R3D Color Discussion

[Sidney L. Plaut]

Lucas,

I agree my "the rule the world" thingy was a little overdone

But you are following a quite "old school" road of tying your software to hardware like all the others (your competitors) do. I live in Denmark, and although Lustre seems to be the nr 1 choice (in regards to prestige), I know of at least 3 Scratch systems vs maybe 5 lustres. - and hands down your product is in my opinion the best bang for the buck. This business model of having few users have of course ruled the film business for years.
But things change... you work alot with RED why not follow their example? - there will be alot of scarlet users... epic users... why not try to capitalize on that? - everyone needs to colorgrade.

in regards to smoke. Ive never worked on a smoke. They were always there at the post houses, but they never seemed to used alot - I've heard it used to be the coolest machine, but the Flame seemed to used more...

 

[Mark Wilkinson]

Hey Mark...

Out of curiosity, where? SCRATCH v5 was only released a few days ago, and up until then, only a few beta customers were using RED Rocket™.

The reason I ask is that it is actually very solid at this point, so wondering what you saw, where, and what needs to be fixed.

Best,

Lucas

No need to get specific (don't want to poke anyone in the eye) - my point was only that these things are evolving very quickly. I'm glad to hear your system is out of Beta and stable now - I'm looking forward to grading something directly off the R3D footage soon on Scratch - I'll report back on my experience.

Thanks for your involvement on the list -

 

[Lucas Wilson]

Hey Lucas,
Any chance that Assimilate will support other native RAW camera formats such as .cine, Arri RAW, SI2K native files?

Yes.

But you are following a quite "old school" road of tying your software to hardware like all the others (your competitors) do.

How so? The only thing we "tie to" is an NVidia card. In today's world, that's sort of like saying we tie to a computer. : )

Obviously, to get high performance, you need a high-performance computer. But the prices you pay for that are "normal" computer prices. Not artificially inflated manufacturer prices for some kind of "certified storage" or a "certified computer."

Lucas

 

[mikeburton]

Yes.

That's good news!

 

[Sidney L. Plaut]

Lucas,

Maybe I am mistaken, I was under the impression that you had to buy the machine as well. - something my friends who have a scratch mentioned? I must have misunderstood then. I should have gotten my facts right. My bad.

 

[Leandro Marini]

I'd like to throw in my .02$ as well. After looking at every di platform available, Local HEro POst built a complete Red color and finishing pipeline around 3 scratches. Since then, we have become an industry leader in Red color correction and often get comments from our clients that our red material looks better, more nuanced, and more organic than anywhere else, bar none. While this is not only due to the red implementation in Scratxh, I can tell you, as the senior colorist, we could not create the images we do in any other platform, the ability to access that raw file without any transformations, in realtime has definied our look and is second to none.

When it comes to red, Scratch is hard to compete with.

Leandro Marini
Local Hero Post

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

Tim - Pablo uses RED Rocket™ to convert to DPX on import.

Actually Mark, with respect, the QUANTEL NO LONGER CONVERTS TO DPX...

it uses RED ROCKET for ingest but files are converted to AAF, Quantel's proprietary, format I believe and now ELIMINATES that step thru a process called RED CONFORM.

The Quantel and RED Workflow is here: http://www.quantel.com/page.php?u=e68256ce263cb93869525d538398ea71

For what its worth. We plan on having both Assimilate Scratch and Quantel Pablo for RED workflow.

The Pablo just arrived...going live Jan 6th.

We will have a Scratch system as soon as we find a Salesman to return an email or phone call (wink wink Lucas) Keycode Media sales staff must all be millionaires... or all lost their jobs?

 

[John Jonathan]

Actually Mark, with respect, the QUANTEL NO LONGER CONVERTS TO DPX...

it uses RED Rocket™™ for ingest but files are converted to AAF, Quantel's proprietary, format I believe and now ELIMINATES that step thru a process called RED CONFORM.

The Quantel and RED Workflow is here: http://www.quantel.com/page.php?u=e68256ce263cb93869525d538398ea71

For what its worth. We plan on having both Assimilate Scratch and Quantel Pablo for RED workflow.

The Pablo just arrived...going live Jan 6th.

We will have a Scratch system as soon as we find a Salesman to return an email or phone call (wink wink Lucas) Keycode Media sales staff must all be millionaires... or all lost their jobs?

Wow, you must be getting close to millionaire level too. Thats awesome! All the people I know in LA are selling off high end gear and you have a Quantel and are getting a Scratch, thats great. You must have more work lined up than anyone else on the west coast, I looked up your site, your in Portland Oregon? Are you doing work for Laika? They are the only high end company I know of in that area. Congrats on doing so well at such a horrible time for the industry, sounds like your doing something right.

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

Wow, you must be getting close to millionaire level too. Thats awesome! All the people I know in LA are selling off high end gear and you have a Quantel and are getting a Scratch, thats great. You must have more work lined up than anyone else on the west coast, I looked up your site, your in Portland Oregon? Are you doing work for Laika? They are the only high end company I know of in that area. Congrats on doing so well at such a horrible time for the industry, sounds like your doing something right.

Thanks Jonathon, we like to call ourselves "InDEBT" studios

Things are happening in OR, thanks to the 20% Cash Rebate we offer
combined with a rabid indie film scene (also funded by the state)
and a $450M commercial market... with NO high end finishing...closest is Seattle or LA...LAIKA is a wannabe Pixar, does all in house productions...

I swear they have more money in Speed Rail and SandBags than we do in our whole facility. We are opening March 1. That website is a lame placeholder...

Most of our business lately, is out of state productions, as we are an effective pass thru facility... with far lower overhead than LA

Like a 28,000 sq/ft facility for only $.55/sq foot and its only 9 blocks from DT

We have our work cut out for us, but if you can find money right now. the deals on gear is hard to pass up.

Like Scratch dropping 50% We want to offer a Scratch suite wholesale to ANY colorist, freelance, so they dont have to invest in the kit. They can mark it up to clients... this means we pay no salaries. WHich also helps in this economy. LEAN AND MEAN is the name of the game.

and admitting when you are wrong and shifting gears quickly... case n point, I told Mark P. I thought 3-D was another fad... I was wrong and we are now positioning for Stereo3D, hence the Quantel.

 

[M Most]

Things are happening in OR, thanks to the 20% Cash Rebate we offer combined with a rabid indie film scene (also funded by the state) and a $450M commercial market... with NO high end finishing...closest is Seattle or LA...LAIKA is a wannabe Pixar, does all in house productions...

I wish you the best of luck, but I would also point out that Louisiana and New Mexico have had very significant incentives in place for a number of years - as have a number of other states - and have to date not really been able to attract anything other than production from outside the state. The incentives have had little to no effect on either Los Angeles or New York based productions in terms of post work. There are a number of reasons for that, and for that reason, I wouldn't necessarily count on getting that work as part of your basic business plan, no matter how logical it might sound. But, as I said, I wish you well. And, as you point out, you are looking at locally based production as your base as well.

We have our work cut out for us, but if you can find money right now. the deals on gear is hard to pass up.

That is true, for almost all businesses right now.

and admitting when you are wrong and shifting gears quickly... case n point, I told Mark P. I thought 3-D was another fad... I was wrong and we are now positioning for Stereo3D, hence the Quantel.

You are aware, of course, that Scratch is quite capable of handling 3D stereoscopic projects, aren't you? :wink5:

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

You are aware, of course, that Scratch is quite capable of handling 3D stereoscopic projects, aren't you? :wink5:

Indeed, but in this case, its more about the operator, as we were fortunate to land a very skilled Pablo artist and he prefers the Quantel S3D toolset.

We believe the operator. not our location, will matter more when it comes to attracting outside productions. He has 21 years experience in the LA, NY and London markets... but we aren't deluding ourselves here. Our Pablo will be doing mostly commercials and our own projects.

EDIT: You are correct, in that we attract a LOT of production work though.

We also have a rabid RED camera indie film base here... and they love Scratch but cant afford it. so we are building a suite for them to rent wholesale WITHOUT AN OPERATOR. Any qualified person can rent the suite. We have about 20 RED ONE's in this town and lots of these people want to "do it themselves". Much to many pro colorists chagrin, of course...

But for us, our long term goals is original content creation , not working on other people's stuff forever, in fact, 50% of our work now is internally generated.

 

[John Jonathan]

Indeed, but in this case, its more about the operator, as we were fortunate to land a very skilled Pablo artist and he prefers the Quantel S3D toolset.

We believe the operator. not our location, will matter more when it comes to attracting outside productions. He has 21 years experience in the LA, NY and London markets... but we aren't deluding ourselves here. Our Pablo will be doing mostly commercials and our own projects.

EDIT: You are correct, in that we attract a LOT of production work though.

We also have a rabid RED camera indie film base here... and they love Scratch but cant afford it. so we are building a suite for them to rent wholesale WITHOUT AN OPERATOR. Any qualified person can rent the suite. We have about 20 RED ONE's in this town and lots of these people want to "do it themselves". Much to many pro colorists chagrin, of course...

But for us, our long term goals is original content creation , not working on other people's stuff forever, in fact, 50% of our work now is internally generated.

I actually went thought all the states and looked through the rebates at one point, the most striking rebates where, Louisiana, New Mexico and Oklahoma, and their was a very curioius thing about them. Every single one of those states, the ones with the highest in rebates, had no high end post facility. Well I thought to myself, maybe someone should open one there? After doing some research I found out some people where, what they would do is take a flame, put it in an empty office suite and do the invoice through that "facility" to get the tax credit. So they where able to take advantage of the tax credit without being a real facility. So obviously I wasn't the first person to think about this, someone else had already tested it out. BUT why did they cheat it and not make a real facility? Well I guess they answer was their was no need and they didn't have too. Industries are built out of structure and need, usually out of the basic film capitalist structure which is commercials. If their is no high end commercial presence in those markets, it won't float. NYC and LA and CHICAGO too. Commercial centers.

OK, so why doesn't Harvey Weinstein or Michael Mann or Imagine Entertainment or some huge body open a post facility in those states to get a rebate, well, they are rich for a reason, they have looked into it for sure. But for them, they are looking at outsourcing to CHINA and INDIA, for post, they are thinking bigger, WAY BIGGER. And for the other companies. Its Canada all the way.
http://www.animationmagazine.net/article/10690

The rebates really only work for Production. The talent, shooting, writing, directing, grips and crew will be in the states and thats where I think the real rebate works. I can't for the life figure out why post always gets the shaft, but it does.

 

[M Most]

The rebates really only work for Production. The talent, shooting, writing, directing, grips and crew will be in the states and thats where I think the real rebate works. I can't for the life figure out why post always gets the shaft, but it does.

Primarily because regardless of where a picture is shot, the chances are reasonably high that the director, the producers, the editor, and just about anyone else who would be involved in post production live in Los Angeles or, on occasion, New York. The production talent pool is used to traveling for work, especially in locales like Europe, where being a "film nomad" is a rather common thing. But with post production, it requires both infrastructure and a very experienced talent base, and both of those things only really exist in abundance - and, by the way, at very competitive rates - in specific locales. One might think that visual effects is an exception, and they would be right. But visual effects as we currently know it (i.e., computer based visual effects) has only existed for the last 10 years or so on a wide scale. The fact is that when you're talking about studio owned pictures, I would guess that at least 80% of them are posted (and by that, I mean picture and sound editing, sound mixing and mastering, and digital intermediate color timing) in greater Los Angeles, about another 15% in New York or London, and the rest - well, that's basically what's available to anyone else. Not a good prospect for a business plan.

 

[Martin Tlaskal]

Hello Nick. It may APPEAR, that grading on Baselight is done directly off R3D files and FilmLight does an admirable job of hiding this complexity, but it still the same old SDK transcode. Only Scratch is capable in operating directly off R3D RAW files. It may be an insignificant difference in practical terms, but a difference nevertheless. Simple example. Say you have a Quicktime and R3D files on the same timeline and you do a dissolve between them. How can Baselight achieve a dissolve between two different codecs? In Baselight case, R3D first gets debayered and then both QT and D3D gets rendered to FilmLight's own uncompressed codec, instead of DPX on other systems and then the dissolve is created from that codec. In case of Scratch, as Lucas had already explained, no prior debayer needed. This question was verified with FilmLight's engineer during the BLT demo. Said that, I find it really interesting, that with RED Rocket™™ even Scratch uses the SDK for debayer...

Hi Jake,

This is not the case - whatever FilmLight person you spoke to was wrong or misunderstood the question. We have no need to transcode any media to some intermediate on-disk format to be able to handle it. Coming to your example, if you have a Quicktime and an R3D file dissolved together, then both are uncompressed/debayered using the appropriate SDK (R3DSDK for RED file) straight to uncompressed 16bit floating point in memory, downloaded to the GPU and then are composited together in the GPU. There is no write to disk at all, unless you have caching switched on, in which case the dissolved result would be read back from the GPU and written to the disk cache (uncompressed).

More generally, with the arrival of RedRocket, it became totally clear why RED insisted on all R3D access happening through the SDK - to minimise 3rd party code changes to handle it, thus encouraging acceptance. Makes sense. Really, R3D handling will very soon, if it hasn't already, become so completely generic, that it will no longer be a point of differentiation between systems.

Regards,

-Martin

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

More generally, with the arrival of RedRocket, it became totally clear why RED insisted on all R3D access happening through the SDK - to minimise 3rd party code changes to handle it, thus encouraging acceptance. Makes sense. Really, R3D handling will very soon, if it hasn't already, become so completely generic, that it will no longer be a point of differentiation between systems.

Regards,

-Martin

Well said Martin.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Like a 28,000 sq/ft facility for only $.55/sq foot and its only 9 blocks from DT

I would kill to pay 55 cents per sq. foot ... that is insane.

 

[John Jonathan]

Indeed, but in this case, its more about the operator, as we were fortunate to land a very skilled Pablo artist and he prefers the Quantel S3D toolset.

We believe the operator. not our location, will matter more when it comes to attracting outside productions. He has 21 years experience in the LA, NY and London markets... but we aren't deluding ourselves here. Our Pablo will be doing mostly commercials and our own projects.

That sounds pretty interesting, sounds like you guys are going for it. Who is the rock star Quantel Operator? His name might be over my head, I don't know many people who use Quantel anymore, but it would be cool to know, if ever I was on the west coast.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I don't know many people who use Quantel anymore, but it would be cool to know, if ever I was on the west coast.

http://www.quantel.com/list.php?a=Showcase&as=User_List

 

[Tim Whitcomb]

I would kill to pay 55 cents per sq. foot ... that is insane.

Just lucky zoning. Its a small 16 block industrial section of town, zoned IG1
so nothing but manufacturing can go in there... fortunately, in OREGON
film production is deemed manufacturing.

Just across the street from us on Hawthorne, its $1.00 to $1.50
and downtown is $2 to $2.50. (still much less than the Big Apple Im sure.

Mike Most is totally correct on why high end post will forever thrive in LA and NY. Location, location, location. We just happen to have an academy award winning director and several others who have movies in theaters living in Portland. and in fact, we are hoping to land some of them because they have expressed frustration of having to travel to LA for post.

But we built this mostly for ourselves and original content creation. Much more affordable to make films when you control costs like studios do.
While other stuff makes sense to outsource. Like labor. We are just a facility
with a very small services division.

 

[jake blackstone]

Hi Jake,

This is not the case - whatever FilmLight person you spoke to was wrong or misunderstood the question. We have no need to transcode any media to some intermediate on-disk format to be able to handle it. Coming to your example, if you have a Quicktime and an R3D file dissolved together, then both are uncompressed/debayered using the appropriate SDK (R3DSDK for RED file) straight to uncompressed 16bit floating point in memory, downloaded to the GPU and then are composited together in the GPU. There is no write to disk at all, unless you have caching switched on, in which case the dissolved result would be read back from the GPU and written to the disk cache (uncompressed).

More generally, with the arrival of RedRocket, it became totally clear why RED insisted on all R3D access happening through the SDK - to minimise 3rd party code changes to handle it, thus encouraging acceptance. Makes sense. Really, R3D handling will very soon, if it hasn't already, become so completely generic, that it will no longer be a point of differentiation between systems.

Regards,

-Martin

Hi Martin.
I afraid you missed the original point of this discussion. I had surmised earlier, that every grading solution uses some kind of intermediate codec, PRIOR to actual grading with the exception of Scratch.
I appreciate your explanation, but it only reinforces my original point

if you have a Quicktime and an R3D file dissolved together, then both are uncompressed/debayered using the appropriate SDK (R3DSDK for RED file) straight to uncompressed 16bit floating point in memory

In so many words, that is exactly what I had said. Writing to RAM or writing to cache is both writing PRIOR to the grade and dissolve.
As I said before, Baselight performs grading on R3D only from previously debayered and transcoded 16 bit uncompressed codec, as is Filmmaster, Pablo, Lustre, DaVinci do from from previously debayered and transcoded DPX. Only Scratch does it directly from RAW, unless it uses RR.