Editing reality TV: editors sift through mountains of footage to find the real-life drama that makes this format so popular

Post, Jan, 2005 by Claudia Kienzle

imagine having to edit down hundreds of hours of video into a dramatic, entertaining, provocative television show--with no script to follow and an intractable airdate. That's the challenge facing editors of reality TV shows--the hot genre featuring real people and their experiences as they battle towards a monetary, professional or social goal.

Editors describe the creative process as solving a complex puzzle or searching for a needle in a haystack because they must search through tons of footage and put together those clips that best tell the story and create a heightened sense of drama that holds the viewers' attention for that episode as well as the entire season.

STARTING OVER

"Film is a director's medium. Dramatic television is a writer's medium. But reality TV is an editor's medium," says Mark Raudonis, director of post production for Bunim-Murray Productions (www.bunimmurray.com) in Van Nuys, CA. "Reality editors must make sense out of tons of unscripted video captured from real life situations."

Bunim-Murray Productions pioneered the reality TV genre over a decade ago when co-founders, Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray produced several reality series, including the MTV hit, The Real World. Today, Bunim-Murray Productions has five reality series on the air, including: The Real World and Road Rules for MTV; The Rebel Billionaire and The Simple Life for Fox; and Starting Over for NBC Universal Domestic Television.

"Of all these shows, Starting Over is the most daunting challenge because they shoot seven days a week, 12 to 15 hours a day, generating 30 to 50 hours of video per day. It's a massive amount of footage that has to be edited into five one-hour weekly shows," says Raudonis.

Starting Over follows the real-life drama experienced by a group of women who move into a Hollywood Hills home. Cameras watch as they face their personal problems, such as losing weight, abuse, or financial problems, and get advice from skilled "life coaches' so they can start a new life.

"Scenes are covered by multiple cameras, including a Sony IMX camcorder, Sony PD170 DVCAM camcorders, and lipstick cameras," Raudonis says. "We quickly whittle a 200:1 shooting ratio down to 60:1 by selecting the best angles of each scene as it's running in multi-cam mode on our Avid Meridien Media Composers. It's not unusual to have 50 editors working in two shifts and sharing centralized storage. But, the craft of editing is all about the art of storytelling."

EXTREME MAKEOVER: THE HOME EDITION

"Reality TV is a huge part of what we do," says Kenny Fields, president of West Post Digital (www.westpostdigital.com) in Santa Monica, CA. "If a production is under the gun to get their shows finished and on-the-air, we have options. With our Avid Symphony systems tied to a Unity server, we can be digitizing footage from two systems and have several editors editing different segments of the show simultaneously, which speeds up the process tremendously."

Among its on-going projects, West Post Digital is finishing two reality TV series--Extreme Makeover: The Home Edition and How'd They Do That? Designed as companion series, Extreme Makeover: The Home Edition focuses on the story of a family in desperate need of home renovations (such as a family with a handicapped son who needed the home to be wheelchair accessible); while How'd They Do That? focuses on the work done by hundreds of carpenters who must complete the renovation in one week.

"We've been given a directive from the production company, Lock and Key Productions (Mike Malloy, supervising producer), that their shows are to be the highest quality they can be, and they have demonstrated this commitment by making creative changes to the show up to the very end," explains Fields.

The production has been using Sony IMX (MPEG) for acquisition, which Fields says, "is as good or better than Betacam SP but without the dropouts. Dropouts are very time-consuming to fix, so this format gives us one less problem to worry about. Recently, the production switched to Sony's XDCAM (disk-based) format, so our online editors will have random access to any clips as opposed to shuttling back and forth on tapes. With 200 to 300 tapes and 1,500 cuts per show, jumping from one timecode to another instantly saves a tremendous amount of time."

Rather than color correcting on the Symphony. West Post Digital moves the project to its color correction bay where colorist Randy Starnes (Desperate Housewives) does the color timing on a da Vinci 2K. Fields says. "This is the highest quality tool for color timing and the most efficient way to go. And this frees up our Symphony systems for building the graphics and titling to keep the project moving forward."

QUEER EYE FOR THE STRAIGHT GUY

For each one-hour episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy seen weekly on Bravo, "We have to watch about 30 hours of footage to make sure we've explored all the options to tell the story clearly and concisely," says Michael LaHaie, senior editor for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which is edited at PostWorks/NY and produced by Scout Productions, in Boston.