Pro Res HQ from AVID DNxHD

[Terence Curren]

Wow! Where to start wpth this one.

The best answer, if they don’t want to go to a Symphony for Color Correction, is to go to tape and then do a daVinci color correction pass.

Short of that, Color doesn’t support the DNxHD codec. So you will have to go into FCP with whatever codec you choose and then razor blade that sucker at every edit point. Be sure to add dissolves for the matching duration wherever they may occur in the timeline or you will be in keyframe hell in Color.

These extreme workaround situations never save money in the long run, they just transfer the money from some place with higher end hardware to someone with lower cost software. The client ends up paying about the same either way unless someone is willing to take a beating on their rate.

Example: 8 hours in a daVinci suite or, Transcode the sequence to a FCP friendly format. Then 3 hours in FCP to prep the sequence, 8 or 9 hours to CC the sequence in Color, another couple of hours to render, then at least 30 minuntes to verify everything came back correctly in FCP, then output to tape.

Where is the savings?

Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca

[Bouke Vahl]

Terence,
Although i totally agree, i do question your math a bit, and you’re forgetting a few things.

Perhaps the guy does not have a deck, but there is one in the FCP shop. That makes things a bit different…
Next, your numbers seem a bit odd.
8 hours in a DaVinci is about 45 – 50 minutes of program, right?
Sets you back some 2500 USD?
How much is a FCP room for a day? Something like 800?
Prepping the output for FCP takes an hour or so to render, in his own shop. Money stays there.
3 hours to prep the FCP sequence? If you also bring an EDL?
Or use my ReCut application? Should be something like 1 hour or less (i can razor an hour show in less than an hour on Avid, using Recut…)
8 – 9 hours to CC in Color? Then you assume that the colorist on FCP is as fast as on a DaVinci. I doubt that, but lets add the two hours saved on prepping to the CC time.

Rendering time i don’t know, i do know it’s dog slow and will probably be overnight. And probably not everything will work as expected, so let’s add a few hours to check and repair mistakes.

Brings the total sum (rendering overnight charged at half rate) to two billable days, makes 1600 buck.

His savings: no renting of a deck, that is 400 for a day?
That makes 2500 – 1600 + 400 = 1300

Now i know these numbers are off also, but there surely is a difference. If there was none, then all the big shops would still be alive.

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s

[Terence Curren]

[Bouke Vahl] “Sets you back some 2500 USD?
How much is a FCP room for a day? Something like 800? “

800 a day? With an operator? Set up for proper Color Correction with the panels? Not a chance.
And if they don’t have the panels, the operator will be much slower. And if they don’t have the HD scopes and proper monitoring, they aren’t going to be able to do as good of a job as in a properly set up room.

Yes Color is cheaper to purchase than a daVinci, but the rest of the room and the operator should cost the same.

As we both know, that isn’t the case. With cheap software you get “everyone is a colorist”, not just folks who have been doing it exclusively for many years.

[Bouke Vahl] “Or use my ReCut application? Should be something like 1 hour or less (i can razor an hour show in less than an hour on Avid, using Recut…) “

Forgot about Recut, sorry. 🙁

[Bouke Vahl] “Now i know these numbers are off also, but there surely is a difference. If there was none, then all the big shops would still be alive. “

Not necessarily. The reason the big shops can’t compete has to do with the lower overhead and clients that don’t care about quality anymore or don’t know the difference.

I don’t know what things are like on your side of the pond, but over here I see shows that would never have made it on TV ten years ago. We’ve become a quantity over quality consumer world. Otherwise WalMart wouldn’t be the largest company in the world.

Terence Curren
http://www.alphadogs.tv
http://www.digitalservicestation.com
Burbank,Ca

[Bouke Vahl]

well, quality also has gone down over here significantly.
I do a lot of dubs from dvCam or MiniDV to digibeta for broadcast, when i’m lucky i can convince the client that when i’m making things broadcast safe ít’ll look better than the legalizers from the broadcaster.
Also, i get to do commercials, produced by ‘normal’ video production companies, wich was unthinkable a few years back.

And, we have a new standard for digital delivery of commercials. Instead of digibeta i can now deliver MXF (IMX D10 @ 30 mbs, read, the lowest 4:2:2 XDcam available)

But for prices over here, i was asked to recommend a shooter for an British contact. They are used to getting a good shooter bringing his own digibeta rig for 550 euro a day. (Lot of ex BBC guys seem to work for that)
I myself try to work for 800 a day (at least that’s on my rate card), for that i bring a MC with adrenaline (Hd), all flavours of SD decks and unlimited storage, plus all common software and more.
(i estimate my suite at a new price of about 120K)

Now for your typical CC’ing FCP room, (without decks)
Storage? Virtually none since it’s not editing…
Mac + FCP + computer monitors and half decent audio monitoring: 15K
Scope and client monitor, well, wild guess, 40K ???
Panel? No idea, but 25K should cover it…
Pimping the room to make it look more expensive, 10K

(all in Euros, add 20% for dollars)

Makes a 90K grading suite. Rates over here are about half a percent a day, so that makes 450, leaves 350 for the operator, and that sounds not unreasonable for a good craftsman…
(yes, i know about power/maintanance/building yadda yadda…)

But it sounds not that strange to me, writing off a suite in about 2 years. (I normally expect 100 billable days a year)

How do you create your rate card?

And my most important question, (Just toyed a bit with Color, as i have a potential client that wants me to work with it), is there a way to have FCP to keep the color metadata connected to a specific clip? I totally don’t understand the way metadata is saved…
What i do understand is that in my part of the country i’m not going to burn my fingers on it for a while…

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s

[Peter Wollsey]

Hi guys,

Thanks for your responses…and although I don’t see any answer to my actual question regarding the best / easiest way to transcode from AVID DNxHD to Pro Res, I will contribute to the discussion you chose to pursue…..

1. I guess the main reason for doing this in Color is that the director wants to specifically work with me based on personal recommendations and seeing examples of my work. While I have cut on both FCP and AVID, as a colorist I use Apple Color, with a control surface and broadcast HD monitor with hardware scopes (which by the way show exactly the same readings as the scopes in Color – so for me, they are actually not needed).

2. Bourke noted that I might have a deck whereas the director & editor might not – he was correct – I have an HDCAM SR deck patched into my KONA3.

3. I know I am as fast as a Da Vinci colorist because I have graded over 100 episodes of broadcast TV with Color, using a control surface. I have sat in on Da Vinci sessions on some of the same series and they take the same length of time. If you have a control surface and experience, I don’t see why grading with Color should take longer than grading with Da Vinci.

4. I get a bit annoyed when people complain about the prep time with Color vs Da Vinci. For Da Vinci you need to make a perfect final textless master on tape – this takes TIME. Everything has to be rendered properly, checked, the deck setup, tape setup with black at start, then go to tape in real time and then check the master. Then the Da Vinci session creates another tape (cost of two HDcamSr tapes – around $200). Depending on length and complexity of the show, this might take 30 mins, might take 3 hrs. That’s my experience with onlining broadcast TV shows. Additionally, a standard all FCP workflow there is an advantage over the Da Vinci workflow in that you get handles and transitions do not have to be ‘fudged’ with keyframes.

5. I have razored a 90 minute feature in under an hour, by bringing in the edl and moving from cut to cut extremely quickly by putting the edl timeline on V1 and my quicktime on V2….tab from cut to cut with the arrow key and click with the mouse to razor.

6. Render time: I work with shared media over a SAN and use a render station. I split up a show into 10 – 20 minute sections and once I have finished grading one section, I open the project up on the render station and start rendering it. This means that over a 10 hr day I can usually have a 45min DVCPro HD show graded and all rendered. The render station is a mac pro with the same specs and graphics card as in my grading suite, but without kona card, broadcast monitor etc (approx $5000 setup).

7. The grading suite I generally use cost about $30k all up. I’m sure there are better broadcast monitors available, but the one I am using is frequently used for broadcast grading in Los Angeles.

There are probably other points I could make but will do another posting later as my 3yr old is yelling for me to read her a book right now…..

PW

[Dino]

Automatic Duck. This will let you open the Avid sequence (to the extent they are translatable) in Final Cut. You will need a copy of the Avid media available to your system and the Avid codecs as well.
https://www.automaticduck.com/products/pifcp/PIFCPwitMedia-480×300.html
Once it’s in Final Cut, you can convert the media to whatever codec suits your needs.

May I ask what monitor you are doing your grading on?

[Peter Wollsey]

Grading on the Panasonic BT-LH2600W 26″

PW

[Bouke Vahl]

Just did some tests (had to do them anyways…)

It is no problem to export from Avid to Prores, if you’re on an Avid on Mac. Prores on windows is read only.

No matter if the Avid is windows or mac, you can export a QT ref from AVID (do set colorlevels to RGB!), and use QTpro on Mac (or any other transcoding application) to do the conversion. Should be close to RT, since there is no scaling or other processing involved.

BUT, FCP has something funny with Gamma. (this is not an MAC vs PC thing, QT’s created with Avid on Mac behave the same).
Your gamma will be lifted. Using the Gamma correction filter in FCP i have to set it to .8 to get it right. (But then i get a warning that my graphic card cannot do this)

Should be no problem for you, as you will grade anyways. I’m not a colorspecialist (i just know how to turn it on..), but there is something funny there. If i change the gamma, it seems that Color is working in a wider color space, as black and white are also affected, and IMHO that should not be the case…

The only way (i know off, others will jump in i’m sure) you can get FCP to actually set the correct gamma in the item properties is to go in as an image sequence. Not very practical for a one hour show…

So my advice, do some testing with greycards. I’ve made one in Avid using black, mid grey and white. If imported in FCP, (i work in pal) the grey is not .35 volt but .40
Funny thing is, when i create the same test image in FCP (white 255, grey 127, black 0), the video output still displays the .40 volt…

My knowledge stops here, but for my workflow from now on i’ll use a transcoding app. that lets me alter the gamma before going from FCP to Avid or vice versa.

hope this helps…

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Just did some tests (had to do them anyways…)

It is no problem to export from Avid to Prores, if you’re on an Avid on Mac. Prores on windows is read only.

No matter if the Avid is windows or mac, you can export a QT ref from AVID (do set colorlevels to RGB!), and use QTpro on Mac (or any other transcoding application) to do the conversion. Should be close to RT, since there is no scaling or other processing involved.

BUT, FCP has something funny with Gamma. (this is not an MAC vs PC thing, QT’s created with Avid on Mac behave the same).
Your gamma will be lifted. Using the Gamma correction filter in FCP i have to set it to .8 to get it right. (But then i get a warning that my graphic card cannot do this)

Should be no problem for you, as you will grade anyways. I’m not a colorspeciallist (typo is there to defeat the spambot…) (i just know how to turn it on..), but there is something funny there. If i change the gamma, it seems that Color is working in a wider color space, as black and white are also affected, and IMHO that should not be the case…

The only way (i know off, others will jump in i’m sure) you can get FCP to actually set the correct gamma in the item properties is to go in as an image sequence. Not very practical for a one hour show…

So my advice, do some testing with greycards. I’ve made one in Avid using black, mid grey and white. If imported in FCP, (i work in pal) the grey is not .35 volt but .40
Funny thing is, when i create the same test image in FCP (white 255, grey 127, black 0), the video output still displays the .40 volt…

My knowledge stops here, but for my workflow from now on i’ll use a transcoding app. that lets me alter the gamma before going from FCP to Avid or vice versa.

hope this helps…

Bouke

https://www.videotoolshed.com/
smart tools for video pro’s

[Peter Wollsey]

Thanks Bourke,

Interesting about the gamma…..

Probably to do with this issue:

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT2912

Not sure what the best solution is…..

PW