Michael Kanfer
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What do you get when you take 50 aspiring filmmakers ages 9-15 from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and show them how to write, direct, shoot, and edit 5K EPIC footage for commercials, music videos, and that all important 3D zombie movie shot on a real Hollywood soundstage? You get Camp RED!
I’m Mike Kanfer, Adobe’s “man in Hollywood” and I recently had the privilege of working with team RED as the director of post production for this year’s camp. I’ve been with Adobe for over six years now, and I can honestly say that Camp RED was probably the most rewarding experience I have had in terms of seeing our products being used in the real world by some very special kids. Adobe Premiere Pro was the exclusive NLE of the camp, and I could not have been happier with the outcome.
The task: With 50 kids broken up into multiple groups shooting on multiple EPICS and RED ONES, there was a monumental amount of data wrangling between the SSD cards (the kids called them chocolate bars) and CF cards. Thanks to some amazing parent volunteers and high-school aged counselors there was never a moment where the kids were waiting to edit their footage. Key to this workflow was the fact that Adobe Premiere Pro can decode and edit 5K EPIC R3D’s natively, without any transcoding. I can’t even imagine what that scenario would be like if we had to transcode that much incoming footage each day.
The gear: Beyond the state of the art cameras, lenses, mounting rigs, sound equipment, 3D rigs and lighting panels, the post side of the equation also had some super-powered gear to get the job done. All of the systems were running Adobe CS 5.5 Production Premium. We had a MacPro tower with a RED Rocket and nVidia 4000, three screaming-fast HP Z800 workstations powered by 12 processors each running everything multi-threaded at 64 bits, nVidia 5000 CUDA capable cards, a Red Rocket on each, with either 10 or 20 gig of incredibly fast external Silver Stor RAIDS provided by the gang at JMR. And last but not least, three HP state of the art laptops. Not too shabby!
Without a doubt, the gear on hand was state of the art (and I’m sure the object of many a techno-geek’s fantasies) but heck…there was a ton of work that only had three days to go through the complete post process.
The software: Although we had a small group of experienced Premiere Pro and After Effects experts on hand to jump in or answer questions when necessary, the kids actually ended up doing all of their own editing, green screens and VFX. They literally had to be pulled of off the machines at the end of the day to go home. This part of observing the process truly blew me away. At least a third of the kids had done a bit of editing in the past with iMovie or FCP, and perhaps one or two using Premiere Pro. Some had never shot or edited a video before. To see them effortlessly cutting multilayered, 5K timelines in realtime with keying and VFX within a day or two of being introduced to CS 5.5 was truly inspirational. Kind of scary in some ways!
Project details: The kids shot 5k EPIC footage mostly at at 5120 px by 2560 px (2:1 aspect) and a few at full frame 5K and imported the files into their projects with Premiere’s Media Browser…quickly marking in’s and out’s on selects. With one Rocket per machine, they were able to play their 5K timelines in silky-smooth real time at ½ res (a mere 2560px!) Some of the youngest kids were assigned laptops until they got the hang of it, but even in their case (without the added horsepower of a Red Rocket) the HP EliteBooks easily handled EPIC footage at ¼ and 1/8 res, giving extremely smooth playback.
Keying: The green-screen keying was done directly in Premiere Pro using our Ultra Keyer. Ultra is an easy to use, professional quality vector based keyer which works almost flawlessly on the first iteration if the greenscreen is shot reasonably well. However, if the greenscreen was cut-off in a shot or had lighting flaws, a few simple adjustments and tweaks of Premiere’s built-in, key-framable garbage mattes were all that was necessary to save the day. For the trickier shots, a handful of the more adventurous kids ventured into After Effects, and one of them (a 13 year old) even created a multilayered clone scenario from his small cast of four actors.
Color correction: The Source Settings panel for R3D clips in Premiere Pro proved to be the one of the most used tools, allowing realtime, non destructive color correction at the same instant the R3D’s are being decoded for playback. The controls mimic those of REDCINE, and any of the RMD color metadata goodness can be shared bi-directionally between the two programs.
Review and Approval: We set up a 65” flatscreen that was shared between laptops and workstations for mid-day editing and compositing reviews, and also used a medium sized EPSON HD projector aimed at the wall. For the ultimate experience, RED Studios boasts a 40 foot screen with a 4K D-Cinema projection on a giant sound stage. The campers gave it quite the workout all week showing dailies right off of the SSD cards at 4K resolution. The same system was used for the Friday night festivals.
Getting the work to the big screen: Completed projects were exported in a variety of ways, depending on the creative quality and the available time before the curtain call, we came up with three different formats:
A. 1920 x 1080 Quicktime Pro Res 4:2:2 HQ or 1920 x 1080 AVID Quciktime DNxHD…for about 80% of the work. Having the ability to take a 5K timeline and quickly shrink it down to HD was a life-saver. Since the majority of workstations were on WIN7, Pro Res was not always an option (don’t get me started on that one) but the DNx looked just as good, and exporting them out of Premiere Pro to the Media Encoder worked quickly and flawlessly (about a 7 to 1 ratio of render time)
B. 3840 x 2160 QUAD HD ProRes (nearly 4K in size, based on the magic number of combining 4 frames of 16x9 aspect HD). Some projects (judged to be the best of the best) were lucky enough to be rendered in 4K, using the MacPro as the ProRes rendering workhorse. Since 95% of the projects were created on Z800 Win7 stations, we used Premiere’s nifty ability to seamlessly re-link projects to media regardless of the platform. All we had to do was power down the systems, sneaker-net the sleek JMR Silver Stors that held the media and project files from the Z800’s over to the Mac Pro, and viola…stunning 4K ProRes. So what do you do when there is no time to bake D-Cinema masters at 4k for projection for 200 people every Friday night…you take those Quad HD Pro Res’ and pump them through a Mac outfitted with an AJA KONA 3G card attached via four SDI spigots to your 4K projector, and enjoy the flawless playback. In my day we used to have to bake 4K DPX’s that took up 40 megabytes per frame (or about 250 gig per 5 minutes) but not at Camp Red. The Pro Res Quad HD’s at nearly 10 to 1 compression that do not drop a single frame upon projection looked spectacular. It does not hurt that they are originating form a crystal-clear, tack-sharp 5K EPIC timeline at a spectacular bit depth. You really have to see this to believe it.
C. 3D D-Cinema masters – The zombie movie portion of our program was shot using 3ality rigs with two RED ONEs. We created two track timelines in sync in Premiere Pro, and output 2K sequences of single frame DPX’s that were sent to RED’s Clipster for multiplexing into DCPs for projection…worked like a charm.
The big Friday night: Nothing can quite describe the feeling of pride these kid’s had in their work, the fun they had doing it, and the proud and astonished looks on the parents (and staff’s) faces on each of the two Friday night festivals.
Special thanks... to all of the help I had on the post side, with kudos to Adobe’s Mitch Wood who configured all of the editing gear and Rick Miller from our education team who took four days out of his busy summer schedule to teach the kids the basics of editing and green-screen. Thanks also to the amazing Simone Smith, goddess of editorial, John Carr & Marc Franklin (professional editors and post supervisors extraordinaire), Wayan Palmieri, 3D editing guru and to our tireless volunteer data wranglers Todd Thaxton and Tim Kotthoff.
Granted, these were kids in a fantasy-land candy-store stocked with the best gear and resources available to Hollywood, but truth be told, the tasks at hand were not much different than what we encounter professionally in our day to day jobs as editors and post pros. I could not be happier with how it all worked out, and look forward to continued collaborations with the amazing gang at RED.
I’m Mike Kanfer, Adobe’s “man in Hollywood” and I recently had the privilege of working with team RED as the director of post production for this year’s camp. I’ve been with Adobe for over six years now, and I can honestly say that Camp RED was probably the most rewarding experience I have had in terms of seeing our products being used in the real world by some very special kids. Adobe Premiere Pro was the exclusive NLE of the camp, and I could not have been happier with the outcome.
The task: With 50 kids broken up into multiple groups shooting on multiple EPICS and RED ONES, there was a monumental amount of data wrangling between the SSD cards (the kids called them chocolate bars) and CF cards. Thanks to some amazing parent volunteers and high-school aged counselors there was never a moment where the kids were waiting to edit their footage. Key to this workflow was the fact that Adobe Premiere Pro can decode and edit 5K EPIC R3D’s natively, without any transcoding. I can’t even imagine what that scenario would be like if we had to transcode that much incoming footage each day.
The gear: Beyond the state of the art cameras, lenses, mounting rigs, sound equipment, 3D rigs and lighting panels, the post side of the equation also had some super-powered gear to get the job done. All of the systems were running Adobe CS 5.5 Production Premium. We had a MacPro tower with a RED Rocket and nVidia 4000, three screaming-fast HP Z800 workstations powered by 12 processors each running everything multi-threaded at 64 bits, nVidia 5000 CUDA capable cards, a Red Rocket on each, with either 10 or 20 gig of incredibly fast external Silver Stor RAIDS provided by the gang at JMR. And last but not least, three HP state of the art laptops. Not too shabby!
Without a doubt, the gear on hand was state of the art (and I’m sure the object of many a techno-geek’s fantasies) but heck…there was a ton of work that only had three days to go through the complete post process.
The software: Although we had a small group of experienced Premiere Pro and After Effects experts on hand to jump in or answer questions when necessary, the kids actually ended up doing all of their own editing, green screens and VFX. They literally had to be pulled of off the machines at the end of the day to go home. This part of observing the process truly blew me away. At least a third of the kids had done a bit of editing in the past with iMovie or FCP, and perhaps one or two using Premiere Pro. Some had never shot or edited a video before. To see them effortlessly cutting multilayered, 5K timelines in realtime with keying and VFX within a day or two of being introduced to CS 5.5 was truly inspirational. Kind of scary in some ways!
Project details: The kids shot 5k EPIC footage mostly at at 5120 px by 2560 px (2:1 aspect) and a few at full frame 5K and imported the files into their projects with Premiere’s Media Browser…quickly marking in’s and out’s on selects. With one Rocket per machine, they were able to play their 5K timelines in silky-smooth real time at ½ res (a mere 2560px!) Some of the youngest kids were assigned laptops until they got the hang of it, but even in their case (without the added horsepower of a Red Rocket) the HP EliteBooks easily handled EPIC footage at ¼ and 1/8 res, giving extremely smooth playback.
Keying: The green-screen keying was done directly in Premiere Pro using our Ultra Keyer. Ultra is an easy to use, professional quality vector based keyer which works almost flawlessly on the first iteration if the greenscreen is shot reasonably well. However, if the greenscreen was cut-off in a shot or had lighting flaws, a few simple adjustments and tweaks of Premiere’s built-in, key-framable garbage mattes were all that was necessary to save the day. For the trickier shots, a handful of the more adventurous kids ventured into After Effects, and one of them (a 13 year old) even created a multilayered clone scenario from his small cast of four actors.
Color correction: The Source Settings panel for R3D clips in Premiere Pro proved to be the one of the most used tools, allowing realtime, non destructive color correction at the same instant the R3D’s are being decoded for playback. The controls mimic those of REDCINE, and any of the RMD color metadata goodness can be shared bi-directionally between the two programs.
Review and Approval: We set up a 65” flatscreen that was shared between laptops and workstations for mid-day editing and compositing reviews, and also used a medium sized EPSON HD projector aimed at the wall. For the ultimate experience, RED Studios boasts a 40 foot screen with a 4K D-Cinema projection on a giant sound stage. The campers gave it quite the workout all week showing dailies right off of the SSD cards at 4K resolution. The same system was used for the Friday night festivals.
Getting the work to the big screen: Completed projects were exported in a variety of ways, depending on the creative quality and the available time before the curtain call, we came up with three different formats:
A. 1920 x 1080 Quicktime Pro Res 4:2:2 HQ or 1920 x 1080 AVID Quciktime DNxHD…for about 80% of the work. Having the ability to take a 5K timeline and quickly shrink it down to HD was a life-saver. Since the majority of workstations were on WIN7, Pro Res was not always an option (don’t get me started on that one) but the DNx looked just as good, and exporting them out of Premiere Pro to the Media Encoder worked quickly and flawlessly (about a 7 to 1 ratio of render time)
B. 3840 x 2160 QUAD HD ProRes (nearly 4K in size, based on the magic number of combining 4 frames of 16x9 aspect HD). Some projects (judged to be the best of the best) were lucky enough to be rendered in 4K, using the MacPro as the ProRes rendering workhorse. Since 95% of the projects were created on Z800 Win7 stations, we used Premiere’s nifty ability to seamlessly re-link projects to media regardless of the platform. All we had to do was power down the systems, sneaker-net the sleek JMR Silver Stors that held the media and project files from the Z800’s over to the Mac Pro, and viola…stunning 4K ProRes. So what do you do when there is no time to bake D-Cinema masters at 4k for projection for 200 people every Friday night…you take those Quad HD Pro Res’ and pump them through a Mac outfitted with an AJA KONA 3G card attached via four SDI spigots to your 4K projector, and enjoy the flawless playback. In my day we used to have to bake 4K DPX’s that took up 40 megabytes per frame (or about 250 gig per 5 minutes) but not at Camp Red. The Pro Res Quad HD’s at nearly 10 to 1 compression that do not drop a single frame upon projection looked spectacular. It does not hurt that they are originating form a crystal-clear, tack-sharp 5K EPIC timeline at a spectacular bit depth. You really have to see this to believe it.
C. 3D D-Cinema masters – The zombie movie portion of our program was shot using 3ality rigs with two RED ONEs. We created two track timelines in sync in Premiere Pro, and output 2K sequences of single frame DPX’s that were sent to RED’s Clipster for multiplexing into DCPs for projection…worked like a charm.
The big Friday night: Nothing can quite describe the feeling of pride these kid’s had in their work, the fun they had doing it, and the proud and astonished looks on the parents (and staff’s) faces on each of the two Friday night festivals.
Special thanks... to all of the help I had on the post side, with kudos to Adobe’s Mitch Wood who configured all of the editing gear and Rick Miller from our education team who took four days out of his busy summer schedule to teach the kids the basics of editing and green-screen. Thanks also to the amazing Simone Smith, goddess of editorial, John Carr & Marc Franklin (professional editors and post supervisors extraordinaire), Wayan Palmieri, 3D editing guru and to our tireless volunteer data wranglers Todd Thaxton and Tim Kotthoff.
Granted, these were kids in a fantasy-land candy-store stocked with the best gear and resources available to Hollywood, but truth be told, the tasks at hand were not much different than what we encounter professionally in our day to day jobs as editors and post pros. I could not be happier with how it all worked out, and look forward to continued collaborations with the amazing gang at RED.
