Hey, is me again, with another BBC production question.

Ok, here I go. Is Spooks shot on film?

No need for a long debate. (You can if you want to though)

Yes or No, anyone know?

I can’t quite decide. It may be HD.

I think most of the new high end BBC productions are shot on high def. I could be wrong. Rockface was shot on Cinealta, so I would presume Spooks would be too given it's scale.

Yeah, I heard about Rockface. Just wondering how they get “the look” though.
I mean just coz its shot on high def, doesn’t mean that it will look filmic.

The BBC have some settngs that the use on their cameras. I was recently emailing the guy who devised them. He specialises in High Def, and specifically making high def cameras produce a much more film like image.

The BBC apparently had no interest at first, so he created his own 'job' and set about researching and setting up cameras. Through a lot of hard work he finally devised some standard 'filmlike' settings for the high def cameras and now they are in use all over the world. The settings are available from the BBC engineering website, but alas they are password protected and you have to prove you are a BBC cameraperson to be given access.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp034.shtml

Excellent stuff Simon. Shame I don’t have a HDW900 and a password. Ahh well, one day...one day.

Spooks is shot on Super16 on an arri SR3, at least thats what was sat on the camera ops shoulder in a behind the scenes doco.