PORTADRIVE: Right For Reality TV

Reality TV raises new technical challenges for the production of good quality audio and PORTADRIVE offers a host of features that can help to resolve these issues. For example, it is common to have a large number of people in ‘front of camera’, performers are not professionally trained to use microphones, the director is often interested in subtle personal interactions and location sets often have poor acoustics. Editing and preparing material for broadcast creates additional challenges; it is common to record massive amounts of video and audio (often multiple camera and microphone feeds 24 hours/day, 7 days/week), and broadcasters want to edit material as fast as possible and produce multiple versions to stream output to TV, web, mobile services, etc. And the pressure to control costs is continually increasing!

Brent Marchenski production Mixer of ‘Making the Cut’

“I used two PORTADRIVEs in tandem to record 16 production microphones for this Ice Hockey reality show. During the project I accumulated 350GB of sound data, which we were able to export directly into the AVID system ready for post-production. It was quick and absolutely seamless and using PORTADRIVE has helped save $20,000 Canadian Dollars on productions. Everyone, including me, has been ecstatic with the results” - read more

Damien Canelos on Production mixer, Antonio Arroyo, using PORTADRIVE on the reality show special ‘A Very Queer Eye Christmas’

“For the Christmas special we brought in Antonio and it was a hoot to see him running around with a pack of six wireless receivers and the HHB PORTADRIVE machine around his neck in the middle of a field of Christmas trees. The show producers wanted participants recorded on separate tracks – for a feature film we could take more time – but using the PORTADRIVE we were rolling within an hour - and we don't stop.” - read more