Twenty398

Preparing the timeline, but first…

As this will be a shorter post, I’ll start with a small digression:
Since my last post, the Adobe workflow is out, and I am hangin’ in here with Color and FCP for this project…. What old news one can feel like

After reading up a bit on the Adobe thingy, I think I may as well just stay here a wee bit longer than I thought, though. Seems you cannot get access to the metadata with the Adobe plugin yet. If that’s a fact, then the gain is that you by now can do about the same thing with Adobe as you have been able to since the release of R1 in FCP… But in ”real” 4k. + hangs and crashes.

Seems to me Apple and Adobe have received separate pieces of the RED cake. Apple got metadata control. Adobe got full debayer and resolution. If this is true, you are stuck with the metadata from the cam on the shoot. In that case I’ll still be doin’ my FCP thingy for quite a while.

I do miss full debayer and 4k. Badly (More on that in part 3 of this small series). But not having control over exposure and kelvin is even more scary.

Enough! To the subject @ hand

My project was 9 videotracks high with all kind of speedchanges and a couple of simple comps. I had 4k 16:9 (stock), 4k 2:1 and 3k 2:1.

I sent all cuts down to one videotrack – except for 3k, composites and extreme lowlight shots.
Then made a copy of my timeline to prepare for Color, selected all, rightclicked and chose ”remove attributes.
… and simply ”Send to Color” to see which shots got the repeat frame bug

I spent some time to L&T multiclip shots. To make a long story short:
That’s rather quick compared to developing DPXs, but it feels very unnecessary…

When I had that done, I read that one could edl the timeline out of FCP to Color to avoid the repeat frame bug. Someone needs credit for experimental fantasy!

I’ll just mention one thing, if you choose to follow my work-intensive route: If there’s a spanned shot in there, you can randomly get he bug in both the shot immediately before and the one immediately after.

So here’s a solution for the more effective person… ☺

Thanks to Luca Immesi
1 Shoot 4k/2k 16:9
2 Make your edit in fcp with P or M proxies
3 export the EDL
4 make a new color project
5 import the edl
6 put the right frame rate, resolution (what ever you want), files path
7 resize the clips in the geometry room
8 enjoy

Update2! So I tried with b17 4k spanned files, it works smooth! Also I experimented exporting an xml from fcp and importing into color, it works fine but I noticed a better playback in color with edl method than xml.
But for people can’t load the edl they can try exporting the xml and importing in color.

I haven’t yet tested this myself, but it sorta makes sense (going into conspiracy mode here on how Apple prefers their buggy XMLs over good ole’ EDLs. Self-censorship won! ☺ )

Next:
Preparing the shots that needed reframing, compositing and scaling…
I’ll write a separate post on my thoughts on developing low noise images from RED RAW for grading. BUT that’s not for now.

The important thing is that I had to run 34 out of 142 cuts this way.
Short story is: Despite hassles by having to do this @ all, I saved a lot of time ☺.

The remaining 108 cuts could have been transferred in one batch through an edl. This starts to sound like RED bliss. (Cliffhanger sound…)

As part of this project is to find out whether the new Color workflow holds up against developing DPXs, I have duplicates of some of the ”problem” or suspected problematic shots. Mostly low-light
I feel very comfortable with developing the RAW files and grading AJA wrapped DPXs in Color by now. But will the new workflow hold up? (drum-roll and answer on thursday ☺)

Cheers!
Gunleik

This is part 2 of 3 in a first series of posts.The first is here.

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… › Continue reading