Jampot Productions: Flexible, high-quality video-first podcasts
Jampot Productions is a video-first podcast production company with a distinctive look and a high-quality production ethos. It uses Sony video cameras across its range of podcasts because of their outstanding imaging capabilities, consistency and dependability, even in difficult conditions.
From Made in Chelsea to Made in Jampot
The company was founded in 2021 by Jamie Laing, an alumnus of the reality-based TV series Made in Chelsea. It is a fully-fledged production company, not just hosting podcast shows, but producing them, managing the talent, feeding social media, and handling promotion and advertising.
In 2022, Jamie and his then-fiancée, Sophie Habboo, launched NearlyWeds, a podcast series documenting their wedding plans. It hit the spot, and its success led to NewlyWeds, an evolution from its predecessor, and then to NearlyParents/NewlyParents as they embarked on the family phase of their relationship. The company has grown quickly and now has around twenty staff. Still small enough to be agile, it has the production standards and ambitions of a much larger media group.
Podcasts are becoming the new broadcast. People still listen via their favourite podcast apps, but more and more want to watch as well.
Jake Ji, Head of Video at Jampot
Cinematic Podcasts
Jampot’s creative formula is ambitious, but its production philosophy and equipment choices are effective and practical. They fall into three categories:
Premium
It has to look effortlessly great. Warm, inviting and engaging, with the kind of quality that long-established network broadcasters would be happy to achieve.
Bespoke
Each podcast strand has a unique, instantly recognisable identity that also serves as its brand.
Jampot is not a “for-hire” studio. Instead, the studio setup is central to each podcast’s visual identity and is meticulously crafted, technically and aesthetically, to match and reinforce its individual themes and content.
Cinematic
The studio borrows cinematic elements (lighting, camera and lens choices, set design, consistency of look) to enhance viewers’ experiences. The look must match the show’s tone and feel: a family podcast shouldn’t be staged in a clinical-looking set.
Why Sony?
Jampot uses Sony cameras almost exclusively, a choice which Jake says is all about consistency and confidence.
The productions are complex and coordinated, often with five or more cameras, so consistent multi-camera matching is critical. Sony’s colour science across its camera range makes it easy to mix and match angles and configurations. The studio uses Sony S-Log3 for colour accuracy across scenes and shots, giving immense flexibility in post-production to “pull” or “push” images.
Sony’s powerful, precise autofocus and wide dynamic range help reduce the risk of missing valuable moments. Knowing that focus will always be sharp and that there is enough latitude to respond instantly to almost any on-set situation allows the production team to concentrate on content and delivery rather than second-to-second camera adjustments.
Inside and outside of the studio
Some shows feature shoulder-held following shots for introductions, and some are shot entirely on location at celebrities’ homes, where cameras follow talent through various rooms and into tight, poorly lit spaces like walk-in wardrobes. In these situations, technical headroom (dynamic range, High ISO, Autofocus, and S-Log3) can help to guarantee high-quality footage in almost any conditions, especially unplanned and unpredictable ones. The Sony FX6 has a built-in ND filter, which saves time on setup and helps complete a shot with an attractive, shallow depth of field. Colour consistency between cameras makes unplanned outdoor or location shoots easy to mix and match with other footage.
Sony’s Cinema Line cameras provide a lovely cinematic look, and make skin tones look great.
Lizzie McCarthy, Video Editor and Colourist at Jampot Productions
Sony cameras and lenses
Jampot’s main cameras are:
Sony FX6
a full-frame cinema camera with powerful low-light performance and Sony’s Cinema Line colour science. It has a dual native ISO sensor for capturing noise-free images in widely different conditions, and includes Sony’s proven autofocus with precise face/eye tracking.
Sony FX2
also a compact Cinema Line camera, has a high-resolution 33MP sensor, and while its primary focus is on video, it is also an extremely capable stills camera. This makes it the perfect tool for on-location use, capturing high-quality video and stills for promotions.
Lenses, focus and flexibility
Jampot uses E-mount Sony G Master lenses, including the G Master 24–70mm f/2.8 and G Master 16–35mm f/2.8, chosen for their consistently accurate autofocus, which can track a subject’s eye, and for the attractive shallow depth of field.
Workflow
Jampot configures its cameras to record manually, with footage backed up to network storage. Recording is usually in 4K and 10-bit 4:2:2 in S-Log3. In these resolutions, a single episode can consume 700GB. These file sizes mean more effort in post-production, but they also allow Jampot to repurpose material for all distribution channels, from 4K to small social media clips.
The studio often has five or six podcast series running concurrently. Actual weekly volume ranges from two to seven recordings. Extremely fast turnarounds are possible: an interview recorded on Monday can be published on Wednesday, complete with a full video edit, multiple social clips, and a trailer. For tight deadlines, the studio becomes “all hands on deck” and can deprioritise other shows to make way for critically timed releases.
Critical efficiency
A Sony multi-camera workflow is natively efficient because of the consistency between cameras, from similar menu structures to a shared colour science, inherited from the company’s top-end movie cameras.
In the post workflow, Jampot has automated backup and ingest, reducing manual handling of memory cards. The company is exploring more advanced Sony cloud and network workflows, including Sony Ci Media Cloud, a comprehensive suite of cloud-based services for media workflows.
A solid foundation for a new, highly visual medium
Jampot has nurtured and grown a successful media business for high-end visual podcasting. It’s a bold move in an industry where content is the primary focus, but where a consistent, high-quality look and engaging visual content are increasingly important. With tight timelines and a complex multi-camera workflow, the studio chose cameras that reliably deliver the best images without requiring constant attention during recordings.
The company plans to continue its organic growth, building on its portfolio of Sony video cameras and software services as it expands.
With Sony, you capture cinematic quality at an affordable price point. I’m 100% convinced Sony’s dynamic range and autofocus are the best. Whatever we do, it consistently looks great. Jampot’s always going to keep growing. We want to be bigger, we want to be stronger visually, we want to be more cinematic. For the future, I would really like to explore a lot more options with Sony to be able to streamline our productions even more.
Jake Ji, Head of Video at Jampot
