Apple Post production environment for Red

[Lucas Wilson]

Complete agree with Mike...

I am not a colorist... but man, I sure have worked with a lot of them over the past years. The very best colorists are the ones who never have to touch secondaries or windows. They can do amazing things with primaries because they understand color at a very fundamental level.

I still work with film timers who are using a Hazeltine to do stuff, and I am consistently amazed at what they can do with such simple controls.

Secondaries are all about special effects and fixing bad shooting errors, not about look, feel, and nuance.

...my$.02.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

 

[Andrew Kimery]

Yes. If you can't do secondaries, individually control shadows,mids,higlights. If you dont' have the software to properly grade, knowing how won't do you any good.

But now I just have another app on my desktop that I can barely use because I still only have a very basic understanding of how colorists do what they do. What have I gained? I'm no closer to learning and understanding how to properly cc and grade and I'm out $500.

Obviously we are way into beating a dead territory and we just have different philosophies on the best way to approach some things.:sheep:


-A

 

[Poi Boy]

Spend the $50, knowledge is good.
Aloha
-A

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Too frequent and too early use of secondaries is the hallmark of inexperienced colorists who paint themselves into corners they can't get out of. If you're first learning color correction, you shouldn't have access to such tools, and if you do, you should ignore their presence. If you can't make a decently corrected image using basic color balance tools, you don't understand what you're doing and need more instruction/practice/talent. Having trained at least 20 colorists over the years, I can tell you that the ones who developed the best skills were the ones who understood what I just said. I would compare this to driving race cars: it takes a lot of instruction, practice, and skill to properly control one at its limits. You don't suddenly get in one and drive at 220 mph. You start out with something you can control. Same thing with color correction. The secondaries, area isolations, highlight saturation curves, and such are for those who already possess the skill to do basic color balance, both technical and creative. Putting such tools in the hands of the inexperienced encourages bad habits that never get broken. When PageMaker came out, we saw a lot of really crappy page design, by those who thought it was purely the tools and not the finely honed skill and innate talent. I expect now we'll see quite a bit of the same thing.

You have infintely more experience on this subject than me so I will defer to your wisdom, however, I'm still a little bit young and foolish so I will make one small objection.

Even if you perfectly understand color science/art there are situations where you want the exact same color to do two different things in two different places. That is when you *should* use a window or secondary in fact it's the only solution. I think the problem is not windows and secondaries but that people use it as a first line of assault not as they should be used.

I would also argue the reason most amazing colorists never use windows and or secondaries is A) Because they work with better DPs and B) They're more experienced by extension older learned more tricks along the way that avoid them.

P.S. Where might someone one take one of these master classes that you teach?

 

[M Most]

Even if you perfectly understand color science/art there are situations where you want the exact same color to do two different things in two different places. That is when you *should* use a window or secondary in fact it's the only solution.

I offer this as a partial answer. Take a look at any episode of the first three seasons of NYPD Blue. Not one window was ever used, because they weren't available on the color corrector that was used for those shows. I know this because I was the colorist who did them. Even secondaries were primarily used only to tweak flesh tones slightly (well, OK, we did use them to change leaves from green to fall colors a few times, but I would consider that more of a visual effect than basic continuity correction). 99% of the work was basic color balance. And although Brian Reynolds was one of the best shooters I ever worked with and still is (he's doing "The Closer" now, and I still consider him a friend), the show's production was often chaotic, particularly on location days, and coverage was frequently mismatched as a result. And I offer this as an even more convincing answer: look at just about any feature film that was released prior to about 2001. The only "color correction" done on those pictures was basic lab timing.

I say again: windows and secondaries are tools. They are there to be used for embellishments, not for basic correction. Useful, certainly. Necessary, no.

I think the problem is not windows and secondaries but that people use it as a first line of assault not as they should be used.

That's a good assessment.

P.S. Where might someone one take one of these master classes that you teach?

I don't teach color correction formally, never have. But over the years I've been in the position of being lead colorist, and in that position, part of the responsibility (and generally one of the more rewarding) is to help other colorists to become better at what they do. The only formal teaching I ever did was a few quarters at UCLA (taught a post production class for a friend of mine who had to take a leave of absence due to an out of town job). I did enjoy it immensely, though.

I'll put in a plug for Steve Hullfish's book on color correction, though. It's quite a good introductory text, and draws on the knowledge and insights of some very talented colorists, most of whom are far more talented than me.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Thanks I'll definitely check that book out.

I can see where you're getting at with the problem of any sort of 'tweak' effect and it's the same problem you have in 3D. Any time you try to use any sort of "Fancy" effect it usually causes more problems than you started with because of "reproduceability". Great if you want one frame, but that lighting starts to flicker from frame to frame and shot to shot and you should have just used a shadow map. Not to mention it's 10x slower.

 

[M Most]

Thanks I'll definitely check that book out.

I can see where you're getting at with the problem of any sort of 'tweak' effect and it's the same problem you have in 3D. Any time you try to use any sort of "Fancy" effect it usually causes more problems than you started with because of "reproduceability". Great if you want one frame, but that lighting starts to flicker from frame to frame and shot to shot and you should have just used a shadow map. Not to mention it's 10x slower.

Yup. Think of it the same way you think of things like global illumination and subsurface scattering.

 

[M Most]

Thanks I'll definitely check that book out.

I just talked to Steve the other day, and there's a revised version coming out soon.

 

[Zack Birlew]

For 4K editing, it's not possible to do it natively yet. I personally plan to always film in 4K+ and downconvert to 2K for post and finishing and save the 4K+ data when I can make a revised 4K conversion later down the road. That's the beauty of this camera, very much like how things are done with 35mm film today, you'll have that 1080P and 2K 35mm print ready for distribution in theatres and HD home video but when the time comes to remaster the film later, you can always get more out of it.

As far as the Apple environment, FCS2 is a must. I'm not too sure about using Kona or Blackmagic cards because there isn't a professional 2K monitor to go along with it. Certainly you can monitor 1080P through one of the newer native 1080P production monitors from JVC or Sony. At the moment, it might just be better to work with a corrected 30" Apple Cinema Display on the Adobe color profile, like what Jim and the RED team are supposedly using.

Storage is a big problem. 4K can eat up a lot of space and maintaining the bandwidth for it requires a RAID array of some sort, but since most will be working in a 2K RAW or REDCode environment for now it isn't as big a problem as it seems. I don't know much about storage but I had planned to get an XSERVE RAID setup as it seems to be the easiest route to go with. However, I know that the new 1TB hard drives have 32mb of cache and I'm waiting for Apple or someone to come out with a professional solution that uses those drives in a RAID setup. Imagine an XSERVE RAID with 14 of these drives in a RAID 0 array, that is 448mb of combined cache! Not sure if all of that gets used together but, from what I understand of RAIDs, the cache makes a big difference.

As for processing, I have a new 3ghz 8-core Mac Pro and maxed out the RAM to 16gb. That should do nicely for a while but the only solution at the moment to get more power is to get another 8-core Mac Pro to serve as a render computer. Not something I plan on doing unless someone needs me to edit in native 4K. Later, around next year, there should be 16-core Mac Pros and then it'll keep doubling as long as they can keep adding cores. So, processing isn't as much of a problem as it was a few years ago when we couldn't get past 3.4ghz without compromising stability.

One key point to remember is that Mac OS Leopard is coming out within the next couple of months and who knows how much the 64-bit code is going to boost the performance of the Intel Macs?

Really, I don't think anyone should worry about how they'll edit with the RED because at bare minimum you can work in DV or DVCPRO HD until you can work your way up to 2K and 4K+ and that is really the best part about the RED camera system.

 

[Jack Wester]

I would love to have writes at 889 MB/sec and reads at 2025 MB/sec or even 1GB/sec confirmed. At 5900 Euros it sounds to good to be true.

[URL="www.mac.co.yu/ponuda/macola/MACOLA_pricelist.pdf]www.mac.co.yu/ponuda/macola/MACOLA_pricelist.pdf[/URL]

Could anyone comment on this?

 

[Lucas Wilson]

I would love to have writes at 889 MB/sec and reads at 2025 MB/sec or even 1GB/sec confirmed. At 5900 Euros it sounds to good to be true.

www.mac.co.yu/ponuda/macola/MACOLA_pricelist.pdf

Could anyone comment on this?

I'll comment...

Follow your instincts. It's too good to be true.

2025MB/sec... sustained? Through one client? Uh... no. Just can't happen. Don't even go there.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

 

[Simon Blackledge]

ours did 2400 a few weeks ago L

s

 

[Lucas Wilson]

ours did 2400 a few weeks ago L

s

Tied to those disks?

Lucas

 

[Simon Blackledge]

nope.. we have a different raid..

.. was meant in jest.. the aja screwed up one time and gave us silly numbers..


relax.. your still right

s

 

[Miodrag Popovic]

I was testing Macola with disable file system cache , regarding flameop suggestion , and get these results in AJA test and in console.
We are testing now solution with 32 X 2,5" HDD and it looks promising. Very high speed with little money .
Unfortunately I didn't get any other test software yet. We get 2025 with 8core, 8GB RAM and enable file system cache, 4 infiniband ports. We repeat the test several times and AJA was showing that ?
It is more important not to have drop frame in 4K, isn't it ?

Cheers

Pop

 

[Michele Gavazzeni]

Impressive!
have you tested how it works when the disk aren't empty
how it preforms for example when the array is 60% full?

 

[Miodrag Popovic]

If somebody want I can send all the benchmarks (from 10% through 90% full disks).
Just contact me at popapple@mac.com

Cheers,

Pop

 

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

I would look at what film school students make for their final/thesis film. Out of all of the ones produced by a given year of students, most of them just don't have compelling stories.

Boy, that's the truth. I don't get it, either -- story is always highly emphasized in film school, but you must not be able to teach it because the words fall on deaf ears. When I was watching the screenings of thesis films, most of them were just boring. The production values were in general fairly high, at least on most of the productions. The lighting was good, image quality quite nice, acting usually passable to good (a few exceptions), in general a few looked like professional quality products, but still I wasn't very engaged with the stories.

Although I fashion myself a writer-director, and have done that several times, I think it's a problem that every director thinks he's also a great writer. Sometimes, it really is best to pick an already very good concept / script and work with that, doing your job as the director, rather than stubbornly trying to write something yourself when actually you're not that good at it. But people don't want to admit they're not good at something, usually.

 

[johnkersten]

In 1970 a GB of RAM was $1600 000. Processing power was counted in fractions of megaherthz, not gigahertz. Maybe not this year, but I promise you, we noobs will be editing 4K. At that point, the professional crowd will probably be editing 8K in 3D stereo.

They invented something like "8K" in Japan, and the picture quality at a standard screen size is so high that your brain thinks it's real, and then your depth perception starts tweaking out ('cos you're looking at a flat image) and you get motion sickness.

On the upshot, I guess that means there IS such thing as too much resolution and 1080P and 4K might actually become standards for TV and Film, respectively.

Jack, I think you should just save yourself the trouble and get an HVX200.

 

[johnkersten]

Does anyone know how a "slower" machine would perform for editing 4K? A Dual-2.7Ghz G5 for example? What kind of hard drive connection needs to be used? 1394B? SATA?