[Angelo Lorenzo]

It’s bad, just not insanely bad. The focal length of the lens doesn’t matter, it just crops so you can scale any differences (yes, I’m ignoring the aspect of barrel distortion) so your main measurements are angle and camera/focus distance. You can scale from there…. but at that point I would really wonder how much this ceiling adds; huge factory vent fans, fine, but if it’s an extension of the normal ceiling then I’d wonder the point.

Doing measurements manually is agonizingly slow and it also locks you in each camera position.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Avid DNxHD, it has a free quicktime codec https://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Download/en392959

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/blog/tag/misfire/

Red Giant makes a product called Magic Bullet Looks and along with it comes a set of effects called Misfire which emulates film scratches and other issues like gate weave. A little pricy but the package is useful in a bunch of ways.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Blue screens are major issues, either RAM, processor, or driver related in most instances. I would google how to look at blue screen crash errors (they are logged) to gain some info on where to start.

My usual guess is bad RAM for blue screen errors, but safe mode shouldn’t affect that. It makes me think it’s a high level video driver, maybe something CUDA related.

You could try see if turning off hardware mode for the Mercury Playback Engine in Premiere’s preferences stabilizes the program.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Can you post a screenshot of Premiere’s full window? I’d like to see what is going on without assuming too much.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

You cannot import some file types directly, go to View > Media Browser and browse to your footage location, then drag the clips from this pane to your library. This should bring in each take as a single file.

What you are currently seeing are spanned clips: multiple clips that are each a part of a single take.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Can’t say I’ve come across the “-1” error when I was using the setup but I think that was before ProRes was part of FFMPEG.

I currently use what’s described in my blog post here https://www.fallenempiredigital.com/blog/2012/06/06/encoding-apple-prores-on-a-windows-pc-with-redcine-x-pro-and-ffmpeg/

Since Redcine-X (the program that manages RED camera footage) can’t export AVI, there is a bit of a workaround using an uncompressed MOV file. The Python script monitors a folder and watches for growing files, when the file is done growing, it knows Redcine X is done converting the file so the script launches FFMPEG (or in this case, a fork called FFMBC) to encode the file. Once FFMBC completes the file, the larger uncompressed file is deleted and it continues to monitor the folder.

Super esoteric but bullet proof. I can leave it running for days.

I’m working on skipping the python script by programming a custom GUI that will do the same thing, including grabbing the source timecode from the original file; FFMPEG and FFMBC don’t copy that info over directly so it has to be set as an encoding parameter.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

This topic is sort of a can of worms, so here is my take on it.

Skip Apple Intermediate Codec. I think most everyone can agree that it’s a legacy codec and ProRes is the superior of the two in most situations.

Canon’s implementation of h.264 is 4:2:0 at 8-bit. As for converting it to a 10-bit codec… the process itself isn’t really upping the quality; the conversion will interpolate some info but it won’t be the make-or-break for something like pulling a green screen.

There are advantages to using an editing codec like ProRes in general. It allows easier scrubbing and playback of footage; if you have a borderline powerful machine then it can save you some headaches.

Regardless of if you convert or not, I do follow the advice of Stu Maschwitz: noise reduce your footage. Noise reduction does a better job at interpolating colors and softening channels that suffer from h.264 compression so it can give it a bit of “magic sauce”.

To quote Stu https://prolost.com/blog/2010/1/26/color-correcting-canon-7d-footage.html :
–Do denoise. It doesn’t really matter what denoising software you use, but use it. When you carefully and subtly denoise your footage, you rebuild your pixels anew, which is especially nice when you follow the next tip:
–Work at high bit-depths. If you start with an 8-bit image and do a gentle de-noise, you’re blending pixels values together to create new colors. Although there’s no such thing as something for nothing, doing this at a higher bit-depth means those new colors have massivly more gradations than the original image. Your subsequent color work will hold up much better.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Well shooting a lot of angles complicates the process because you have to design an extension for each angle/move. My advice on that point would be to come in with a more concise shot list; shooting extra is great but make sure you have a base set of shots that you know you can work on in post fairly easily so you don’t paint yourself so far into a corner that you have to reshoot.

Of course, I could be just misinterpreting what you mean by shot. I usually think a shot is a setup while you might just be talking about it as a cut.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks

[Angelo Lorenzo]

As a producer in my own right, here are my concerns:

You say 15-30 shots in 1-2 minutes. This either means you haven’t broken down the scene for shooting properly or, more likely, you’re shooting some kind of fighting/action sequence.

Action means shooting with a bit narrower of a shutter angle to kill the motion blur slightly but it also means a ton of manual rotoscoping so I hope you have that skill under control.

How high do you need the ceilings? Cathedral?

The problem with building a practical set is, of course, the cost of construction. Beyond that though is the possibility of having to build on-set which means extra days to the stage rental, or a design that allows you to build off-set and transport. You also have the extra expense of hiring a real carpenter and crew because they’ll come with the proper insurances.

The set extension process is probably cheaper in most situations, but slightly more time consuming. If you’ve never ever done this, then I suggest you hire a small VFX house so you get a VFX supervisor to guide you through the process of preparing your set for extension.

Alternately, it sounds like you’re going to one-man this. I suggest doing a little test footage and working on it so you know what to expect. I also STRONGLY suggest you purchase and watch https://www.hollywoodcamerawork.us/vfx_index.html as a primer to vfx during principal photography.

Angelo Lorenzo
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks