Equipment

Dan filming on the beach. — Dan filming some GVs on the beach, remember the surfing scene in Season 1 episode 4.

Choosing the right tools to make “The Specials” can be a tricky business. Over the years, we’ve continually upgraded our equipment as we’ve moved from being a simple, self-funded web series to making a show for television.

Original webseries

When we started out as a web-series we bought the best equipment we could without breaking the bank. Filming for Season 1 took 4 months and generated 125 hours or 2TB of SD footage.

Camera: Sony HVR-Z5E recording to memory cards with a HVR-MRC1K.
Shotgun microphone: Audio Technica AT877.
Radio microphones: Sennheiser EW100 G2.
Voiceover recording: Audio Technica AT877 microphone into the Sony HVR-Z5E camera.
Editing and audio mixing software: Final Cut Pro 7.
Color correction software: Color
Storage: Internal hard drives in Katy's Mac Pro.

Season 1

Collage of photographs showing Katy and Dan filming, editing and setting up equipment. — Katy editing.

When reversioning the original webseries to Season 1 we completely re-recorded the voiceover with much better equipment. We also completely redid the post production (audio mix and colour grading) at a professional facility.

Voiceover microphone: Neumann TLM 193.
Voiceover microphone preamplifier & ADC: Sound Devices USBPre2.
Color correction software: Avid Symphony.
Audio mixing software: Pro Tools 9.

Season 2

Two of the servers which we store all our footage on. — Storing all the footage we were generating was getting very tricky before — as Lewis would say — we got these bad boys!

With Season 2 we upgraded our camera and microphone which improved the quality of the original footage. Although it only has one more episode than Season 1, Season 2 took much longer to film — a whole year! We ended up shooting nearly 400 hours of HD footage from which we created 7×21 minute episodes. Editing can be a painstaking process. We now had a total of about 18TB of footage, so we had to considerably beef-up our storage.

We also decided to do most of the post production at home, Dan created a post production space in our lounge where he did the audio mixing on Pro Tools and the colour correction on DaVinci Resolve.

Camera: Canon XF305.
Shotgun microphone: Neumann KMR 81i.
Radio microphones: Sennheiser EW100 G2.
Voiceover microphone: Neumann TLM 193.
Voiceover microphone preamplifier & ADC: Sound Devices USBPre2.
Editing software: Final Cut Pro 7.
Color correction software: DaVinci Resolve.
Audio mixing software: Pro Tools 10.
Storage: Custom built SAN using servers which can hold up to 24 hard drives each — this should keep us going for a while!

Katy filming Hilly and Paul in a scene which appears in Season 2 episode 7.