Best settings for stock footage from raw footage

[J.P. Scott]

Hey All:

So I am going to be selling a lot of red footage from a project of mine on a stock footage site. I am thinking prores 422 (HQ) should be fine and I was thinking (half high) for the debayer. The original footage was shot in 4k 16:9 and I am scaling it down to 1920x1080.

I am not going to do any color correction but I was thinking of possible altering some of the settings like the color space or LUT (which I know very little about). Currently I think I am just exporting what the camera originally shot with redspace for both LUT and color space. I noticed that when I exported a clip with redspace (without changing any settings) that it looked washed out and a little on the brighter side. I also noticed that the darker area were quite a bit brighter and pretty noisy and I could see faint vertical lines (maybe debayer lines?).

Again I just want to supply the company with good stock footage that has the ability to be color corrected to some degree. I also want it to be as visually appealing and not as washed out as it currently is. I don't have a color calibrated monitor and probably shouldn't get into anything too complicated since I have little experience and knowledge with the intricacies of RED and the like.

Thanks!

JP

[Johnny Friday]

If you are going to sell or supply stock footage, you want it to be the best looking it can be...that of course means coloring and editing....no way around it...otherwise bad looking footage--washed out and desaturated---would you buy it? Part of the job of supplying stock footage---if you plan to do this for a living, your reputation is also at stake. I may shoot 1 hour of footage and have 6 hours of post...that's about normal for me 1:6 to 1:8....for STOCK....

[J.P. Scott]

If you are going to sell or supply stock footage, you want it to be the best looking it can be...that of course means coloring and editing....no way around it...otherwise bad looking footage--washed out and desaturated---would you buy it? Part of the job of supplying stock footage---if you plan to do this for a living, your reputation is also at stake. I may shoot 1 hour of footage and have 6 hours of post...that's about normal for me 1:6 to 1:8....for STOCK....

Johnny:

I won't be doing it for a living, I've had some clips on this sight for a few years now and have made about $4,500 over that time. That is with only 250 clips or so and all are HVX200 SD and HD. I didn't do any color correction for those, I was just starting school and knew very little about the technical aspects of post and coloring, I just had a camera and took it to some cool places.

With this new batch (I haven't added to my old stock for 3+ years now) I will be adding about 300-400 new clips all shot on RED @4k (I will scale down to 1080 for stock). I agree and understand that I would want all my clips to look as best as they can but I don't know much about coloring/grading and I only have my laptop screen for reference. I also want to make sure that the footage I supply is re-gradable by the purchaser and that I not change something in post that hinders that to any excessive degree. Is 422 (hq) with a half high debayer good enough for the purchaser to make decent color corrections of their own?

I know there is no easy way to make footage look great or even good. But there must be some "easier" tweaks that I can do to make the footage look better (ie. more saturation, less noise, less washed out etc.). I've seen some stuff posted here that looked great and it said that no color correction was done on it just different setting (ie. gamma or redspace or something else).

Do you have experience with selling/supplying stock footage? Any suggestion for where i can start on CCing my own stuff?

Thanks,

JP

[Michael Romano]

Start in REDCINE-X. Make them look good to your tastes on your monitor. Try not to clip blacks or whites by watching the scopes/waveform. Experiment as needed. You'll never know what look people will be going for with stock footage so there really isn't a wrong way to do it as long as it still contains all the information. Try to stay away from really crazy looks but you should certainly color correct the footage. The better it looks, the more likely people will buy it, this is how you'll make some money. Some stock libraries accept R3D files as well.

Getty library submission info:
http://contributors.gettyimages.com/...article_id=688

If you're really lost and want someone else to correct them, many on REDuser, myself included would complete the grades with calibrated monitors and software for a reasonable fee.

[J.P. Scott]

Thanks. I realize now that redcine x is deffinitly the way to go. I was using the old red alert in the beginning because it was quicker and easier but has a lot less control.

I was doing just that "making them look good on my monitor" and messing around with settings. I'm afraid that I don't know how to tell if I'm "clipping" I know what it means but not where to check for it. Do I basically make sure that all of the fuzzy lines in the scopes never go past the end of the scope, essentially clipping the information?

I supply to thought equity motion which has been pretty good. I don't have a lot of clips (250 maybe) so I only sell 1-5 a quarter right now. I don't know if I'd try to switch to getty but they seem to have pretty identical price points too. Anyone know what getty offers suppliers in terms of a split (ie. 50/50, 15/85. 35/65 etc.) I know that adding these red clips (300-400 of em) will help me out sales wise. They are well lit and have a lot of production value (ie. private jets, resort pools, dingy motel, 20 story city highrise, bar etc)

JP

PS: I will be moving this thread (aka. starting a new one in the redcine x thread, which is where I should have put it in the first place.
PPS: I would also be interested to see if anyone in or near Pasadena, CA would be interested in helping me with some of this footage? Maybe I could pay to be taught a bit or have my clips graded or both.

[Johnny Friday]

Michael gave you good advice.....Here is my workflow:
1. Take R3D to RCX---get the look i want using recolor & redgamma and saturation/wb/curve & contrast...then save the look to apply to other clips and adjust on each clip as needed.....use scopes---if you don't know how, do a bit of research--it is EASY and when you know how to use them they are very beneficial---and you will laugh how easy to use scopes.

2. Transcode out to prores 422 HQ or most clients for TV want prores 4444: ALWAYS do a FULL DEBAYER--and since you are handing them to your stock agency--do a 4444 prores....much more valuable and for client to do more color work.

most stock is bought as is and how it looks online....and a good majority of folks buying stock for tv don't color correct either...so having the footage look good from beginning is essential for stock sales....

[David Rasberry]

A good current generation consumer LCD HDTV is a better color reference monitor for grading HD than most laptop displays. I'm using an ISFccc certified LG 32" for a grading reference monitor. The current LG models are true 10 bit displays. Their plasmas are better for rich blacks than the LCD's. I calibrated mine by eye using the built in calibration wizard after selecting color temp and gamma curve from the expert menu. Saved the result to Expert 1 user setting. I've run through a bunch of charts: Grayscale, pluge, color bars, and they all look right on the money plus the set tracks color and grayscale on cable and broadcast channels extremely well.
For those who have color correction software and a colorimeter, there are very sophisticated calibration controls for individual white balance of every step of a 10 step gray scale, but mine looked quite neutral out of the box so I haven't touched it. The built in wizard is easy to use and works very well for a reasonably accurate casual setup. I also view corrected footage in all of the factory preset calibrations too, just to make sure it tracks well with settings like most people will see on their TV's out of the box. This is sort of the visual equivalent of sound engineers testing their mixes on 4" full range Auratones to make sure they sounded good on a boom box. It is not a high end grading monitor, but it beats the pants off of most computer displays.

[J.P. Scott]

Michael gave you good advice.....Here is my workflow:
1. Take R3D to RCX---get the look i want using recolor & redgamma and saturation/wb/curve & contrast...then save the look to apply to other clips and adjust on each clip as needed.....use scopes---if you don't know how, do a bit of research--it is EASY and when you know how to use them they are very beneficial---and you will laugh how easy to use scopes.

2. Transcode out to prores 422 HQ or most clients for TV want prores 4444: ALWAYS do a FULL DEBAYER--and since you are handing them to your stock agency--do a 4444 prores....much more valuable and for client to do more color work.

most stock is bought as is and how it looks online....and a good majority of folks buying stock for tv don't color correct either...so having the footage look good from beginning is essential for stock sales....

I will certainly learn more about grading and using the scopes. I will probably calibrate my tv to get as close as possible to a good color representation. From my other research i've read that a full debayer for 1080 footage isn't worth the extra render time and that the results are practically indicernble. Same for prores 422 and 4444 since I have no need for alpha (though I do understand the extra chroma). Is that overkill for something like this?

Thanks for the tips, I will start learning more about rcx. Hopefully you or someone else cam shed more light on the debayer and 422/4444 stuff. I run a fast laptop, but doing full debayer and 4444 may take forever :( especially for 300-400 clips.

Thanks again,

JP

[Mark Andersen]

J.P. I do a lot of stock and have kinda made a career out of it. The advice you are getting is good. The clips should be a nice tidy length for sales, I try to get them down to between 10 and 20 sec. They should look good, and have a clean neutral color grade (RCX usually can do the job) and be in a codec that your agent wants, mine wants ProRes 422 HQ. Don't provide flat ungraded files, they won't sell well cause they won't look good in the search engine. And if they are QT clips in ProRes they will no longer be as easy to CC for the client, who doesn't want to do it anyway, they like the clip "ready to go".

I have more info in the PM I sent you.

[J.P. Scott]

J.P. I do a lot of stock and have kinda made a career out of it. The advice you are getting is good. The clips should be a nice tidy length for sales, I try to get them down to between 10 and 20 sec. They should look good, and have a clean neutral color grade (RCX usually can do the job) and be in a codec that your agent wants, mine wants ProRes 422 HQ. Don't provide flat ungraded files, they won't sell well cause they won't look good in the search engine. And if they are QT clips in ProRes they will no longer be as easy to CC for the client, who doesn't want to do it anyway, they like the clip "ready to go".

I have more info in the PM I sent you.

Thanks! I've kinda wanted to do a lot more in stock footage too. These next clips, if I do all that you guys are saying, should have no problem selling for a premium and there's a lot of variety.

Also, totally right about the debayer johnny. Just did a test between full debayer and 1/2 premium and there is a HUGE difference in clarity when using full. And the extra render time wasn't that bad at all.

It's fun learning new things and I'm glad I'm learning all this before I start uploading the footage to the stock site. Thanks again guys!

JP