Twenty398

Noah Kadner helps us unravel the mysteries of the Red camera. What is Red? What makes it so great? And will it work in your workflow? Find out with Noah Kadner. Dan talks about Noah’s book “RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera” written for Peachpit Press.

http://www.workflowjunkies.com/2009/09/24/episode-18-red-rules-with-noah-kadner/

As readers of RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera know, we have a printed version of the RED ONE’s menu map in an appendix. As time marches on, Scott Jones of XL Films has updated his map for Build 20. (And we just got 21 a couple of days ago!) We’re always playing catchup! To download it head over to this link:

http://www.xlfilms.tv/2008/shared_images/XL_Red_Menus_Build20.pdf

RED released Build 21 of the RED ONE firmware today. This is a big one, enabling 4.5K resolution and REDCODE 42! Of course I recommend carefully testing this release before using it on a full production. You get the following:

* Addition of 4.5K WS (Widescreen 4480 × 1920 pixel) RESOLUTION recording setting.

* Addition of REDCODE 42 QUALITY setting for 4.5K WS, 4K 2:1, 4K ANA, 4K HD record resolutions.

* Addition of VIEW mode indicator, vmRAW / vm709 / vmRSP, in upper GUI status row.

* Addition of Video Genlock for HD-SDI PVW output(s) when GENLOCK selected in SENSOR menu.

* Enhancement of USER PROFILE function.

So head on over and look for the Beta build release here:

http://www.red.com/support

Stand by for a further review. In the meantime, to check it out yourself go to:

http://redgrabs.com/REDCINE-X_ALPHA2.zip

and the changes:

· Fixed losing Rocket support after playing with video controls or making color setting changes.
· Made timeline a moveable window and cut down the extra space on the bottom.
· Added a scrollbar at the bottom of the Timeline.
· You can move scrubber now by clicking on time instead of clips so you can make changes to other clips, but keep your scrubber in the same spot if wanted.
· Added tool tips to all the buttons on the video player.
· Dragging clips off the timeline crashing issue fixed.
· Fixed the video player window resizing bug a reduser mentioned.
· Curve presets are saved beyond application level now. You can exit application and go back in.. and last stored presets are loaded.
· H.264 export option has been changed to .mov
· Increased audio clip loading speed

da Vinci should be on your radar for two reasons- they support RED and they are makers if incredibly expensive, high-end color grading suites most of us will never be able to afford to sit in. And yet they just got bought up by bargain video card maker, Blackmagic Design. My question is- will this mean greatly reduced prices on Davinci software in the future? Or is this just good news for the high end post houses that can already afford them? A few words from BMD head, Grant Petty on the purchase:

In reality, I cannot believe we have purchased such as legendary brand, and one of the things that totally blew my mind when I first started in post production as an engineer way back in 1988 was the color grading room with a DaVinci. The image on the monitor was such incredible quality, I just stood there staring speechless. It was amazing. Now we have our opportunity to care for the DaVinci name, and it’s exciting but a little terrifying too! We have some big standards to live up to, but we want to exceed what people expect.

Read more at fxguide:

http://www.fxguide.com/qt/1448/blackmagic-buys-davinci-confirmed

RED has released an ‘Alpha’ preview of their REDCINE-X grading application and it’s a winner. Designed as a replacement for both RED Alert! and REDCINE, REDCINE-X combines the functionality of both applications while taking huge strides forward in usability and speed.

What I Like:

User Interface: the big boys of editing could learn a thing or two from this. I was able to load, grade and export a clip a minute after firing it up for the first time. With no instructions at all. It’s just that intuitive.

Play bin in media by hovering mouse- again another one of those things you see in the high-end software that is just something you want in all of your editing apps.

Auto-Scan for R3D- this is what computers are meant to do, find your footage wherever it is on the hard drive so you don’t have to.

Performance: On my 2 X 3 Ghz Quad Mac Pro with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 I could play and grade with decent performance up to 1/2 resolution. This rocks and saves you a lot of time. Expect to see much higher performance if you have a REDRocket card installed.

What I Don’t Like:
Runs only as a full screen application. This means you can’t have it in a floating window with other applications at the same time. I realize this is for performance sake, but it’s less practical when you want to have several other apps going as you grade. At least the dock stays visible and Apple-H hides REDCINE-X as it should.

Still an Alpha, this app is useful and much-needed, so here’s to RED’s engineering team getting it up to full production speed and stability asap.

To check out REDCINE-X on your own system, try out this link:

http://redgrabs.com/REDCINE-X_ALPHA1.zip

(It’s Mac-only for now but a Windows version is promised at some point.)

Noah’s RED book has received its first review and it’s a nice one from Steve Sherrick, a longtime REDuser and fellow blogger. Here’s an excerpt:

If you have never heard of the RED One, also known as R1, well you will definitely want to pick up Noah’s book and read it from cover to cover at least 2 or 3 times. It will get you up to speed in a hurry. If you have heard of it but never actually used the camera, the book will answer many of the questions you may have and provide you with enough information to feel comfortable to take the camera out and shoot with it. If you are an experienced Red user, well, there’s still a lot you can pick up on in this book as not only does it cover the basics of operating, but gets into the details of data management, postproduction, and how to integrate audio.

For the rest of the review, follow this link:

http://www.redfilmmaker.com/2009/08/red-ultimate-guide-to-using.html

This blog has been a little quiet for 2009, due to my hard work writing the first and only book on the RED camera. RED: The Ultimate Guide to Using the Revolutionary Camera is finally done and available now! From the official press release:

“With the release of the RED ONE™ digital cinema camera, the possibility of recording stunning, cinematic-quality images with an affordable camera became a reality. Now that the industry has embraced the nascent technology and added new tools and workflows, filmmakers—from independents on up—are leading the charge on establishing new rules.

Here to guide newcomers and RED veterans alike, popular trainer and filmmaker Noah Kadner picks up where the manual leaves off. You’ve got the basic operations down and now you’ll learn how to use the camera in a production environment and discover the various options in post. Using a clear, objective approach, he offers best-practice advice on utilizing RED’s proprietary tools, explains the workflows for Final Cut Studio, Avid, and Premiere Pro, and gives workaround solutions where needed. Well-known filmmakers and industry leaders share their own bleeding-edge production methodologies throughout, offering a rare view into this exciting new world of filmmaking.

Here are just a few things you’ll learn to do:
•Build a RED package that fits your budget
•Set up for sound recording and learn which audio tools to use
•Achieve the optimal exposure using RED’s onboard tools and external gear
•Edit your footage with step-by-step instructions for Avid, Final Cut Pro, and Premiere Pro
•Work color correction into your HD, film, or Web projects
•Prep your project for output and archive your footage
•Learn from pros such as Rodney Charters, ASC (DP, 24), Simon Duggan, ACS (DP,Knowing), Albert Hughes (Director, The Book of Eli), and many others using RED”

For more info, visit the book’s homepage here:
http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321617681

To order direct from Amazon, visit this link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321617681?ie=UTF8&tag=callboxlive-20

Here’s a nice little piece from Digital Facility on PlasterCITY Digital Post’s RED Workflow, which they’ve been perfecting ever since the camera first came out. Here’s a quote from owner, Michael Cioni:

“We’re seeing a lot of production companies and DPs make use of the RED camera because of image quality, compact design, cinema lenses and overall lower costs. RED footage makes up a significant portion of our work,” says Cioni. “As early adopters, we’ve worked closely with the RED team to design and deliver powerful end-to-end tapeless and tape-based workflows. SCRATCH is the ideal post tool for RED footage because it’s the only software that can deliver real time results of color grading, down-converting and window-burn dailies from a soft-mounted firewire drive.”

For the rest of the story click HERE.

Technorati Tags:
24p, 4K, digital cameras, filmmaking, high-definition, indie, indie filmmaking, native, new techology, RED, redcode, workflow

More random observations working with RED and Premiere CS4. Some of these might be obvious issues for folks who work with Premiere all day long, for me it’s been a while. Now on the Quad Core with 4GB of RAM(still below the reported min requirements but this is more machine than most folks have already).

1- Performance needs to be tuned carefully. Got a nice little G-RAID feeding footage and still seeing a lot of dropped frames with all quality settings set to defaults. With resolution set to Quarter, Quality to Medium, Chroma DeNoise Off, Debayer set to Leading Lady(might want to change that to something a bit more understandable in terms of quality) and OLPF Compensation off- I get nice smooth frame rates and the footage looks pretty solid.

2- 16:9 Performance suffers a bit more. 16:9 has always been a problem for REDCode playback because it doesn’t scale nicely down from 4K the way 2:1 does.

3- Load times for complex projects can be long. I’ve got one project with about 2 hours worth of .R3D files that takes forever to load if it loads at all. It’s a little scary to see the progress bar sit there at almost loaded, forever.

4-The unsupported format warning is a little bit annoying. Essentially you drag your entire RED folder into CS4’s project window for a quick import. It sorts through, pulls out the .R3D and ignores the other files in the folders, such as the digital magazine profiles. However it then complains about these being unsupported formats. The option to never warn me about this again would be greatly appreciated.

5-Spanned clips are not marked. For example, if I have one long take that the camera split into several .R3D files, each shows up in the project as a separate clip. It’s smart enough to join them back into a single take but it would be more useful to automatically either- only import the first .R3D of a spanned take or make an obvious note in the project window that a clip is spanned.

6- It seems reasonably easy to crash CS 4.0.1. For example if I have one clip open and I bring up another and scrub through it that will give me a SPOD and then hang. Brings back those somewhat scary memories of the old Premiere which I spent years on and battled crashes and hangs every step of the way… but this is different. Right? More later….

Technorati Tags:
24p, 4K, adobe, os x, RED, windows, premiere, native

Been working a little more with RED in CS4. I had a little bit of trouble exporting a finished RED edit. I’m now updating the Adobe Media Encoder CS4 now, which should hopefully do the trick.

Scott Simmons is on the case as well with some more in-depth tests and performance analysis with Adobe CS4’s new native RED .R3D plugin which you can check out here.

http://www.scottsimmons.tv/blog/2008/12/11/kicking-the-tires-on-r3d-editing-in-premiere-pro/

Scott also provided a nice link to Adobe’s Dave Helmly who has a 30-minute video and text description of the best workflow practices. It looks like Adobe has its eye on being out front with the RED post workflow and it’s a very welcome development. Grab a coffee and then check it all out here.

http://blogs.adobe.com/davtechtable/2008/12/native_red_camera_files_cs4.html

And to back up a bit, here’s an older post from Studio Daily looking at a beta version of the plugin and its potential implications last summer.

http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=622

along with their current update:

http://www.studiodaily.com/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=756

Technorati Tags:
24p, 4K, adobe, os x, RED, windows, premiere, native