March 10, 2009
The judges’ table, anchored by Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi (center), offers a reality check for the show’s “cheftestants.”
By Jon Silberg Recently wrapping its fifth season, Bravo’s Top Chef has captured the imaginations of would-be culinary artists — and people 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 preparations 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 view of the pressures involved in the very competitive, high-stakes world of top-level restaurants. Cheftestants are judged and either advanced or dropped based on the judges’ take on the taste, presentation and creativity of the dishes they prepare.
The material — 100 to 125 hours per one-hour episode — is recorded on Panasonic AJ-HDX900 cameras this season in DVCPRO HD (previously it was done in standard definition on SDX900s). The material then goes to the company Magical Elves, home of such other reality shows as Project Runway, Air Guitar Nation and Last Comic Standing.  Editors Kevin Leffler and Katherine Griffin of Magical Elves.
Located on two floors of 12-story building in the old “bank district” of Los Angeles, Magical Elves’ series are edited, sweetened and onlined on the premises. When lead editors Steve Lichtenstein, Kevin Leffler and Katherine Griffin start work, some of the many hours of raw material has already been weeded out. Producers, using paper transcripts, have given some initial shape to the edit based on the way the specific challenges have unfolded as well as how the relationships among the cheftestants are evolving. Although episodes are being edited before the culmination of a season, the producers and editors still know how things will play out a few episodes down the road and they can choose with their edit to highlight or underplay specific behavior and reactions in order to subtly foreshadow what’s to come.
The editors work in Avid Media Composer 3.0 tied via Avid Unity to a 16TB server. Everything is in Avid’s 10:1 compression and the editors make extensive use of Avid’s group clip function, which uses timecode indicators to allow them to simultaneously view all the camera vantage points for any given moment onscreen.
The three truly work as a team, which is something Griffin particularly enjoys. “I love how collaborative it is,” she says. “We all sit down and talk about the arc of each show and the entire season. This season, for example, has had 14 episodes in all and we’ll all be working on different sections. One of us might be doing the ‘Quickfire’ test and another is doing the elimination challenge and another doing the Judges’ Table but we can all discuss how we’re massaging each of the story arcs along the way so there’s a real consistency throughout the whole season.”
Workstations had all been based on Mac boxes until this current season, when the majority of editors switched to HP xw8600s running Windows XP Professional. “We have a lot fewer crashes,” Leffler says. “We would lose a lot of work before. We still run Mac and PCs here. Katherine is still working on a Mac. But we’ve found that these PCs are better running Avid. With the Macs, we’d have a lot of glitches and trouble labeling. The PCs also run faster and smoother.”
“We’d have five or six crashes a day,” Lichtenstein recalls. “We’d save every 15 minutes, and on the Macs that would take so long to do, you’d lose momentum. You’d forget where you were.”
The editors speculate that Avid has been able to work more intricately in the development stage with the PC systems than with Mac and that Apple might be more concerned with making its own Final Cut Pro work with the newest hardware and operating systems than the competing product Avid makes. (It should also be mentioned that this changeover occurred before the release of Avid 3.0.5, which was designed specifically with the Apple OS 10.5, Leopard.)
The Magical Elves editors are also expected to lay in the score for episodes from among the hundreds of cues composer Biff Sanders continues to create for the series. “Biff starts each season creating new cues,” Lichtenstein explains. “We ask for specific cues like for a Christmas theme or a Hawaiian setting and then we can manipulate those a bit.”
They also work to create a best audio pass. “We have an effects library,” Leffler says. “We have sounds like ‘frying’ and ‘sizzling’ but we rarely use audio effects to embellish the sounds that were recorded on set in the kitchen. We also have dramatic booms and symbol effects we use in particular areas of the show.” Online conforming with the native DVCPRO material as well as color correction is done in-house using Avid’s Nitris DX system.
Griffin, a veteran of editing reality TV, started at Magical Elves in the early seasons of Project Runway and has stayed with the company ever since. “I really like the approach Magical Elves takes with all its shows,” she says. “They really investigate the people’s talents and look at what drives them to do what they do. I worked on reality shows before I came here where the producers weren’t all that interested in having the audience get a real impression of the people and situations in the show, where they would really just push personalities to get a certain pre-determined outcome.
“Working on that kind of show really didn’t feel good in my soul,” Griffin concludes. “I didn’t like what I was part of. But on Project Runway and now Top Chef, I think we’re really showing the audience real personalities and focusing on their real talents and it kind of warms my heart to work on these shows.”
|