The Atem Mini Extreme ISO becomes the heart of ‘The Rick Shiels Golf Show’ video production

The Rick Shiels Golf Show video podcast comes to YouTube in 4K mixed by Blackmagic’s Atem Mini Extreme ISO and shot with four Pocket Cinema Camera 6K.

The Rick Shiels Golf Show, hosted by Rick Shiels and producer Guy Charnock, is an extension of the Rick Shields Golf YouTube channel, which has 2.2 million subscribers. In contrast to his main videos, which take in golf courses around the world and offer unpublished challenges for the sport, Rick Shiels’ new podcast includes all kinds of discussions about what’s going on in the world of golf, as well as educational tips and spoof shots. As Shiels himself says: “The main channel had been around for nearly a decade, but I wanted a place for more informal chat, behind the scenes content and commentary on breaking news from the golfing world.”

To shape these new videos, Shiels turned to consultant Alex Pettitt, who designed a flexible 4K dynamic, relying on Blackmagic solutions. “Combining the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO with DaVinci Resolve Studio unlocked a 4K workflow while enabling the ability to live mix the podcast for speed, while retaining the flexibility to fix mistakes in post. It’s the perfect setup for good quality, quick turnaround multicam content.” says Pettitt. The consultant identifies the key to the success of this configuration as having used the “HyperDeck High” option for live broadcast quality and activating the isolated recording function. In this way, each source is recorded individually, while a timeline is generated in DaVinci Resolve that includes all the cuts and can be used by the Shiels team during post-production.

On the capture side, Rick Shiels media team decided to go with the Pocket Cinema Camera 6K in Blackmagic RAW format at 6K with a frame rate of 50 f/s, which gave the format a sharper look and feel. Similarly, as Matt Nowell, Digital Content Producer at Rick Shiels Media, explains, shooting in H.264 with DaVinci Resolve Studio allowed for streamlined image processing: “The proxies are only around 2GB, compared to the 43GB of 6K original files from the camera, accelerating our editing process. The proxies can then be swapped for the camera’s original BRAW files when needed in just a few clicks.”

Shiels is excited to start working in 4K in a continuous, flexible and easy way: “The 4K update is mega. It’s smoother, sharper and more realistic. It feels like you’re there rather than watching a video, all while keeping the workflow simple. We’re really pleased with the whole thing having unlocked all that additional creative potential we didn’t know was there.”