[Jesse Glucksman]

Thanks for the advice. I’ll be grading the ProRes files. No, they are not paying me enough to go through THIS much trouble.

Here’s what happened, which you guys may find amusing. The show is a standup comedy performance. They recorded the rehearsal, the opening act and the main show. Apparently, the C300 doesn’t like video files longer than 5:16, so there are dozens of files, 5:16 in length, that continue one after the other.
In order to make editing more convenient, they combined every clip from each camera into one ProRes 422(HQ) master clip–clean transcode, no LUT or highlight clipping or anything. Four cameras, once clip per camera per show–rehearsal, opener & main show. They renamed the master clips LIVE_SHOW_Camera_1 or REHEARSAL_Camera_2, and so on. Each master clip has timecode wholly unrelated to the original camera-generated code. Footage from all 3 shows is cut throughout–sometimes better delivery in the rehearsal, sometimes good crowd shots from the opener’s set. It was actually a much bigger mess than I thought when I first posted my question.

As I understand it, the C300, when recording to an external drive, outputs a max of 422, 1920×1080. Technically it’s “better” than the ProRes transcodes, but since the DP is really smart & detail oriented, and since it’s a highly controlled set, I really can’t tell the difference between the two. Like one of you said, it’s not like they recorded 4k.

And yeah, I’ll be chatting with the editors about workflow. Knowing is half the battle (the other half is handled by a cranky colorist)…

[Jesse Glucksman]

I do miss the drag-and-drop function in Color. That may be the only thing I miss. Use the keyboard shortcuts to make it go fast, though. Command+C on the blue tint node, then Options+S (add serial node) and Command+V on the shots that need the change.

[Jesse Glucksman]

The handles issue has been bumming me out, too. A film I worked on had to come back to me with their motion-effected shots and some re-cut scenes recently (which required fully graded handles of some of the existing footage). I graded the non-speed-effected raw footage as well as fully grading extended handles on the shots they needed, and gave it all back to the editor. He went in & re-applied all this motion effects and has the ability to tweak the cut to his delight now.

[Jesse Glucksman]

I had one bad experience doing this, and one good experience.

The good one was when the project was being graded off of external hard drives, so all I had to do was export the project (File:Export Project) & get the drives to the new guy. He imported my project file and had minimal trouble getting it up & running.

The bad experience, from months previous, was when I had to copy the media from my internal storage to an external drive and the new guy had me send him a backup of my database itself, but he never thought to ask for the project file. I don’t know if that makes a difference, or something got confused because of how the media was structured (the whole project was kind of a mess to begin with), but he couldn’t get the media to link up properly. Long story short, things didn’t work out well at all.

I think, and hopefully someone with more technical experience will agree, that even if you copy the media to a new drive it should go well if you provide the finishing location with the project file. But do it a couple days before so you’ll have time to troubleshoot if something goes wrong.

[Jesse Glucksman]

I didn’t see anything about using the RMD file. I think I may have fixed it–I took the clip into Red Cine X and exported it as an ‘R3D Trim.’ Do you know if there’s a disadvantage to doing that? Loss in resolution, anything like that?

Thanks!

[Jesse Glucksman]

The director says no. I’m going to have him send me a copy of the r3d to see if maybe the one I have is corrupt.

[Jesse Glucksman]

Dave was indeed a great guy who explained everything I needed to know. And adding a node in Track Mode took me all of 15 minutes to compensate for the change in calibration (and most of that time was just scrubbing through the timeline to make sure everything looked uniformly proper).

Thanks again for the advice & help!

-Jesse

[Jesse Glucksman]

I have an appointment with Dave tomorrow. Here’s a follow-up. It if turns out my calibration has been substantially off, how do you recommend compensating, considering I’m most of the way through a project? By habit I always leave Node 1 blank so I can create a basic look on the Node 1s of all the shots for getting the footage to normal. Or would assigning a LUT to the whole project make more sense?

Thanks!

[Jesse Glucksman]

I think that did it. The Preferences/”First In List” thing was the key I was missing. Thanks!

[Jesse Glucksman]

His name popped up in a different thread and I just sent a message via his website. The thread was from a couple years ago so I’m glad to see he’s still doing his thing.

Do you personally use any hardware devices, or do you always have a service calibrate for you? If the former, what do you like to use?

Thanks!