[Felix Bach]

Hello there.

Even if you guys have been discussing this some 6,5 years ago, I will continue this discussion and would like to have some things I dont get clarified.

We are currnetly working with ALEXA 4444 Files, one the highest resolutions available. We have shot old pictures from a museum (from a tripod, no movement in picture) and want to reprint them in order to use them as props for in some scenes. As it was forgotten to take photographs from the picture, we are now working on getting 300dpi printable stills from our video footage. So we dont need to go back to the museum. 🙂

The stills are to be printed on canvas and then get an old proper wood frame. The largest of those paintings has an original size of 64x81cm
and the smallest one 33x60cm.

My export from the original camera files has given me 72dpi Tiffs with a size of around 5,5mb. I have forwarded these stills to two graphic ladies who will try to get the max out of it and im still waiting for their feedback. Somebody in this forum mentioned that there are some nice fotoshop plugins to pimp the resolution. I have also applied the test version of Photo Zoom Pro 4 (file size after transforming to 300dpi from the 5mb-tiff-cp-export=105mb, which sounds good 🙂 and forwarded the result to the graphic ladies and also wait for a feedback concerning the quality comparism between the fotoshop-pimp and the photozoom-pimp. To be shared later.

I still would like to get some clarifications on a few points:

-Exporting from 4444 Timeline with original camera footage as TIFF is pretty much the best I can get out of FCP, isnt it?

-Why does this high resolution footage give me the same results in dpi (72) as DV material? Or is that wrong? It seems so natural to me that an ALEXA should produce something far more outstandind in quality than my old DV-bone. And that this should also be reflected in still exports. However I am not strong grahicwise and my fotoshop skills are even below basic.

-As we are talking square inches and non-interlaced footage no resizing/converting is needed in fotoshop right?

-Is this whole idea of getting printable stills from prores4444 a stupid idea anyway? Or my attempt wrong in the beginning?

Thanks for any help people. I will post all my final results and gained knowledge in this matter whenever I have all the information together.

Best regards, Felix

[Felix Bach]

Hello.

Appreciating so often the content of this forum I will just share my updates from the ALEXA workflow on FCP to contribute a little content to the forum myself.

As described earlier, I tried a workflow using a LUT and Color to get rid of the blueishness of the ALEXA material and produce handier proxies in one step. But this has turned out to be a very unstable process, as you can read in previous post.

The workflow we are working with right now is quite simple. We imported all clips into FCP, bought the previously mentioned Antler Plugin (Alexa LogC to Video 3.0.1) and applied them on all Alexa clips in 4444 Resolution. We rendered those and exported them with a simple 422 codec to get our proxies. The color of those clips aint perfect, but looks naturally enough to work with them.

I proceeded and did some relink-tests in order to see if FCP can easily reconnect our clips from 4444 tp 422 if needed in between and for mastering. They all worked fine, even with subclips.

We are still arranging the footage and are about to start with some editing soon. Workflow looks simple and fine to me. If I encounter technical problems in my workflow, I will get back to this post. So far I can only recommend it though.

If you have any questions about this feel free to contact me.

Best regards
Felix

[Felix Bach]

Using the provied script from andriy i now produced a timeline in fcp with just the first four log c files (4 from 169, thos 169 just being the result from the first four days of approx 30 shooting days), i sent that timeline to color, adjusted setting to get 422 proxies and corrected the previously mentioined greenishness and rendered that. the xml file exported from color afterwards ran well in the bluebell script and produced the first three clips before it cancelled the process due to a “zeitüberschreitung”, which in english would be an error message something like “sry process timed out”. so clip 4of4 was never created. i dont know how to proceed. very frustating workflow so far. im considering now working without proxies and just use antler fcp plugin to work with the log c files. but its still strange. transforming each single clip seperately cant be te solution……can anyone tell me what im doing wrong?

thx in advance,
felix

[Felix Bach]

the lut works basically fine. however i get a slightly greenish picture applying just the lut, which however can be easily corrected in color before starting the render process. dont know if this is connected to the logc files or the lut.

a more severe issue is connected to the xml file you export from color after rendering. when i put all 7 hours of log c into the timeline, xml turns out to be 16mb and the bluebell script obviously cant handle that. it always comes up with an errer message after a while (“classXMLc of missing value” cant be read). dilemma!

because having rendered for pretty much 24 hours, i couldnt figure a way, to shrinken the timeline within color while preserving the render files in order to get a smaller color-xml to create proxies from. i tried to import shorter timeline variations which i created in fcp in the same sequence, then exported as xml and used the xml file incolor with the reconform option. and this does give me the desired selection (half an hour instead of 7) of my timeline in color, all bars still appear green and rendered but if i now export and xml from that and throw it into the bluebell script, i get no proxy but original filesize and the bluish filter the logc files have. so nothing changes, somehow the render files get lost in the reconforming process. suxx hard.

after soendingt half a day on this, i threw away my 150gb of renderfiles and started all over, now i create timelines with log c files uf max up to 30 minutes. hope this will be fine.

however this cant be the proper way to do it i think. can anyone help here? is there a better script than this blueshell one? and is it normal than in every single process this script turns on the automator without doing anything with it really? and is it normal that timeline sizes shouldt exceed a specific length?

first time treating alexa footage on fcp and trying to setup workflow for a feature documentary being shot this year. any help appreciated.
thank you.

best regards,

felix bach