems at work and it really is a very time-consuming process especially when you are adding special transitions and doing heavy color correction. There is no good algorithm as yet to do a full color correction that you can achieve with "eyeball mk1", a Tektronix video scope and a calibrated class 1 video monitor - very time consuming but well worth it as the OP said. The special transitions are quite tricky as they mostly have to be done precisely to the frame to get the desired effect.

Then there is also the small matter of preparation... first the tapes have to be viewed and the desired parts fed into the computer which is only possible in real time. Considering that filming these segments runs into a whole day or even longer, that means you have hours of material to sift through, and then about an hour or more worth of material on different tapes that you want to have available on the AVID system. At least this last part can be automated with a robotic tape loading system. Mark the parts you want to have beforehand, the computer memorizes the timecodes for those scenes on each tape and then loads them up one after the other... Sony Flexicart is a really neat toy

I seriously doubt that the"little ponsy motoring show" uses the still very new XDCams. Much more likely that they are using normal DigitalBeta cameras. For one the infrastructure for DigiBeta is already in place, getting XDCam to that level will take years and a huge multi million £ investment, secondly XDcam becomes worth it when producing in HD which the BBC won't be doing regularly until 2010. I work at a large german broadcaster and the newest technology is used either on a large pre-recorded flagship production like a mini series or on a controlled production that is short and simple but done everyday like a current affairs show. The internal BBC guidelines for production delivery currently have DigitalBeta listed as the desired format.

One more thing to note on Top-Gear is that the in car shots are done with a miniDV camera and I can distinctly remember that in one sequence a few seasons ago, they actually used a 8mm film camera for some shots. Looks nice but is a pain to get into the computer for editing.

[Pulsinator]

Agree with most of what's been said. Most likely shot on Digibeta and they love their polarising filters and grads. But aside from all the above, it is extremely well produced. I imagine they don't leave the office without knowing exactly what they're going to get. It's briliantly scripted (the difference between sounding like it's being read and natural - you'd be amazed the work that goes into making people sound natural.)

But most of all, what makes it good is money. The BBC has lots of it. They can afford the best equipment, the best people, and all the time they need to make it all work.