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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Speedgrade makes RED POP

Because of the limitations of most EDLs (i.e. CMX3600), on projects with a lot of "specials" (speed/framing/DVEs) I make a copy of my NLE sequence/timeline and "flatten" it out onto one track with handles for grading. This is an effective but time consuming workaround where I have to manually rebuild the edit from the graded media.

I still shake my head as to why issues like these are still around in 2013. I'm no coder, but it seems like it should be easy enough to establish a standard protocol for XML usage that would get the NLEs and the finishing systems to interface effectively. Perhaps AVID and Assimilate Scratch, or FCP-X and DaVinci Resolve, or some other pairing could work together to establish a reliable round trip inside the NLE that held any formatting the NLE could create. Not holding my breath.

Cheers - #19
 
Certainly not impossible, but will take a while to do. XML is not a magic solution, it is a very nice way to self-tag metadata in a easy to parse format. But how image, color, keyframes, world size, direction and all that good stuff that each system uses is what is different and takes time to harmonize. Add to that third party plug-ins that are commonly used in editorial that are not supported in grading systems only adds to the complexity. Motion effects that use different pixel interpolation algorithms is another example of complexity. Even semantics of simple headings to be properly mapped from system to system; Start in Avid is In for FCP, Reel in Adobe is Tape in Avid, etc.

Michael
 
Speed grade still doesn't work directly with r3ds right. I thought it does a transcode for all footage.
 
Ugh. Sounds like a bit of a nightmare to use for my purposes then. We've almost picture locked the edit so I might just grab a big harddrive and try the send to speed grade option. Do I lose any raw colour grading capabilities moving to dpx?
 
Brad Crawford said:
Ugh. Sounds like a bit of a nightmare to use for my purposes then. We've almost picture locked the edit so I might just grab a big harddrive and try the send to speed grade option. Do I lose any raw colour grading capabilities moving to dpx?
Click to expand...

You don't lose any, you lose all...
 
The problem I've found with the EDL from Premiere is it has a few bugs. Even with a plain one-track sequence and no audio, Speedgrade will complain about the time base for some reason and I don't know why. There are others out there that have experienced similar issues. Then for some reason it doesn't bring in all your footage and you have to manually bring it into your timeline. And then, for some reason it drops frames and ignores timecode for some clips and the solution I've found so far is to re-create the clips on your timeline in Premiere then re-export. These are all bugs not related to just EDL.
 
So should I edit my source settings in premiere first and get a look in fairly happy with in terms of contrast/blacks and then go dpx? does that give me the most options or should I keep it flat from the premiere export to speed grade? I have quite a few off time clips (its an MMA doc) so it doesn't sound like EDL will be of much help.
 
jake blackstone said:
You don't lose any, you lose all...
Click to expand...

Sure... eh... Right...

But if you do a technical 1stlight pass harmonizing the scenes and optimizing them for the grade to something like redlogfilm, you actually can have a sweet time grading those log dpx's...

That is if you can get the technical pass right.

I asked LIM why they didn't default to something like RLF/640ISO/5000K/Tint: 0 as a default meta for transcoding to DPX before grade...

If you don't really know what you're doing, that should be a pretty safe bet for 95% of your shots...

Not optimum in all conditions, but close enough NOT to need what's going on with the signal...

Anyhow...

SpeedGrade was essentially THE RAW grader out of the door, so it reads r3d's pretty well
They even had some nice GPU acceleration tricks "on the shelf" back in the day, that looked amazing in beta's, before RED clipped that down. They def have some interesting tech!
 
Brad Crawford said:
So should I edit my source settings in premiere first and get a look in fairly happy with in terms of contrast/blacks and then go dpx? does that give me the most options or should I keep it flat from the premiere export to speed grade? I have quite a few off time clips (its an MMA doc) so it doesn't sound like EDL will be of much help.
Click to expand...

Open your RED footage in Speedgrade as RedLogFilm then go from there. I apply a LUT first then grade on that. When you're done render the clips back out as Prores 4444 and replace on your timeline in Premiere (to keep your Premiere clip settings Alt drag clip over the one on the timeline). I haven't found an easier (or less buggy) way to do it with Speedgrade. Better still use Resolve and wait until Adobe fix all the bugs and come up with a better Premiere integration.
 
A good 'integration' would be to completely implement Speedgrade into Premiere. And while you're at it Adobe, melt PP and AE together as well. One day, looking back at all the workarounds and fiddling and jumping forth and back between apps will seem like stoneage to us.
 
jake blackstone said:
Improper use of curves is one of the most noise inducing operators, beside HLS Hue vs Lum or Hue vs Hue. So, you're not missing much...
Click to expand...

Improper use of anything usually brings improper results.
Not negating positive ones with proper use.
 
Michel Rabe said:
And while you're at it Adobe, melt PP and AE together as well. One day, looking back at all the workarounds and fiddling and jumping forth and back between apps will seem like stoneage to us.
Click to expand...
That day is upon us. It's called Smoke.
 
jake blackstone said:
That day is upon us. It's called Smoke.
Click to expand...

Maybe if it wasn't Mac only it might have pushed Adobe more to work on merging some of their apps into one. Now that they stopped selling boxed software and Adobe cloud should reduce most of the single app sales they might be more opened to look into it.
I would like to use Speedgrade more often but it's just not practical right now in many situations for me.
 
I just graded my 20 min film in Speedgrade and it was an extremley frustrating experience. I like the software because it's relatively easy to use, but really I'm not quite sure who they're aiming this software at. They really need to address their bugs though, it's riddled with them.
 
Al Lougher said:
I just graded my 20 min film in Speedgrade and it was an extremley frustrating experience.
Click to expand...

Were all the bugs related to importing the EDL? I've run into zero issues with grading individual clips...
 
Justin O'Neill said:
Were all the bugs related to importing the EDL? I've run into zero issues with grading individual clips...
Click to expand...

Most of the issues were with Premiere EDL yes, but strange issues like selecting a set of clips to render out and then the rendered files are too short or even wrong clips. I go back and render each manually and it's fine. Then when memory gets low it loses ability to save anything to your HD and never recovers so a force quit is needed and of course you lose all work. Sliders stick and you can't move them and they're incredibly non responsive. Undo causes periodic crashes (and there's not really a legitimate undo/redo function sometimes it works sometimes it don't, in fact a standardized menu File/Edit/Window etc. would be nice). Saved looks magically move around and I can never find them. Random "Error reading file" on clips that were working fine before. The whole FPS thing which is just weird and very confusing. Is it 23.976 or 24fps? Either way it doesn't seem to want to conform R3Ds properly. I dropped a clip onto the timeline by mistake and it shifted all my grade layers by a few frames, undo didn't want to reset it so I manually had to move each layer back to the original position (with over 200 shots not the best way to spend an evening in. Where's ripple-delete function when you need it?). What else.. working with the timeline really sucks and is not standardized, clearly is the result of buying 3rd party software and not bothering to make it an Adobe standard. And it's a mega memory hog, I mean seriously, really poor memory management and eats my entire memory until 2MB remains and I'm not kidding.

So yeah just a few bugs lol.
 
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