Novice seeking advice

[Sean Yu]

My business partner and I are about to film a feature with the Red One camera. We're looking to shoot 4.5K 2.40:1 aspect ratio (that feature will probably be available by the time we start shooting). We're looking to buy a Mac Pro 8-core 3.2Ghz with a hefty amount of memory and a powerful video card. I have two main questions.

1. What do you recommend using in order to store all that raw high-end Red footage shot on 4.5K 2.40:1? Should I stock up on LTO tapes with the drive, or find a way to use the Avid Unity?

2. What do you recommend my workflow to be? I'm open to using Final Cut or Avid Media Composer. I've heard some people have been having trouble using Final Cut since it doesn't support 4K footage, and the program, Color from the Final Cut Studio 2 pack has difficulty handling footage longer than about 10 minutes. Also, FCP only has 10-bit color. Either way, both programs need an EDL and rendered in RedCine at the end to apply to the final master copy. Right now, I'm leaning towards buying Avid Media Composer, partly because I've heard from various people that Apple's cooperation with Red leaves more to be desired. Still, I'm not sure how to go about it.

I want the final master copies to be in 4.5K, 2K, and 1080p. Any advice or suggestions would be highly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[MichaelP]

I would suggest you decide how the 4K mastering is going to be done. From there you can derive all your other deliverables. Once that is decided you can work backwards to decide your best path to get there. With feature work you will most likely be transcoding to a proxy anyway for the offline - either ProRes or DNxHD. DNxHD does offer a 36MB data rate which allows for ~20 hours on a 300GB drive.

There are lots of tools for both RED wise for either system. For Avid, a compilation of workflows has been put together on www.avid.com/red. I would also look to ScriptSync as a key feature for editing dramatic script based footage - for more information on that I would suggest looking at www.avid.com/scriptsync


Michael

 

[michael zaletel]

I've given this recommendation before but in your case it is really important. If you sign up for Apple's Developer Program (No you don't have to be a programmer) at a cost of $500 per year, you get to buy one computer/monitor system at a substantial discount. Last time I saved 22% which on a fully loaded system is easily over $2,000.

-shooter

 

[Josh Negrin]

There's no reason to ever do a 4k master. Shoot in 4.5k as planned and do a 2k master on a mac pro 2.66 with an ati 3870 card and 8gb of ram.

I talked for a long time with a representative of NEC (pioneer's in getting 2k digital projectors into movie theaters) about the difference between 2k and 4k. He told me the visual difference (what your eyes are able to see) is about 1% where as the amount of processing power and hard drive space needed to project a 4k file is substantially higher than the resources needed for 2k. With Blu-Ray (the top end delivery format to the consumer) maxing out at 1080P (1920x1080 just shy of 2k) and digital projection maxing out at 2k, there's really no need to spend all the extra money on having a 4k master.

As a frame of reference, when current film projectors project a film print on the huge theater screen, after it's all said and done you're getting, roughly, 1.5k of resolution. That's real world numbers, factoring in the work of the d.p., the colorist, and how many times that film print has been projected. Of course there are many more variables, but on average you're looking at 1.5k resolution when you see a film on the big screen. Hope this helps.

pro editor
www.jnfilms.com