feature film

[Lance Bachelder]

I also just finished a feature cut in FCPX. While I did most of the color timing in Redline I did all final color in FCPX using Color Finale and a little Color Board. Because the mix came out so bad I also ended up remixing the entire film in 5.1 in FCPX for the Red Carpet premiere in Hollywood.

I cut the entire film in 4K native .r3d’s – no proxies!

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Oliver Peters]

[Lance Bachelder] “I cut the entire film in 4K native .r3d’s – no proxies! “

What sort of hardware?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Steve Connor]

[Lance Bachelder] “I also just finished a feature cut in FCPX. While I did most of the color timing in Redline I did all final color in FCPX using Color Finale and a little Color Board. Because the mix came out so bad I also ended up remixing the entire film in 5.1 in FCPX for the Red Carpet premiere in Hollywood.

I cut the entire film in 4K native .r3d’s – no proxies! “

We’re going to need a LOT more detail about this please!

[Lance Bachelder]

The entire post was done in my home studio – I used a new 6 core Mac Pro with D700’s and 32GB RAM. Media was kept on 2 OWC Thunderbolt raids in RAID 0 for speed – everything backed up of course to several other drives. I used 2 27″ LG monitors plus a new Sony XBR 850C 4K 65″ TV fed from the MacPro’s HDMI port for all color work – which came out great from X by the way. My audio set-up includes a Focusrite i/o sending to Bluesky SkyOne monitors and JBL sub. Super easy to do the 5.1 mix and even panned all the car-bys etc which sounded great in the theater at Raleigh Studios.

The show was shot on 2 Red Dragons in 4K 7:1 4096×2160. Based on the FOCUS seminar, I used Sync n Link to sync all dialog which was awesome as long as the timecode match, which we did have problems with on the 2 Red’s. I had originally planned to create 4 Libraries (4 reels) to make the show more manageable but was surprised that the Mac Pro could handle the entire show as one Library no prob. I created an Event for each scene which I dragged the synced dailies into each night after shooting. I then simply used Projects for each scene and duped the projects for alternate cuts.

Once all the scenes were cut I did then create 4 reels and copied and pasted each scene into the proper reel. Then once I had the four reels done I dragged those into a new Library called FINAL – this opened and react much quicker as I now had only the media that was in the cut. Again, once the reels help solid, I pasted all 4 into a new Project with the entire show on one timeline – I wasn’t sure the Mac or FCPX would be able to handle all that raw Red media and sound design but it work fine. Perhaps more RAM and a faster machine would have been better but it all turned out.

I think everything went well because we made the decision to shoot 4K 7:1 and not 5 or 6K – I’m guessing I would have had to create proxies had we gone with larger files but the 4K files were great and looked fantastic. Although I did export the final show to Resolve 12 for color timing we were not happy with what we were getting (not to mention all the crashes) and went back to Redcine to do most of the color. There were radical white balance problems between the 2 Dragons and Redcine has a great white balance tool. The other thing we discovered in Redcine was Alchemy – this was magic and instantly made our footage look like film with beautiful shadows and highlights and great clarity. Not just Alchemy of course but that was the secret sauce for sure.

I rendered out 444 XQ 4K files from Redcine and cut them over the top of the Red raw files (because Alchemy is not recognized in the metadata outside of Redcine) Once I had the entire timeline in Pro Res 444XQ I used Color Finale to fine tune some scenes and adjustment layers here and there using the Color Board for final tweaks.

Anyways, it was a great learning experience for me, I had never cut a Red raw show before and never an entire feature from scratch in FCPX. The one think that FCPX has over any other app in existence is how it handles multi channel audio. The ability of scrub and turn off unused tracks and being able to quickly isolate with law’s or boom mic from the Inspector is so elegant and so “pro” it made the whole cutting process so much cleaner and easier. Also the scopes in FCPX are just so much nicer than anything else out there it really makes tweaking final color a pleasure.

Wish list? The biggest thing I’d like to see is some sort of audio bussing – a way to buss via Roles so Dialog, for instance, could have it’s own final fx applied like EQ or Compression etc. Performance – I still think FCPX is a bit clunky in real-time playback and you really need to watch your RAM usage – I used the free app Memory Clean to frequently get back memory that FCPX holds on to and did have to restart X when Memory Clean wasn’t enough. Red metadata – it would be nice if a few more of the controls from Redcine made it into the metadata controls inside FCPX – Resolve and Premiere both give you almost the entire toolset from Redcine while FCPX gives you minimal control. Finally, the one thing I really dig in Resolve is the ability to ignore a file extension when importing an .xml. This would be great to allow the user to override FCPX’s unwavering need to find the exact file which can lead to Incompatible file warnings – I’d like to be able to point to any file and replace whatever I want.

Whew – sorry for the novel… and the typo’s…

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Steve Connor]

Thanks for posting that Lance, I’m sure you’re going to be getting a few questions about it. Glad it went well for you.

[Oliver Peters]

[Lance Bachelder] “Although I did export the final show to Resolve 12 for color timing we were not happy with what we were getting (not to mention all the crashes) and went back to Redcine to do most of the color”

Great info! Thanks. Regarding Resolve, do you think that’s a systemic issue with Resolve or just your comfort factor with the application?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Bill Davis]

Congratulations Lance.
Nothing more satisfying than getting the work done to your satisfaction and on time.
Well done.

Know someone who teaches video editing in elementary school, high school or college? Tell them to check out http://www.StartEditingNow.com – video editing curriculum complete with licensed practice content.

[Lance Bachelder]

I would say a bit of both. Early versions of 12 definitely had a big problem with .r3d files and would crash constantly. Not as bad with Pro Res files. Resolve really is geared toward colorists who enjoy using curves. I’ve never been a big curves person, even after 20+ years in Photoshop. I was able to get much better and more filmic results in Redcine using Alchemy and Levels and barely touched curves or the color wheels.

It was at a Vegas premiere that I resolved to become an avid FCPX user.

Lance Bachelder
Writer, Editor, Director
Downtown Long Beach, California
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1680680/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

[Ronny Courtens]

Lance, could you send me an e-mail so I can get in touch with you?

ronnycourtens@mac.com

– Ronny

[Eric Santiago]

Love the article 🙂

Glad too see others using the same workflow as I am.

Im not cutting any features with FCPX at the moment but are handling two for color and adr/master.

Since it was my RED camera and I was responsible for dailies and data, the workflow with FCPX, RCX to Resolve/Pro Tools has been helpful to the end users which are Avid/Premiere 😛

Ill save the rants for another post 🙂