My First Scratch session with Redcode Raw: No Joy

[BigLu]

This is not an official report this was just my persoanl experience and findings.
I WAS THERE for the entire day.
I was very curious to see how scratch performed.
So here is what saw.

The session was started by a teacher for hours, he made little progress then he had to leave.
Chase then spent hours trouble shooting the system himself.
Then a professional operator came by who was working on a Luster system a few rooms down he gave it a solid attempt to get anything going. But no luck what so ever.
Just Crashes all day long and trouble getting clips to show properly.


There were 5 of us in total trying to help
we had no luck what so ever.

I went in with high hopes and positive expectations.

I by no means have any interest in badmouthing any products. Especially Scratch.
I have read positive things about the scratch system
and have taking a strong interest in possibly investing in one.
But in my only 2 experiences with scratch
The 1st was great
The 2nd did not work at all
for the system that was great I give them nothing but high respect because they are one of the best.

But for now I dont feel good about scratch at all.
Not unless i was RICH and had a huge bank roll.

It runs on windows.
That alone makes me wonder.

Once again these are just my experiences with scratch.

For now I will live with my Final Touch / Color
and I liked the Luster system a few rooms down.
Scratch? Killed us that day.

Maybe next time will be more pleasant im sure.

 

[Lucas Wilson]

This is not an official report this was just my persoanl experience and findings. I WAS THERE for the entire day. I was very curious to see how scratch performed. So here is what saw.

The session was started by a teacher for hours, he made little progress then he had to leave.
Chase then spent hours trouble shooting the system himself.
Then a professional operator came by who was working on a Luster system a few rooms down he gave it a solid attempt to get anything going. But no luck what so ever. Just Crashes all day long and trouble getting clips to show properly.

Guys... please PM me or email me with some details. Please don't reveal this facility's name in public. But I need to know who this is so I can get them properly trained and up to speed.

Also - you said this was started by a "teacher?" There are only a small number of ASSIMILATE employees in LA, and we are the only ones who do official training. I know it wasn't me... so that only leaves a couple of choices. Please let me know who the "teacher" was.

I am completely uninterested in coming down on anyone here. But a facility that is offering that kind of service only hurts the facility, the client, and us. I want to make it better.

Thanks,

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

 

[BigLu]

I personally called
310.5XX.XXXX because we were so desperate
in hopes of a little help. I left a message with my direct number and ways to message me on here.
I dont blame anyone for never getting a call back
but i didnt get a call back at all.
I just thought it was a wonderful opportunity to build a nice relationship with such a powerful system as Scratch.

I hate to say anything bad at all.
Its not something i am interested in doing.
This was just my experience and hope it can be helpful to another RED owner.

 

[Fredrik Harreschou]

Fredrick, we started off with a trained Scratch operator in a facility that does 2K DI every day. We were to conform my FCP edit, grade it, and output DPX files. This is how I define "online session."

Chase, I'm truly sorry and understand your feelings. I must admit I was under the impression you tried to do this all by yourself on a demo license and found it hard to believe that a professional operator was giving you nothing but troubles. Your experience must have been terrible.

I just want to assure you that if you try again, with an operator/artist that knows what he/she is doing, you will have a GREAT experience working with REDCODE. We grade and output in SCRATCH with great success every day...

 

[M Most]

It runs on windows.
That alone makes me wonder.

So does Clipster. So do Pablo and Quantel IQ. So does Nucoda. So do probably at least half of the installations of Lustre.

To be fair, both Nucoda and Lustre are also available on Linux. But I hope you get the point.

 

[Simon Blackledge]

After reading the whole thread this pretty much says untrained ops.

Scratch is a really good system.. don't let this put you off.

s

 

[David Birdy]

Mike,

Will Avid have any Red sessions, or any demos at this years NAB.. maybe offsite at a hotel??

Dave

 

[Rudi Herbert]

My 2 pesos,

RED is priced revolutionarily, but at the end of the day, it still produces ultra large files encoded proprietarily and that requires a powerful system to work with, a lot more powerful if you want to approach real time capabilities, especially at resolutions of 2K and over. And power equals money. Also, with great power comes great responsibility That power is nothing if you don't know how to harness it and use it. Come on guys, you cannot get a system that can do all that and expect it to rival RED's affordability. It just doesn't work that way.

And as anti-establishment and anti-Hollywood as I am, you do get what you pay for with an experienced operator, on ANY system. mmost ran me through a quick Scratch/RED demo and boy, was he just cruising all through that interface and making it sing and showing me this and that, and that and that, and that as well. It was the first time I saw Scratch at all, and in a very short time I understood the GUI fairly well, though of course, it takes a mmost or any other highly trained technician to exhibit all the product's capabilities.

You know, I've actually done a few projects for the big screen that I graded myself on AE, because I wanted something cheap and uncomplicated. I graded on AE, all of it on proxies, rendered one frame at a time of each significant part where the color changed and/or needed revisions, and then rendered the DPX 2K files overnight. Got about 18 minutes rendered for every 8 hours and ended up with a finished projects of 45 minutes in only 3 days. On the same computer (Windows mind you!) that I paid less than 4 thousand for. The delay was totally acceptable for me. There are tedious and time consuming ways to get things done reasonably cheap with very high quality, but if you want real time, fast turnarounds and use an application to its fullest, then I think the only way to do it is to either own the system yourself or drop the big bucks at a professional facility.

 

[Arnaud Paris]

Sorry Chase, but the facility in which you had your experience was not a serious one, at least not about grading Red footage.

It's important to understand that the Red camera is constantly evolving, and that is true also about the RedCode raw. That means that the Assimilate team is always working hard on integrating these changes on the software side.

I think if you accept that your Red camera has some features being delayed you should also accept that Scratch needs some time to catch up and to work 100% without glitches.

Being a colorist on Lustre or Pablo does not mean that you know how to grade Red footage on Scratch. Being able to work around the issues is something people do very well with the camera, why should'nt it be the case with Scratch and Red footage?

Your colorist at least could have talked to Assimilate when you were having problems.

Believe me these guys are fast. We run a Scratch in Paris (we even train colorists about the specificities of grading for the Red.) When we have a problem or question these guys always react within 24hours.

Seriously you should give yourself a day with Scratch at OffHollywood or with Lucas to get a true opinion of its potential.

 

[Chase Gordon]

Apologies

Apologies

Hey Guys,

If you haven't noticed, I've updated my initial post with a bit of a mea culpa. You are all totally right that a poorly trained operator made a big difference and I was not being helpful to anyone complaining about struggling with the UI. Ditto about the facility not having a vector scope for us to use.

Lucas, I've sent you the details about the facility and my contact info. BigLu referred to the operator as "the teacher" because he was teaching both of us about the system so we could stay after he was gone and continue working on it. He is not an authorized Scratch teacher (or, apparently, a fully trained operator) and he did not claim to be.

And yes, this facility is NOT serious about doing RED. They're just dipping their toes in to see what it's about. This is why they didn't want to install beta software that might ruin their bread and butter film DI pipeline. And that's part of how we got 8 hours on a Scratch system.

Arno, as for Assimilate's support, this facility has had very different experience in that regard than you did. It's not like we didn't try to get help.


If you look at the "Final Cut DI" workflow described at http://www.red.com/cameras/workflow you might think this was all working fine and easily today. I naively thought I've got RED footage, I can get to a licensed Scratch workstation, it will conform and convert my footage. If I don't hire an operator maybe it will take me 2 days instead of 2 hours, but I'll get it done.

What I found out is that just having a Scratch workstation is not enough. Even an experienced professional operator (who stepped in for 10 minutes) couldn't get past the stuck frames. The slow renders weren't operator error either. Using Scratch on RED footage requires a commitment to RED that a film shop doesn't want to make. This was news to me. And this is really what I meant to be warning people about with my post.

I'm in the Los Angeles area. Anyone who wants to send me a quote for exporting my 4K 2:1 RED footage to 2048 x 1080 DPX and ProRes HQ with and/or without grading, please PM me. Program time without end titles is about 18 minutes right now (haven't locked it yet, trying to get it down a bit).

Honestly, if I could get RedCine and RedTrip to work on my Mac I'd be willing do the conversion myself, then take it somewhere a professional colorist could grade it. But that's another disappointment....

I'm confident that eventually this will all be worked out and RED will revolutionize filmmaking and digital post production. I was just misinformed about how close to that day we are today and now I'm paying the price.

I'm not blaming anyone but myself for that, I just want others to learn from my mistakes.