hey guys it's dave here from creative path films and in today's video
i'm going to walk you through our setup for a multi-camera cooking show
we recently completed a batch of cooking show episodes for a very good friend and client of
ours Angela from Fresh Food Friday and the shoot involved a very cool multi-camera setup that i
thought you all might enjoy learning about and of course if you enjoy cooking amazing meals
check out Ange's channel i'll link it up above and down in the description seriously she even catered
our wedding and she is absolutely brilliant at what she does all right let's get into the setup
when we were planning this shoot we knew that Ange likes to work very quickly and she's absolutely
in her element when she's moving fast and in flow so we wanted to avoid interruptions as much as
possible that's why we went for a multi-camera setup in fact if you look at any cooking show
there's a lot going on very very quickly so a multi-camera setup is an absolute must in order
to capture all of those decadent details for this setup we had a total of six cameras in use
and i'll walk you through them one by one first we had our wide shot which was covering the entire
kitchen and capturing all of the action the second was a medium close-up on angela that was following
her around as she was teaching and walking you through all the steps the third shot was a
close-up of angela's hands that was following what she was doing as well as covering the ingredients
on the bench the fourth camera was an overhead top down shot that captured the entire bench space
and the fifth camera was another overhead shot that was capturing the cooktop now ideally we
would have had the cooktop incorporated into our other overhead shot but we were impeded by
a large range hood that was in the middle of the kitchen so this camera was a last minute addition
to capture the cooking process our sixth camera was set up away from the main action and it was
set up on a small jib and used to capture all of our hero shots of the finished plated dishes
as well as stills we'll be covering this setup in an upcoming video so make sure to hit subscribe
so you don't miss out on that whilst i and our editor chris was certainly happy to have
so many angles to leverage if you don't have the budget for a six camera setup then you can achieve
a very similar look with as few as three cameras to do that these would be the three angles that i
would use i would use the wide shot and then crop in and out to get your close-up of the
chef i would have the close-up shot on the hands and on the board as well as a wide overhead shot
that incorporates the cooktop the trick here would be to shoot all of these angles in 4k or
an even higher resolution so that you can crop in and out and isolate particular parts of the shot
to give you those close-ups in post provided of course that all your shots are in focus alright
now let's walk through this setup in more detail for both our wide shot and our hero shot on angela
we had two Blackmagic pocket cinema camera 4ks shooting in 12:1 raw on the wide shot we had a
sigma 18-35mm art lens and on the hero shot we had the 50-100mm art lens our third camera was
a panasonic gh5 again with a metabones speed booster and this time we had a canon L series
70-200mm image stabilised lens we were shooting this camera in cine d at 4k 50 frames per second
that allowed us to get those nice buttery smooth slow motion shots for the right moments for our
main overhead shot we had a panasonic gh4 with a stock 14-42mm lens to keep the weight down and it
was outputting its signal to an original atomos shogun recorder at 10 bit 422 recording in prores
on day one we had this overhead cam rigged onto a DJI RS2 so that we would have a remote control
overhead rig but i'm not actually going to show you how we rigged it to our goal post rig because
even though it was pretty secure and we had all the safeties and extra support in place i wasn't
100% happy with it and it still felt a little bit sketchy and i've since changed the way that
i would rig this for next time on day two one of our magic arms gave out and i couldn't rig it up
the same way so we changed it up a little bit this time i kept things super simple and i had
the camera mounted to a small tripod head that was attached to a super viser clamp via a baby
ball head adapter this setup was rock solid and super secure but unfortunately we lost
the remote control ability that the rs2 gives you the final stovetop shot was a last minute
addition so i had to improvise a little bit for this camera i took a lighting spigot and screwed
it directly into the camera's cage i then took a second spigot and added it to a super clamp which
was mounted on the overhead rig then i put the two together using a manfrotto umbrella adapter
whilst this may not have been ideal it was a very light camera so i was comfortable that it
would be secure enough of course i wasn't silly and i made sure that there were safety chains
attached to both the cameras that were secured to the rig just in case something were to give
away which leads us nicely into the goal post rig itself which was the key to the entire setup
a goal post rig is essentially a large crossbar which is made out of speed rail or aluminium
tubing that's suspended between two stands we used two pieces of 5.5 foot speed rail that
were connected together using a kupo tube joiner using two pieces of speed rail of this length
means that you can transport them in a regular sized vehicle such as a small suv and that saves
you the need for roof racks or a lighting van the crossbar was secured using two baby couplers that
were attached onto two c-stands it should be noted however that c-stands have a safe working capacity
of about 10 kilos each which means that there's 20 kilos between the two by the time you take into
account the weight of the speed rail and all the rigging you're left with about 10 to 12 kilos that
you can rig up safely because we were only using lightweight mirrorless cameras i was comfortable
using c-stands in this setup however if you wanted to have a larger span or you wanted to rig
anything heavier such as lighting or larger camera bodies then i would definitely recommend that you
should substitute your c stands for combo stands and use big ben clamps that have a junior spigot
these steel stands are much stronger and they have a maximum payload of 30 to 40 kilograms
each depending on the model but as i said our rig was under 10 kilos so i was comfortable
with this configuration all right that's it for our cameras now let's move on to lighting
Ange had a fairly light and airy space so we went for a high key look our main key light
was an aperture 120d mark ii and was off to the side at 90 degrees using a large softbox
for fill lights we had two of the new aputure amaran 100ds both with 60 centimeter aperture
lanterns one was on the opposite side to the key and one was filling in from the front for our
backlight we used two four foot led light tubes these ones were by lumin8/ luxceo and they were
mounted up on top of the cupboards to give us some nice background separation well that's basically
it for this setup my final note is for the soundies in the room and that is that induction
cooktops can play absolute havoc with wireless microphones so it's a good idea if you can
to get in there and do a test before the day with the induction cooktop set to its maximum heat and
if you can't do this test then I would definitely suggest having a shotgun microphone on set just
in case well there you have it guys that's how we set up to shoot a multi-camera cooking show and of
course don't forget to hit subscribe if you'd like to see the setup for how we got our epic
looking hero shots i'll put the link to that video at the end as well as down in the description once
that video goes live and of course if you enjoyed this video and learned something today make sure
to give it a thumbs up to let me know thanks for watching guys and we'll see you in the next one