Top Gear (that brittish car show)

reflex

reflex

Well-known member
Does anyone know what cameras they use to shoot that? I would have to say that the way it looks is just great. My favorite. ( the on location stuff )
 
I don't know the cameras, but I agree with you. The show is not only wonderfully shot, it is the best (in my opinion) automobile show around. Great presenters (they really know their stuff), great narrative structure, and excelent pace.
 
Yeah, it's really top notch. I'm never bored watching it. They've got some humor and some good info, great tests of the cars... , and i like some of the 'brittish' lingo they use.
 
SPZ said:
Great presenters (they really know their stuff)
Click to expand...

Hehehe... know their opinions maybe.

It's a great show though. Someone asked about it before and another member replied that he had worked on it and shot on Digibeta and Super 16. Some reports do use slow-mo, so they could well still be using film. It is very hard to tell with all their colour correction and vignetting.
 
Top Gear's production team use Carlton 021's equipment. They use Digibeta cameras for their inside shoots - sometimes you'll see a cameraman or two, and Jeremy Clarkson mentioned that they use Digibeta cameras in the last episode of the last season. 021's equipment also includes Sony HD, so I wouldn't be surprised if they use the Sony HD cameras for the outdoor shoots. It looks like the cameras have been setup with high gamma and heavily crushed blacks. They also make heavy use of optical filters on almost all of their outdoor shoots. You can achieve a similar looking image from the DVX100 with the high gamma setting, Normal 2 colo(u)r matrix and a master ped setting of about -10. Go and give it a try.
 
I've done some second unit stuff for Top Gear and I can confirm they use Sony 790's (DigiBeta). They also shoot some selective stuff in Super16mm (SR3 Advance, I believe). And yes most if not all of the stuff uses Filtration (except the studio links, of course).
 
I've been ripping-off their look for a couple years now. :)

Crush the blacks, saturate the colours, and use subtle vignetting and/or graduated filter.

The hardest to get right is the vignetting -- it has to be very smooth, barely noticeable.

Another trick ripped-off from them is to lock down the camera to record something in the foreground, then in post speed up the background so the clouds race across the sky. Very simple in Vegas and looks impressive.
 
it's wasn't a time lapse then? Just a sped up shot? I know what your talking about with the clouds and stuff... how they go forward fast and then backwards and all over at different speeds. Looks nice.
 
I just split the track, create a matte where the action is (the shot is planned before-hand in order to pull a clean and quick matte -- though if the sky is bright a plugin ("Secondary CC" in Vegas) will help), play with the track velocity to move the clouds, and then alpha-channel one track over the other.

You need to shoot more footage than necessary in order to speed-up the shot enough without running out of clouds -- and also need to keep &*$#@!% people from walking into frame or bumping the camera. Tape is cheap.

There's similar tricks. On a shoot a few weeks ago I happened upon a spectacular sunset where the sunlight was streaming through moving clouds. However I was near the border of a forest, which was in shadow and very dark. I locked the camera and shot the sunset, then without moving the camera opened the iris to "expose" the treeline, letting the sky blow-out. In post I doubled the tracks and replaced the blown-out parts with the sunset and got a great wide-exposure shot.
 
great work pmark23. I always look for oppotunities to double expose, but they are sparse. No need for a graduated ND then...?
 
Thanks for that info Martin. I've been looking to get that look several times now as well, but haven't succeeded yet. Just made a scene file for it and it looks pretty cool just filming down the street. Do you have any idea how that works indoors? I have a shoot at a Film Festival (indoors, mostly at night) coming up and I think it could be really cool to give it a special look.

I can imagine it makes the faces and red carpets come out really strongly, but it totally pushes away the background and mostly black clothing, might be cool! Or should I not take the chance and do it all in post? And...can you accomplish the same in post? What do you think?
 
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