OpenEXR from REDCINE-X

[Evan Warner]

Hey all,

I'm helping a production finish a show that was shot on a red cam. They edited using M proxies in Final Cut Pro and I am now pulling VFX shots to be sent to the VFX artist. He has requested Linear OpenEXR sequences. This is my first time working with EXR and am still trying to wrap my mind around them let alone figure out how to convert into them from the raw R3D. From searching the forums it is my understanding that I can export from the R3D files in REDCINE X to OpenEXR but I can't for the life of me figure out how. Under the export options I only see DPX, TIFF, Quicktime and Avid. Is it possible to export into openEXR using redcine? If not is there another program (something free or inexpensive, we can't afford smoke or nuke or anything like that)

Assuming that I can figure it out I'm going to do the rest of it as follow.

- Assemble all of the VFX shots in a FCP sequence
- Export a XML
- Import XML into Clip finder to add handles and reconnect to R3D
- Export out of Clipfinder and into REDCINE
- Export to openEXR

Does this make sense? Am I missing something?

cheers
Evan

[Deanan]

Not yet. The nearest equivalent would be to export linear tiffs and then convert to openexr.

[Mark L. Pederson]

Just an FYI - you can make OpenEXR directly from R3Ds in Scratch.

[jake blackstone]

Just an FYI - you can make OpenEXR directly from R3Ds in Scratch.

Or FilmMaster

[Evan Warner]

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the responses. There is nothing free out there is there? We really can't buy scratch or FilmMaster just to do a file format conversion.

cheers
Evan

[Jean-Charles Wolfarth]

The cheapest one would be to batch convert with Photoshop the TIF files exported from Redcine-X to OpenEXR. Thanks for your post, I didn't know about OpenEXR, it looks like a great format... Another request for Deanan !

[Virgil Kastrup]

xnview is free and has a free plugin for openexr
edit: sorry. was a bit fast on the trigger there. the plug only reads openexr.

[Evan Warner]

I have photoshop so I will try doing that. Thanks for the help!

I'm just a bit curious about this. Is EXR a common VFX format? If so, why is it not built into more workflow utilities from red and others? It is my understanding that it is a Open format as it's name suggests so are there shouldn't be licensing issues. Is it still quite uncommon for anyone without access to a high end composition app to be using it?

Thanks all for the help so far!

[Wolfgang Woehl]

ImageMagick is for free and handles EXR.

[Nick Shaw]

The user guide for REDcine-X talks about rendering to EXR, so I'm sure it will come in time. They just have a lot on their plates and are working through things one at a time.

ImageMagick is for free and handles EXR.

The problem though is preservation of meta-data. To use free tools you need to go via 16 bit TIFF, and that means losing timecode and other meta-data. The most affordable app I know of which can go from R3D to EXR, preserving meta-data, is Nuke.