Premiere - Color (Native)

[Jamie_F]

Hi all,

I'd like to migrate over to Premiere from FCP, before I make the leap I hope I can nail down a solid workflow that can take me back to FCP for grading in Color on the Native Red files.

Has anyone here attempted this workflow yet?

Many thanks.

J

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Why wouldn't you:

1) Use Premiere, with a powerful Mercury video card and edit in Premiere- with the original r3d.

2) Go directly from Premiere to Color? Premiere's interchange with FCP is via XML... which Color can open.

I haven't done these, but got the idea talking to Adobe workflow people closer to the CS5 debut.

Probably not the concrete advice you want, but hopefully it opens up some avenues of investigation.

 

[Jamie_F]

Why wouldn't you:

1) Use Premiere, with a powerful Mercury video card and edit in Premiere- with the original r3d.

2) Go directly from Premiere to Color? Premiere's interchange with FCP is via XML... which Color can open.

I haven't done these, but got the idea talking to Adobe workflow people closer to the CS5 debut.

Probably not the concrete advice you want, but hopefully it opens up some avenues of investigation.

I've been looking into it the last few days after giving CS5 a test run and just wanted to see if anyone here has done it. PPro CS5 has been a pleasure to use.

I've attempted your second suggestion and I wasn't able to relink the media in a batch. I could link it manually, but even then the frame range was a little suspect...it might be a host of things, file structure, my lack of knowledge with Color etc. I'm used to facility Graders. And just testing Red footage I found here.

My thoughts were, I could just get the footage transcoded, offline it in PP and send it over to FCP to conform for Color which is why I wouldn't work Native in PP and only make use of the native playback in my timeline for references and image quality checks simply as an awesome convenience. Working in 64bit is not too shabby either.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

I was thinking the same way, but decided Adobe + DaVinci Resolve instead.

 

[JP Castel]

We have also been looking into this workflow for an upcoming project. After a few test runs I have not bee able to get a RED MX 4.5K sequence back into color for the native grade. After a little bit of research here on reduser, many have suggested that you can use clipfinder as a relink tool to the h proxies in the file, which should link back to the r3ds when you send it to color. I have tried to relink back to the H proxies files and have had no success. Also when you export a project sequence out of premier it seems to export the entire project with bin folders and all, which is different then when we export them out of FCP for the reconnect to r3d in Clipfinder then back to FCP and Send to Color. I am going to continue test over the weekend and I will let you know if anything works. I suspect it is a sequence resolution problem as color to my knowledge cannot handle the 4.5K resolution. Many export dpx out of premiere then load into color, but still not as easily flexible as the raw red controls.

 

[Jamie_F]

We have also been looking into this workflow for an upcoming project. After a few test runs I have not bee able to get a RED MX 4.5K sequence back into color for the native grade. After a little bit of research here on reduser, many have suggested that you can use clipfinder as a relink tool to the h proxies in the file, which should link back to the r3ds when you send it to color. I have tried to relink back to the H proxies files and have had no success. Also when you export a project sequence out of premier it seems to export the entire project with bin folders and all, which is different then when we export them out of FCP for the reconnect to r3d in Clipfinder then back to FCP and Send to Color. I am going to continue test over the weekend and I will let you know if anything works. I suspect it is a sequence resolution problem as color to my knowledge cannot handle the 4.5K resolution. Many export dpx out of premiere then load into color, but still not as easily flexible as the raw red controls.

I've been using 4.5k so that's an interesting little piece of info. The alternative is to go DPX, but before I make that call I'd love to confirm staying Native is possible. I came across another snag with PP and Color not having clip detection, another workflow thing I'm used to with Lustre. I don't have a time issue so my solution was to just build a file structure similar to conforming I've done for Lustre manually with each scene. It's only a couple of hours work.

I don't have Clipfinder 2.5 yet so I am relying on what others have accomplished with that. I'll grab it over the weekend. Looking forward to hearing how your test goes.

 

[Jamie_F]

I was thinking the same way, but decided Adobe + DaVinci Resolve instead.

I'd be interested to hear your experience on that.

 

[JP Castel]

Just messing around with it a little now tried to use and edl out of PP and open it in Color, but I am having mixed results. My test clip consisted of 3 R1 2:1 clips 2 at 4K and one in slow motion 2K, which is the only one linked linked up correctly. The first 4K clip was resized to fit into the PP sequence which is set at 2K 2:1 and will not link to anything. The third clip which is a 4k but not resized blown up in the window relinked, but to the wrong file. Argh this is reminding me of when we took my short film through quantel DI on edl... lets just say we had some 8 r3d layer deep sequences... Going to play around with it a little more before I head back campus. I set the source director in color to the RDM folder of the roll with the footage. Color spat out and bunch of log erros that look like this.

The start timecode of /Volumes/Archive/Personal/RED AIR RACES/A004_0919H3.RDM/A004_C031_0919KX.RDC 14:32:00:07 intersects with /Volumes/Archive/Personal/RED AIR RACES/A004_0919H3.RDM/A004_C030_09196C.RDC 14:30:02:12 - 14:33:03:14

Also no luck with the relink from r3d to H proxies into clipfinder on the xml.

Also interesting tidbit for you cause you mention 4.5K, we just had a 4.5K MX DP Reel project finish through color here on the following workflow. Cut with combinations of proxies and Prores 422 Offlines from various films then relink through clipfinder 2.2 reopen in FCP send to color however color yielded very soft renders of the footage in 2k, which is apparently due to the low debayer quality, which is apparently unchangeable in color. Finally we ended up having to render out the RED MX 4.5K footage separately through RCX at full debayer into 2k then replace them in FCP > send to color. However since redcine doesn't seem to have good multicore support, and we don't have a red rocket card, the render was extremely slow on our 12 core... so we manually entered frame in and outs for every clip to speed things up. Luckily his timeline was only a couple minutes. Apparently Clipfinder 2.5 has an option to send xml directly to RCX to quicken this process. I am not sure if this is a 4.5K or MX related issue, but we have moved many timelines through with R1 2:1 R3D with beautiful clarity so it might just be MX. Can't apple just update FCS already

 

[Jamie_F]

I gave this a go:

Redrushes to transcode proxies, load in to PP, dumped them on the timeline, Export>Final Cut Pro XML, imported XML to final cut, sequence matched, media manager - create offline - set sequence to Red Using Prores, went to change the ingest options in Log and Transfer (via Whitepaper instructions Workflow 2) and that's where I got goose-egged. I can't ingest the media.

The next stage was Batch Capture and no joy there as well.

Tried Clipfinder 2.2 but no joy there relinking the media. I'm hoping 2.5 would rectify this in some way...?

Not being able to ingest the r3d's through log and transfer seems like a file structure problem. Since I grabbed these r3d's here, is there something in the file structure or perhaps the original output that comes with the r3d that Log and Transfer requires...?