Spike TV has just wrapped production of 10 episodes of the original comedy series Players, shot with Panasonic’s AG-HPX300 P2 HD shoulder-mount camcorders.

Players, scheduled to premiere in late 2009 or early 2010, follows two brothers with opposite personalities trying to run a sports bar. Created by Matt Walsh, one of the founders of the improvisational comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, Players is a Principato Young Entertainment Production, with Kevin McMahon as director of photography.

DP McMahon, a member of Local 600, is a veteran sports and reality-show cinematographer, and has worked on many high-profile comedy projects. He worked as a cameraman on Mind of Mencia and The Hollow Men, both for Comedy Central, as well as on television series for comedians Andy Dick, Orlando Jones and Greg Behrendt. As the director and DP for the 2007 and 2008 installments of the televised The Mediterranean World High Dive Championships, McMahon became familiar with tapeless P2 production while using the AG-HVX200 P2 HD handheld for all his slow-motion work.

“The producers of Players were committed to network-level production but it wasn’t in the budget to rent top-tier cameras,” said McMahon. “Just as I was looking for a less expensive but full-featured alternative that could do the work of a bigger camera, the HPX300 was introduced. Based on my favorable experience with the HVX200, my preference to shoot tapeless and the HPX300’s specs, my rental company, Mad Dash Video, purchased two of the cameras.

Mad Dash Video is renting the cameras to the production. Players is being shot single-camera style, with the two HPX300s used for coverage. McMahon operates A camera, with Tom Hejda on B camera. They are shooting 1080/24p in AVC-Intra 100. A soundstage in Santa Clarita, Calif., stands in for the Players bar, where most of the series’ action takes place, although there is a modicum of location work.

McMahon and Hejda are shooting entirely handheld, using the HPX300’s standard Fujinon 17x HD lens, with supplemental use of Fujinon 3.5 wide-angle HD lenses (which McMahon had purchased for previous work with 1/3-inch camcorders).

“I like the fact that AVC-Intra has a higher bit rate and that there are no rectangular pixels,” McMahon said. “It's 1920x1080 for real, with no stretched pixels, better compression and no Long GOP. The resolution is great, especially with the Fujinon 3.5. The picture looks very good: it’s the only way to go when shooting video right now.”

McMahon has customized the HPX300’s Cine Gamma D mode to shoot the bar interiors. “The customized file is really working for us,” he said. “We took the blacks down from the original Cine Gamma scene file, which has made it easier for the gaffer and me to light. You can get all kinds of range with this camera when you customize with waveform monitors, vectorscopes and color charts, as we did. We’re shooting through a half black frost filter, which gives a nice glow to everything.”

The DP said that his four-person crew includes two 1st ACs who are also functioning as “data wranglers.” “Our procedure is to record one 32GB P2 card at a time, which gives us a comfortable 44 minutes per card,” McMahon explained. “When we’re done, the ACs take the P2 cards to an office we’ve set up off one side of the stage. We have a laptop assigned to each camera, and each laptop has an AG-HPG20 P2 Portable recorder attached to transfer material off the card. We export redundant Express eSATA cards to an external SATA hard drive: we keep raw data on one SATA drive that resides in the camera office, and transcode material through Final Cut Pro into ProRes422 on the second SATA drive, which is then sent to post.”

Players is being edited in Final Cut Studio 2; postproduction is being handled by The Dorm in Los Angeles.

“The HPX300 is proving to be the perfect tool for this job,” McMahon said. “The consensus is that Players measures up to the look of network programming. Essentially, the HPX300 lets smaller cable operations create content rivaling that of the big boys at a fraction of the cost.”

About Players
Players follows two brothers with opposite personalities trying to run a sports bar. Created by Matt Walsh, one of the founders of the improvisational comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, Players is a Principato Young Entertainment Production and shoots in Los Angeles in February and premieres this summer on Spike TV.

Players stars Walsh as Bruce, a free-spirited, fun-loving, guy’s guy who is living out his fantasy of owning a bar that allows him to freely bet on sports along with dating the cocktail waitresses. His older, more subdued and uptight brother, Ken (Ian Roberts), serves as his antagonist, and tries to keep the focus on the bar turning a profit. The series also features Vicky (Danielle Schneider), the promiscuous waitress who has an affinity for B-list athletes, Hickey, the senior member of the staff who instead of actually working, spends most of his time bidding on sports memorabilia on eBay, and Calvin (James Pumphery) the young bartender who idolizes the fun-loving Bruce.

Matt Walsh, Ian Roberts and Jay Martel, as well as Peter Principato, Paul Young, Tucker Voorhees and John Lynch of Devlin Entertainment, serve as executive producers. Jason Woliner, who directed the presentation, serves as a co-executive producer. Walsh, a Chicago native, is a former Daily Show correspondent who was a founding member of the improv comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. Walsh has appeared in films including Old School, Semi-Pro and Bad Santa.