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colour correcting with realtime playback
I have a 50 minute low/no budget documentary picture-locked and ready to final grade.
It is mainly shot DVCpro50, with one DV25 shot sequence.
All the rushes are loaded at full native camera res onto 3x300GB SATA media drives mounted inside my Dual 1.25/G4 via a Firmtek SATA card.
I edited at full res in a DVCPro50 timeline and monitored the edit via Decklink Pro SDI out to a Sony 20inch broadcast CRT.
It’s a project been going for seven years – hence the old formats and kit !I now want to switch my timeline edit from DVCPro50 setting to uncompressed 10-bit for a final grade and render (adding Nattress G-Nicer filter to the DV25 material) and either do an edit-to-tape via my Decklink Pro to hired Digibeta deck or, even better, take a hard drive to a post house to do it for me.
When I go uncompressed I won’t be able to monitor the picture realtime any more unless I move to a RAID setup.
I happen to have a RAID ATA card and two WD Caviar drives in the cupboard that used to reside in the computer but there is now no room for two more drives inside the machine – I already have a total five hard drives (including the system drive) installed internally.I might be able to add the two WD Caviars and the RAID card by removing the CD drive and removing the secondary ATA drive (I can move the data to one of the SATA media drives temporarily).
If I can do that, how do I set up my final edit and all it’s source media files, working at 25fps playback after rendering in an uncompressed timeline ?
Is it just a case of setting prefs to all new render files to go only on the new RAID O ? Do the original DV50 and DV25 clips stay where they are on the 3x SATA drives ?Or are the advantages of the uncompressed realtime RAID O playback not worth the hassle just for the final clour correction stage ?
There’s no heavy effects/compositing/layering going on anywhere, it’s traditional natural history work (but some quite severe colour correcting of the DV25 material) so maybe I should stay with the DVCPro50 monitoring and just render out a master file uncompressed ‘blind’ and assume it looks ok when it goes onto Digibeta in the post house ?What would you do ?
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4 Replies
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Is there a specific reason you want to switch your picture locked timeline from DVCPro50 up to 10 bit uncompressed? I would say it is better to stay native to the material shot, unless going up to uncompressed provides better quality on your color grade or any effects you may use. From the looks of it, going uncompressed may not really be worth it.
In my experience if a client needed an uncompressed master file (which is rare), I have used the native format (in this case DVCPro 50) from there I would output to tape and re-capture at whatever format/resolution they needed. Uncompressed still required a decent RAID for playback however. The output/recapture, especially in shorter projects, was a much easier route than rendering up to 10bit.
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I want go uncompressed because I mustn’t lose any quality. Rendering using a compressed format will result in some loss of quality even if minimal most of the time.
Most shots are single layers and have maybe only one to three filters applied – colour 3-way, sharpen, grad ND – but others, particularly the 4:3 DV sequence, have more – scaling, chroma reconstruction (G-Nicer), sharpen, 3-way colour – so I would expect things to start to significantly deteriorate through all that unless bolstered by the uncompressed codec.
I suppose I am in a position where i do not have the automatic ‘approval’ of a recognised production company, so I may need to have to defend and explain the technical route I took in getting accepted for a broadcast.
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Personally, I always drop DV material into an uncompressed 10 bit for grading. I also use Nattress gamma filters a lot as well as chroma sharpen, 3 way CC etc. Some might say 8 bit is OK, but I can see the difference going to 10 bit on heavily graded material.
That said, I have not had any problems running uncompressed 10 bit PAL off LaCie FW800 external drives. I usually set my grades and then render overnight and then do real time playback. Most of my work is doco and you can get a very good result with FCP tools plus good plugins. Don’t forget to use RGB limit if you want to stay broadcast safe. I find the broadcast safe filter isn’t safe after render.
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Do you run the uncompressed playback off single drives on the Firewire800 or two striped ?
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