Twenty398

Here’s the mission:
Cut a 7 minutes short (While Waiting… Facebook group here, Teaser here. Reduser discussion here.) in FCP and finish in Color with the new RAW workflow.
Deliver DCP master with Compressors Quvis Wraptor plugin

Sounds pretty simple really!
Cut. Send to Color. Grade. Render. Send to compressor. Cinema bliss. That’s what it says on the package, right?

Well, if this workflow really works that well, I’ll be sure to report!

But I have a hunch there’s a couple of hurdles along the way. I would love to be proven wrong.

I’ll first walk you through what’s been done thus far.

The short was shot over a week, this summer in Norway. Principal photo was Ingri Fjestad. All shot on RED One, most in B16, a couple of night shots with B15. (Yes. I know that’s odd, but that’s how it is). The cam was natively ballanced throughout most of the shoot (5600k/320ASA) to get the metering right.

All but the same night shots were shot on an old set of Cooke Speed Panchros. The 18mm was vignetting like a real over-done post FX.
The night shots were shot on ARRI/ZEISS ultra-primes.

Mostly it was shot in 4k 2:1, but there are 3k shots in there.There’s also a couple of simple composites in there, and primary delivery is 2048×858 DCP.

I cut the piece from the M proxies. When the Color workflow emerged, I re-conformed the cut to H proxies with Hans Georg Dauns excellent Clipfinder, and have just recently locked the cut.

More after the jump…

Delivery is Dec 17th. I plan to have tested the master well in advance, Dec 15th as the latest
possible date.

Things to look out for…

1. 25 fps
I know it sounds simple, but Color has been known to be a buggy little beast with 25 fps source
footage. Especially DPXs
Up untill now, I have had to develop the DPXs in RedCine or Redline, conforming with Crimson,
install the AJA codec and the AJA wrapper. Manually re-assemble the cut in FCP and send to Color.

25 fps DPX just wouldn’t work
I am yet not sure how 25 fps RAW works in Color…

BUT there’s another!
DCP specs specify 24 fps, so after color-timing, I’ll need to re-time my whole piece…
Charming…

2. Re-framing, low-light and 3k – Colors interpratation of RED RAW
Some shots will have to be reframed and keyframed slightly.
As the Color intepretation of the RED RAW files is only half de-bayer to 2k, re-framed shots
will have to go through DPXs and a re-framing in Shake (if I need to keyframe the reframing)
to get the most of them. How visible the loss will be… I dunno yet. Just starting, right. But
I keep Crimson/Shake ready for these shots.

Low-light…
I am used to getting rather good lowlight results from RED with the DPX workflow.
From my initial tests in Color, these results seems to be hard to recreate with only half
debayer and the LUT approach of the COLOR RED-Room (more on that later…)

Again I keep Crimson and Shake ready to shoot.

3k
Color can read 3k. Heck. Color can even read 4k, you just have to re-frame it. BUT not from RED RAW.
3k shots will have to be re-sized before sending to Color to keep the full rez…

3. Bits and RGB and FCP and stuff…
Up untill now, FCP has not handled 10-bits RGB files when rendering.
The filesize remains 10-bits when you render. But it only uses 8 bits.
As every bit doubles the precission, this is … not… very… good…
AFAIK this is still the case in 6.05. Thus: No rendering of film-images in FCP. Ever.

This also means that I will need to use some 3rd party app for the composites, even though they
are technically simple enough to do in FCP. But I cannot render them out with that app.
Shake/Crimson will solve this issue as well – I hope…

4. LUTS
The way Color reads the RED RAW files, a LUT is applied to the image.
If you look at the histogram. 0 is black. 100 is white. There is NO headroom above or bellow these
levels. The precision is 12 bits, though, so this doesn’t sound like a biggie, but here’s a hunch…

We have already made a calibrated LUT for DCP deliveries through Compressor/Wraptor.
Simply put, this works like a simple pre-correction to make my monitors look like and respond like
the DCP projector. (We’ve been able to test it in several theatres and on different makes of DCP
projectors too. DO THAT! )

When we’ve been grading from AJA wrapped DPXs, this has worked pretty well.
BUT I have a hunch trouble is down this lane…

When you do your final render for delivery, you remove the LUT. Thus changing the levels of your
rendered output. (The LUT is conceptually re-applied on the delivery device, right?)

What I fear, is that I will not have enough headroom arround my grades, so that instead of getting
smooth gradients in the lowlight – like I used to, everything will drop to 0, and thus be crushed.

I know about it. It is solveable – I think, BUT it is a challenge.

I plan to render out AJA files, and hope there’s not going to be any nasty surprises there.
I HAVE Gluetools so I could have rendred out DPXs from Color, but from the testing I did
I noticed that gradients were added in the compressor rendering, so that’s not a viable option.

Prores just doesn’t hold up for this kind of work IMHO.

5. Audio
The one thing I have NOT tested yet with the wraptor is how it treats audio… I have noticed a rather violent auto-limiter, so I guess this is mainly a question about setting the right headroom. But this will also be a challenge…

The 17th is a preview-screening. I plan to do a 5.1 mix eventually.
But that seems like the simplest of the challenges to solve…

6. Disk-formats
Quvis comes with a new formatting tool for disks, that pops up in Disk Utility. As FAT32 only allows for 2GB files, it’s a good plan to use this format for transport.

7. 2gb file segmenting in RED – the repeat frame bug in Color
As mentioned, I have cut this piece from camera-proxies.
When I “Send to Color” everything looks good, but the shots that are re-timed or shots that are longer than 2gb. I KNOW I’ll have to clean up my timeline before sending to color, so that’s fine.
Apparently the repeat-fram issue is solveable through Ingesting/re-wrapping the RAW files with the FCP
Log&Transfer tool.
I sure hope that is true…
If that’s the case, then I’ll have to find a rational way to batch L&T the relevant shots and re-conform
to the Quicktime wrapped RAW files.

IF that doesn’t work…
Crimson/DPX/AJA – here I come.

7. Colors interpretation of “Float”
If you have an ATI card in your Mac, you can set Colors precision to float.
If that was true throughout the rooms, you could easily reverse the grading you did in one room in the
next.
So… Why on earth would I like to do that?
In shots with very wide dynamics, where you want to keep BOTH the highlights and the lowlights,
you very likely want to use vignettes in the secondary room to refine what looks bad out of the primary.
The issue here is that what is lost ot of the primary, is actually just gone…

I have a hunch I could try to use the LIN gamma for some of this shots and do all the corrections
in the secondary room. But I dunno, yet. Maybe RedLog will still be the best for these shots?

8. RED RAW – RED ROOM settings
After 10 months with RED, I have a pretty clear general hunch about how to develop the RAW files
for grading. But like everything else: Look at it.
Generally RedLog, slightly lowering exposure, native kelvin settings and WB in matrix is a very
good starting point for low-noise RED images. BUT now, I can experiment a bit to get different
starting points that might fit this particular scene/shot better without spending hours rendering
out new DPXs. I dunno how much I’ll use this feature, but it sure fells good.

Hey!!!
This may sound like a lot of hazzles, but really it is not, and doesn’t neccesarily make the workflow
bad. In fact it will be a tremendous advantage, even with all the above in mind. If it works
Color is not even approaching Scratch with this upgrade, but still – if it works, it will be a
tremendous tool for low-budget productions like the one I am about to finnish.

Actually I am pretty sure I’ll bump into even more hurdles as I go. That’s not really the issue.
The Issue is to see if I can find solutions for them.

Software I know I’ll be using:
Final Cut Pro
Color
Shake

Cinematools
RedCine
Red Alert
Crimson Workflow
Clipfinder
Steinberg Cubase 4
Soundtrack
Quvis Wraptor

And then I’ll throw in whatever I need.

Enjoy!

Gunleik Groven

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