-
ALEXA vs. RED?
-
[gary adcock] “You seem to want to bash everything about this, and you keep speaking as if yours is the only point of view.”
The fact RAW workflow is discussed, offered by manufacturers and used by post facilities shows it is not exclusively mine point of view.
-
Are you guys fighting?
Pat McGowan
President, inMotion DVS Inc.
Ottawa, Canada
Sony PMW350K, Sony EX-3, Sony EX-1
Final Cut Pro (6 seats, CS5 (4 seats), C4D
Small-Tree GranitSTOR 32TB RAID -
I would amazed if there were not 3rd party utilities available by summer for the ALEXA workflow. If this camera is a popular as I think it will be this will not be an issue. Anyone?
Pat McGowan
President, inMotion DVS Inc.
Ottawa, Canada
Sony PMW350K, Sony EX-3, Sony EX-1
Final Cut Pro (6 seats, CS5 (4 seats), C4D
Small-Tree GranitSTOR 32TB RAID -
Didn’t I wrote there will be such an utility around this summer right in this thread and even mentioned its name?
🙂
-
So, back to my original post – ALEXA vs. RED EPIC?? Pros and Cons from a technical, aesthetic and marketing perspective….
Pat McGowan
President, inMotion DVS Inc.
Ottawa, Canada
Sony PMW350K, Sony EX-3, Sony EX-1
Final Cut Pro (6 seats, CS5 (4 seats), C4D
Small-Tree GranitSTOR 32TB RAID -
Pat, do this:
buy all the cables and software you need to use and edit the digital Arri. Now, (optionally) buy all the cables and software you need to use and edit a Red. (I say optionally, I`m a little prejudiced on this one.)
do this:
Look- at- the- stuff. You don`t have to ask many more questions. If you can`t get one or the other, you already have your answer for the present months. You have just spent less than $5,000 and already have the answer within pretty good reasons, mostly better reasons than we can give you. You haven`t bought the big expensive thing, the camera, and you haven`t bought the littlest things, so no distraction.
now look at this:
CreativeCow.Net…RedCamera…”THE END OF THE WORLD (as we know it) IS HERE!” (https://www.blackmagic-design.com/davinci/resolve/) Here we are looking at a beautiful new Resolve, DaVinci color corrector console. Just what a RED needs. I wouldn`t mind if someone put one in my hands, you neither. But do you know what? A RED needs one, it lives on one, it can`t do without one. You can`t take your hands off it! Computers (machines) are cheap, people are cheap, but when you put them together and make them editors, they`re expensive. [Michael Aranyshev] said you`d be in a pinch if you have to edit 40 GB of original takes into 2 GB of sendoff. He also considered this his and your average. If you are recording the mating habits of a Humming Bird, or maybe your usual nightmare wedding job, you`d starve to death in your own business. That`s why I wouldn`t be caught dead using an Arri digital nor my own equipment for this. Nor would I do these for a living. Just to make fun of that inefficiency I`ll remind us all of the days when we used to put some shows on the air by multiplaning a single camera and having a stage, a black curtain, and lighting in front of us, another stage and black curtain and lighting behind us, and a titles- roller too. Shows or acts had to set up or break down behind the curtains with the lights still off, the audience if any had to turn their chairs around at the change, but it worked “real time”, on time. When I started working in post- production it nauseated me a little that it averaged 3 hours of logged time to make 1 hour of sendoff time. Employees used to moan when they had to use more VPR2B VTRs and fewer VPR3 VTRs in the suites because some heads or a capstan belt went down and the VPR2Bs slowed the flow to worse than 3 hours per. Then I had to laugh at myself when I had to edit on my own equipment and it took me 8 hours to make one sendoff hour. One of my definitions of my own business is that I`d (in theory) fling and fire any of my employees or talent who`d be poorer and slower at making video than at making audio or Radio. Basically this was true. My TV production equipment almost never let me down, nor did it work as poorly as my Radio shows making equipment. I really don`t know how the Radio- only people make a get- by living on the junk. Now look at the color corrector again. One doesn`t mind having one, but I`ve never used one myself. When I shoot on my own cameras, whether the portable which can be run by just me, or the “studio”, where the Camera Operator can drop the brightness control on the viewfinder then push red, green, and blue push buttons while observing the threshhold on the viewfinder tube while the camera is aimed at reference white, the results have been that I never brought back an approved take from a shoot that needed color or brightness correction at all, except for a little black level touch- up, which was not exactly hard to mix into an edit. Audio was harder than video. Naturally the man on the setup box would always say a few unwelcome words in the headphones of the man on the “studio” camera but we brought back perfection. I wish you the same luck. That`s why the colorimetry and halftones (and mixed results) of the Arri seem importantly better to me than the RED. In regular TV we think of it as good color versus unsatisfactory color, which requires re-do time, whether at the take, or whether in the edit.
now write down software, flow, and cabling/ storage notes that are presently available before going on:
Michael Brevin said, “There is now real- time Arriraw playback, and debayer in Gpu Assimilate, Invidia, and Glue tools have new products No hardware acceleration needed. We announced ProRes DTE Direct- to- edit proxy and edit recording.” “Workflow is real- time.” Oops, Michael, some of this ignores editing for playback. Personally I never put playback software on my editing computer. It gets in the way of the editing software, still we`ll take notes from a friendly salesman and go on. (Michael Aranyshev: “Playback isn`t workflow.”)
Gary Adcock said,
“I have to disagree with Michael (Aranyshev).
With the D-21 you are able to handle the RAW content output of the camera into a variety of devices, Stwo, Codex and Clipster with many of the finishing tools all handle ARRIRAW and with the GlueTools plug- in on the Mac in my humble opinion I believe the workflow to be simpler than handling R3D files for many people.” (etc)
Gary too:
“[Michael Aranyshev] “R3D fits into the existing DPX workflow just fine.”
Never said that it didn’t.
But at the time that the originial D20 was announced and shipping Red was not yet a product so it was designed with the existing tools at hand. That world has changed in 5 years.“Just calculate how long will it take to load 40TB of ARRIRAW’s to your grading suite array vs. how long will it take to load 4TB of R3D.”
I think a 10-1 difference between the Raw formats is a bit much, my numbers indicate the it is closer to a 3:1 size difference between the 2, but yes the older format is larger, but if we are talking Scratch, Nucoda, Baselight those tools are geared to be handling that much data regularly.With tools from Stwo, Codex, Cilpster or Rave HD you take the ARRIRAW capture directly into the grading suite and use the device as ONLINE and there is no loading as you are accessing the material in the same manner as it was shot.
I am Acquisition Agnostic,
There is not just one way to do these workflows, but I am here at NAB and I see the buzz around Alexa and Epic ( which will be shown on Wed) I will be in the 3Ds room at the RedUser Event Wed because I was part of a Technology demo shoot with some of the first MX models that OffHollywood has.
Its all about the tools, and like many RED users, ARRIRAW users will have to suffer some pain somewhere but I am not worried.
gary adcock”
Pat, I think of data size the way a Broadcaster does. One gets accustomed to taking a reel off a machine, sticking it all the way up one`s arm to the shoulder, and walking to the next machine or the storage box. There`s also loading some of the data directly. To repeat Gary yet again, WITH TOOLS FROM stwo, codex, clipster OR rave hd YOU CAN TAKE THE arriraw CAPTURE DIRECTLY INTO THE THE GRADING SUITE AND USE THE DEVICE AS online AND THERE IS NO LOADING AS YOU ARE ACCESSING THE MATERIAL IN THE SAME MANNER AS IT WAS SHOT. Personally, Raw Audio Video Editing sounds like an improvement when you`re reaching for “effects quality”, even though I haven`t tried it. Storage isn`t no cost but it looks like lunch dimes compared to editing corrections. Albert Einstein said, “Technicians (Engineers- sic?) fix problems, Geniuses prevent them.” If your color corrections and levels are harder and more common to fix than your audio problems, then your production workflow has certainly failed the Fred test.
-
[Pat McGowan] “Are you guys fighting? “
just different points of view
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, ILhttps://blogs.creativecow.net/24640
-
[Michael Aranyshev] “With ARRIRAW there is no such thing.”
have you worked with the current GlueTools ARRI plug in workflow that allows for direct playback of ARRIRaw inside of Quicktime. With R3D files you still need to have the the QT wrapper to open in QT.
ARRIRAW has been supported on the highend tools of awhile. I have worked in ARRIRAW as long as I have worked in R3D. The difference was there were not as many D21’s to work with.
The GlueTools ARRIRAW conform tool for FCP is even being updated for the Alexa release and will allow full control of the codec within FCP, and this is something that cannot be done with R3D files with out going into Color or out of FCP into another app.
I’m not saying one is better than the other, I like them both and I am lucky enough to friends with the key people in both camps. I do have extensive time working in RAW and I see advantages to both systems depending on your workflow and needs.
I am all about choices.
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, ILhttps://blogs.creativecow.net/24640
-
Gary, are you seriously suggesting to cut a longform with the original footage from either RED One or D-21?
The GlueTools ARRIRAW conform tool for FCP is even being updated for the Alexa release and will allow full control of the codec within FCP, and this is something that cannot be done with R3D files with out going into Color or out of FCP into another app.
I get D-21 from s.two DFR. It is RAW in DPX wrapper. Robert Monaghan explicitly refused to support this format in either ARRIRAW Toolkit or Cineon/DPX Toolkit. But that’s not the point. I’m talking about pulling out exactly the frames that went into the cut from the back up storage. There is a choice of tools for R3D right now. There is one promised to be released this summer for D-21.
OK, forget R3D and ARRIRAW. Let’s talk about regular RGB DPX. Let’s say you have a film edited and scanned, ready for grading or graded already. Then you have a trailer too. How would you pull the 3,000 frames used in the trailer out of 180,000 that makes your film? What software?
-
[Michael Aranyshev] “Gary, are you seriously suggesting to cut a longform with the original footage from either RED One or D-21?”
Hell No.
I do mostly commercial and corporate work and I do have a couple of clients that insist on working natively at max rez. (one long before it was truly feasible on mac or linux)“I get D-21 from s.two DFR. It is RAW in DPX wrapper. Robert Monaghan explicitly refused to support this format in either ARRIRAW Toolkit or Cineon/DPX Toolkit.”
That was nearly 2 years ago, according to the current release of the ARRIRaw Plug in.
S-Two makes a line of equipment that records ARRIRAW data from the ARRIFLEX D-21 cameras.
Currently, the image data is saved as specially encoded DPX Frames. While these frames are
legal DPX frames, the ARRIRAW image data needs to be decoded from these files. This Toolkit
provides a conversion tool that will generate a new set of ARI files from the S-Two DPX frames.
The STwoARRIConvert.app is located in the Applications/Glue Tools folder on your Macintosh. It
is installed long with the rest of the toolkit. To start the application, doubleclick on the
STwoARRIConvert icon.
I have used it a number of time without issue on the S.two Dmag system. I am going to be doing a project on the OB1 in a few weeks, but I do not expect any issues.
“How would you pull the 3,000 frames used in the trailer out of 180,000 that makes your film? What software?”
that trailer is the length of many of my projects
But Scratch, Baselight, Nucoda, Lustre, Pablo all have the ability to handle a properly conformed xml cut list this is done all the time and has been for a while now. Handling that I/O process is having, maintaining and continually updating the reel, camera, take, frame info on while it was being edited- it is not now and never been an “automated” process.
None of these tools are considered affordable by any stretch of ones imagination.
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows for the Digitally Inclined
Chicago, ILhttps://blogs.creativecow.net/24640
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up