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RED workflow – ProRes422 HQ?
Fellow Final Cutters,
I’m going to be shooting and editing some corporate shorts on the RED soon, and was curious what the best and easiest Final Cut workflow is, at the moment. We’ll be shooting 4K 24fps (which is preferable for in-house DVD-only release, 23.98, or 24p? I’d personally think 24p), and I’m thinking that since we’ll be doing a majority of the offline on a MacBook Pro, editing with the proxies wouldn’t be much fun. Is it possible to achieve great looking results at 1080 ProRes422 HQ?
What does everyone recommend? Log and Transfer to ProRes? Also, what might the render times be expected to be in Log and Transfer? Would you recommend RedCine over L&T? I’m thinking that during the 5 days of shooting we’ll maybe want to set up two mobile systems on-set; one system for handling offloads, and another with a drive we copy all new assets to at the end of each day, and said second system would be reserved to rendering/changing from 4K to ProRes files (rendering all night, and all day, 24- hours a day) which we’d use for both offline and online. Would those approx. 120 hours be enough to render 1TB or less of 4K assets down to ProRes? Would it possibly speed up the render times to acquire an eSata connector for the MacBook Pro? I know eSata is best for playback performance, but would FW400 be a bottleneck to render speeds? I’d think not, but then again, perhaps so? Someone recommended Firmtek’s eSata MacBook Pro thingy as the most stable they had used for their P2 and RAID setups. I’d prefer not to spend another $120, unless it means the difference between having the assets rendered by the time the shoot is over, in time for the edit, or not having been rendered in time. Let me know if it’s a dramatic difference in render!
I’m thinking we would treat the ProRes files as our final master format, from offline, through online – straight to DVDSP and duplication and DVD viewing. The only time we’d look back at the 4K would be on a shot by shot basis for potential zooming or cropping in on specific shots.
Does this all sound like a good workflow, and please let me know any thoughts. I’ve had a dickens of a time finding any step by step RED Final Cut workflows spelled out on the internet. Guess it’s the nature of the evolving platform.
Thanks so much!
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10 Replies
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Oh, no, this thread is getting swallowed up in the highly active FCP forum!
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[Joel Fisher] “We’ll be shooting 4K 24fps (which is preferable for in-house DVD-only release, 23.98, or 24p? I’d personally think 24p)”
Unless you are doing a film out, you will be wanting to work in 23.98. That is the NTSC film-on-video rate. “24p DVDs” are 23.98 (23.976 to be exact). You can always conform back and forth between 23.98 and 24.00 using Cinema Tools or FCP itself – so it really doesn’t matter. But to avoid confusion you should keep your entire workflow at 23.98 since there’s absolutely zero reason to use 24.00 unless its going to film.
I’ve yet to work with the RED so I can’t comment on the rest of your post. But from what I can tell it looks like a good way to go.
Sean
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Thanks for the thoughts on 24p… I had done so much work with 24pN on P2, my first instinct was 24p. Of course, I’ve also edited a lot of 23.98 HDCAM stuff lately, but my understanding of the DVD end of things was more limited.
Thoughts on any of the other questions, anybody?
Thanks again!
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Hi Joel
I’m working on these kinds of RED projects from time to time, and I use ProRes HQ as my codec of choice for RED finishing. To be fair, often there’s other formats in the mix as well, so capturing those via SDI as ProRes gives me just one type of file to deal with throughout.
1080p24 ProRes files look great, and you should still at this time do this via REDCine – the L&T option does not give you the shot by shot control over your one-light colour correction, nor the reframing options that are so nice when shooting 4K video. You can also CC with curves, which is not yet possible using REDAlert and L&T as far as I know.
My biggest concern with what you mention is that you seem to suggest using a MacBook Pro for rendering. I would strongly advise against this. Using a MacPro, and setting the export settings sensibly in REDCine (for example using full rather than maximum quality and so on) you can get transcode times down to between 8 and 4:1. You will not get anywhere near that on a MacBook Pro – not will you get a good quality (say half-size) preview in REDCine. On a MBP your transcode ratio may be as high as 20-40:1.
Use a MacBook Pro with an eSata CF card reader and a RAID 1 drive (mirrored data) to transfer data off the cards. Regularly transfer this to an internal RAID array or RAID 1/5 external array on the Mac Pro. One light on the Mac Pro using a calibrated cinema display – then for good measure have an HD monitor and SDI output on the Mac Pro if you can swing it to check the REDCine outputs with proper gamma. This HD monitor can be used by the camera operator and DP/Director as an on-set reference monitor for shooting anyway.
Personally, I get my cards backed up (twice) on set then do the transfers at base, so your requirements are obviously different. I would still recommend a Mac Pro for the transcodes – you could have it cased for transport then set up as easily as a MBP unless you are really in a remote location…
Hope that helps a little.
Ben
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer -
You can save out a look (preset) from Red Alert (an RLX) and this will appear as a choice in the Log and Transfer Red plugin.
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That’s true Steven, but you have to apply that look to all your selected shots in the log and transfer window. That does not allow you to quickly view each shot in turn and make small/large adjustments as required. Further, if you want 1080p files from the RED originals, at present you will not get the exact frame size required – it’s a fudge until the QuadHD option is enabled in build 17 of the camera firmware.
As much as I appreciate the speed of the L&T option, it does not do the RED footage the justice that REDCine does yet – I wish it did…
Ben
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer -
Thanks guys for all the input thus far. You said that the L&T will not do justice to the footage like RedCine, applying a one light. I do realize we’d be editing pretty flat images without doing this… but we really won’t have time to do initial image tweaks before we hit the ground running on the edit (there will be more time later for tweaking – and it doesn’t make sense to me to apply a general correction across the board to digital compressed footage. I’d prefer to save the detail for later, with more attention to perfection.) Do I lose something (other than a more aesthetic offline) by skipping minor tweaks up front, and saving adjustments for final online in Color with the ProRes files? Are certain elements of details lost in the transfer to the ProRes codec if I don’t do tweaks up front? I’ve been thinking of using Color for the final image forging on the locked cut (assuming Color works with ProRes).
Also, an idea just struck me. Some people have mentioned dropping proxies into Compressor and converting the footage to another format that way. What if (WHAT IF) I converted the footage via low or medium quality proxies into, say, DVCPROHD 24 720, through Compressor? Would this be faster than L&T to ProRes, and RedCine to ProRes? I could use this as an offline, and then once ready for the online, either manually or Crimsonly, or whatever, conform the cuts to ProRes 1080. That is, if the lower-res conversion would be faster up front. Basically we need speed and cutting up front, and then we have (hypothetically) as much time as we care to spend on the back-end.
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Thanks for the clarification and additional info.
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Thanks everyone again for your input. Any thoughts on my last post regarding using Compressor? I don’t know if it was clear that I was asking a question… it may have looked like I was positing a solution. It was more of a question whether that would work, etc. 🙂
Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!
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Joel I just finished a food shoot with RED and I have to say that doing any kind of color correction with Redcine is a bad idea unless there is something horribly wrong.
I prefer to do color correction in the final edit only and doing it in Redcine means a huge waste of time if time is of the essence and the lighting is good on the shots.
sure everything will need some level of cc, but it usually does anyway.
I would just convert everything using Redcine (log and transfer is really buggy right now for some of us) but leave out the color correction until the edit. You should be able to load up tons of clips all at once and have RedCine export them as individual prores high quality files. Make sure you have as fast a mac pro tower with as much memory as possible though as this software doesn’t quite work as well as it could with lower resources (being beta and all)
I wouldn’t waste any time on an offline/online and I would even be so bold as to avoid 24p and just do it all 29.97 to keep it simple. The image WILL still have a film cadence to it being progressive.
my 002 cents.
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