1080p out - a slippery slope

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Didn't want to "degenerate" Jay's thread any further...

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39205

...so thought I'd start this conversation here.

I am all for options. Don't get me wrong. But I would rather see more effort put in to the look management loop becoming complete (i.e. exporting looks from Redalert) and the post workflow being simplified more.

I am not an editor, so I can't speak in detail on what exactly could be done to simplify the process, but "1080p out" could become dangerously convenient.

So convenient, that editors will again talk clients in to going this route in order to make the editor's lives more convenient.

Case in point is the Phantom. I did a Phantom shoot in Toronto where the director (bless him!) insisted we record the RAW data to hard drives - and not go directly to tape (which has become the norm in Toronto). The rental company had very little in the way of support for recording data only (i.e. Cinemags) and we were very close to being forced in to shooting to tape.

All of this because once editors found out that the camera could shoot to tape, they would insist DP's use this option. As a result the rental house had no motivation to invest in the gear required to support data recording. We would have had to ship Cinemags from New York - prohibitively expensive.

Like I have said - tail wagging the dog.

With RED, 1080p out eliminates the option for us to use in camera looks as metadata only. This is a HUGE advantage with the RED. As soon as a convenient 1080p option is available - mark my words - editors will insist on it. And DP's will be having to defend "not" using it for the sake of giving their clients the best looking images with the most flexibility in post. A worthy and noble cause that has the clients best interest at heart.

I appreciate these options and am not suggesting that RED shouldn't develop them. But I just hope that as much effort (if not more) will go in to making the post workflow as easy as possible and look management a complete system.

 

[David Rasberry]

Didn't want to "degenerate" Jay's thread any further...

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=39205

...so thought I'd start this conversation here.

I am all for options. Don't get me wrong. But I would rather see more effort put in to the look management loop becoming complete (i.e. exporting looks from Redalert) and the post workflow being simplified more.

I am not an editor, so I can't speak in detail on what exactly could be done to simplify the process, but "1080p out" could become dangerously convenient.

So convenient, that editors will again talk clients in to going this route in order to make the editor's lives more convenient.

Case in point is the Phantom. I did a Phantom shoot in Toronto where the director (bless him!) insisted we record the RAW data to hard drives - and not go directly to tape (which has become the norm in Toronto). The rental company had very little in the way of support for recording data only (i.e. Cinemags) and we were very close to being forced in to shooting to tape.

All of this because once editors found out that the camera could shoot to tape, they would insist DP's use this option. As a result the rental house had no motivation to invest in the gear required to support data recording. We would have had to ship Cinemags from New York - prohibitively expensive.

Like I have said - tail wagging the dog.

With RED, 1080p out eliminates the option for us to use in camera looks as metadata only. This is a HUGE advantage with the RED. As soon as a convenient 1080p option is available - mark my words - editors will insist on it. And DP's will be having to defend "not" using it for the sake of giving their clients the best looking images with the most flexibility in post. A worthy and noble cause that has the clients best interest at heart.

I appreciate these options and am not suggesting that RED shouldn't develop them. But I just hope that as much effort (if not more) will go in to making the post workflow as easy as possible and look management a complete system.

From the hints dropped so far, RED's 1080p scaled out may still record in a .r3d raw file format with full grading capabilities.

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

From the hints dropped so far, RED's 1080p scaled out may still record in a .r3d raw file format with full grading capabilities.

That is good news.

What I am worried about is the "we want a tape at the end of the day" requests, where they would have us record the 1080p out to a tape deck.

 

[Stuart English]

1080p

1080p

What you do with a 1080p 4:2:2 HD-SDI clean feed output is up to you ... it isn't the same as .R3D RAW

Maybe you can sell .R3D RAW to un-educated producers via a similar analogy that HDCAM isn't 35mm film.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Dylan,

My personal belief is that it's my job to inform, educate where possible, and produce content for my clients in the best fashion possible WHILE fitting into their existing workflows and pipelines when nessesary, or suggesting piplines or workflows that will increase the visual quality of the production, when possible.

If they say they want tape at the end of the day, then I have to show them what they will lose with such a choice. If they listen to what I have to say, and still want tape, then perhaps, for that client, the tape is the better way to go.

As DPs, shooters, etc. We are all about the image, the look, the quality. However the producer must be a "forest" person and not a "tree" person. If a RAW workflow increases his cost and/or time for the project, and this would force him to a Varicam instead, then perhaps a RED 1080p shoot might be an alternative.

I find that when I have some influence over the post, I can always get the client to go with the RAW workflow. When that does not work, I offer to develop the footage for them if that helps. When I am the last guy on the stage, and everything else has been set, my chances of influencing the post chain of the production are slim at best.

Sadly this last situation is all too common. The 1080p out allows me to keep that work instead of watching them go to a different camera / operator.

Just my opinion.

And you did not "degenerate" my thread.. I just needed specific answers, that's all. I got them!

Jay

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Note that - for the most part - I am speaking of editors. Not producers.

I find that producers (and directors) are mostly reasonable and get the fact there might be less image flexibility going one route over the other. And sometimes flexibility for their client is recognized as being a very important thing.

It is apathetic editors (not all editors - so don't gang up on me!) that are not willing to do the work to integrate a tapeless workflow.

For the most part - this attitude has disappeared. Namely because there hasn't been a convenient 1080p out option available. As a result "some" editors kicked and screamed their way in to learning how to deal with RED "footage".

It always made me shake my head. Because I thought of the many hours I spent on this forum learning how to use this fabulous new tool. And the many more hours testing it. Editors - back in the day - seemed unwilling to make even the smallest effort to integrate RED in to their workflows.

I am just concerned that without file based workflow simplification, a 1080p out might bring back the DP/editor arm wrestle arena.

 

[Elsie N]

But I just hope that as much effort (if not more) will go in to making the post workflow as easy as possible and look management a complete system.

Really like your "half-baked" approach:001_cool:

 

[Chris Parker]

here here dylan.....i am with you on this one.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

RED1 as a Swiss Army Knife camera

RED1 as a Swiss Army Knife camera

RED1 should finally have all possible recording options enabled like a sort of Swiss Army Knife digital cinema camera.

Jay suggested this option for Epic (that means TOMORROW) but RED1 could have it TODAY.

Have a look at the attachments:

 

[tj williams]

Stuart/Jay
Cool so now we know that the red Epic HDSDI output will give us the look up set in the camera they will get what they see baked in, in 1080P. Presuming the time base will the the TB/FPS of the project in the 1080 output? and certain aks mfgs will be making a mount to put another aftermarket HDsdi recording box on the side of my camera. Glad the Epic body is a bit lighter!!! It will be nice to send these instant familiar media to people who need it and still have a backup of even higher quality to hold for a few days while they get it all shipped backed up and maybe even edited.

I think we should show a bit more consideration for the kind of editors who work in Corp/news the work load and turn-around can be brutal. It is not so much a matter of changing workflows as it is a matter of possible losing of images, and additional time to work with the images. tape is really more reliable than hard drives when you are going through the airport! go ahead have TSA drop your drive on the floor??? I've had them drop a full box of HDCam tapes, of course we lost nothing????.....

RED Rocket™ as it goes down in price, and becomes faster than real time etc. will go a long way to selling our tapeless 4K work flow to these folks.

 

[Jay A. Kelley]

Note that - for the most part - I am speaking of editors. Not producers.

I find that producers (and directors) are mostly reasonable and get the fact there might be less image flexibility going one route over the other. And sometimes flexibility for their client is recognized as being a very important thing.

It is apathetic editors (not all editors - so don't gang up on me!) that are not willing to do the work to integrate a tapeless workflow.

For the most part - this attitude has disappeared. Namely because there hasn't been a convenient 1080p out option available. As a result "some" editors kicked and screamed their way in to learning how to deal with RED "footage".

It always made me shake my head. Because I thought of the many hours I spent on this forum learning how to use this fabulous new tool. And the many more hours testing it. Editors - back in the day - seemed unwilling to make even the smallest effort to integrate RED in to their workflows.

I am just concerned that without file based workflow simplification, a 1080p out might bring back the DP/editor arm wrestle arena.

Ahhhh then my arguement is off base here.. I have met a couple editors that you speak off.. Mainly the problem I have is that they under-bid the job, and they find out LATE in the game that they are dealing with RED files, and say "They did not tell me this, and I did not figure this time into my bid, if they want RED then it costs more."..

I've had a bit of luck dealing with these guys though..

Jay

 

[tj williams]

Hi ya Jay
Also good to consider that for most editors out there using P2 or XD etc... they have the deck sitting on their counter. They are putting the shots into the computer in real time or less and immediately editing without any need to render material to the time line. End of the day it did take them longer to edit RED and hey they charge by the hour.... I also believe in that!

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Stuart/Jay
Cool so now we know that the red Epic HDSDI output will give us the look up set in the camera they will get what they see baked in, in 1080P. Presuming the time base will the the TB/FPS of the project in the 1080 output? and certain aks mfgs will be making a mount to put another aftermarket HDsdi recording box on the side of my camera. Glad the Epic body is a bit lighter!!! It will be nice to send these instant familiar media to people who need it and still have a backup of even higher quality to hold for a few days while they get it all shipped backed up and maybe even edited.

I think we should show a bit more consideration for the kind of editors who work in Corp/news the work load and turn-around can be brutal. It is not so much a matter of changing workflows as it is a matter of possible losing of images, and additional time to work with the images. tape is really more reliable than hard drives when you are going through the airport! go ahead have TSA drop your drive on the floor??? I've had them drop a full box of HDCam tapes, of course we lost nothing????.....

RED Rocket™™ as it goes down in price, and becomes faster than real time etc. will go a long way to selling our tapeless 4K work flow to these folks.

Hi TJ
With regards to losing images - I don't buy your arguement.

I've never lost footage on a RED shoot. (knock on wood).

The ability to make multiple back ups with digital media solves this. Try that with tape. $$$

What if your original tapes go missing?

I did a job a couple of months back where they were paranoid about RED workflow. We ended up shooting F23 to an HDCAM SR deck. I had a DIT creating looks and we delivered tape that was "flat" and metadata to recreate my on set look. The director (also supervising VFX) insisted on 4:4:4. The producer and PM were flipping out, because the job was originally bid for RED. To get a similar workflow with similar flexibility and quality cost them ten fold what RED would have.

Having been so accustomed to having multiple copies of footage from digital shoots - the producer was terrified to take the original tapes with him on the plane. They asked about getting duplicate HDCAM sr's done - it was prohibitively expensive.

 

[David Battistella]

I just thought i's post this over here as well as it pertains to this discussion.

I am not sure I'd be so quick to blame the editors (demeaning) on this. The reality is it comes down to dollars and cents.

Your thread suggests that the editors you work with are,

1. not too smart
2. Lazy
3. Uninformed
4. Have way more power than anyone else in the process

Let's not ignore the fact that post on RED was the last, slowest, most overlooked part of the RED equation. That made it very hard for them to get out of the block and made RED WORKFLOW a VERY dirty word among PRODUCERS who thought it would cost them a lot more MONEY to shoot RED over HD.

Come on Dylan, you know how many NON UNION series are shot HD in Toronto and that a lot of those would NEVER consider shooting RED over HD because of the percieved workflow bottlenecks.

Also. Many places were still on AVID when there was no feasible AVID workflow.

Don't make the editors idiots here. They work as hard as any other crew member and that is just buck passing.

David



Quote:
Originally Posted by Stuart English
For the money you would spend on either one of those, why not just buy a RED Rocket™™™™?

And neither one of those addresses off-speed recording either.
Stuart.

I'm sure you read through the thread.

Red had made it as easy for anyone to use R3D with FCS as it is to use P2 or XDCAM tapeless workflows.

If a post house or news organization has Final Cut Pro or AVID then they should be as equipped to deal with RED footage as any other tapeless workflow.

RED, while it is priced in the range to compete with ENG and EFP is geared more toward cinema style than fast turn around.

As I stated, it's best to use the right tool for the right job and while in quick turnaround situations people might want to turn there RED into a camera that does what a tape based camera would do, i'd always rather see improvement in the RAW workflow.

So, you provide 1080p out the HD-SDI and, based on whatever the many different needs people are trying to service in this thread, you have provided them with a means to record to some format that the client or the post production house believes is the best for their situation (even if it is a baked in look) and is counter intuitive to the entire RED philosophy.

Quick turnaround, with proper planning, can be done with RED without any major problems or bottlenecks or TAPE, but people still want to please their clients who can't feel comfortable with tapeless workflow.

I don't understand this: if you shoot tape you still have to digitize it in REAL TIME, transcoding to REDrocket is actually a faster workflow, but because the post places do not want to educate themselves or bring themselves up to speed we are supposed to ask you to engineer the camera in a way that makes it "easier" to deal with this type of client???

HUH?

It all feels really backwards to me, whereas coming from a film making and post background, the RED workflow is the first one I have seen that makes complete sense.

A RED Rocket™™ lets you encode faster than real time, so I complete agree with your point.

As long as SONY is making VTRS, we will have to live with TAPE, at the very least a delivery format. Acquisition is another matter all together.

But if you put an uncompressed 1080P feed out the camera people will shoot entire films that are recorded to HDCAM SR and never go back to R3D. Even if it makes NO SENSE at all.

You can bet on that.

David
__________________
Peace

 

[Dylan Macleod CSC]

Hey David

No disrespect meant to "most" editors.

But there are many who have been "uninformed". There are some who are "lazy" - while maybe lazy is too strong a word - but unwilling to change their methods to accommodate a new workflow (i.e. RED/data).

As I have said - this has changed - now that clients are "demanding" RED many were forced to figure it out.

I have been in situations where I have been told I have to use a Panasonic camera and not a Sony! "Some" editors have WAAAAY too much power. Sad but true.

I am definitely NOT ignoring how RED post workflow was initially overlooked.

In fact that is at the crux of what I am saying!

PUT AS MUCH EFFORT (IF NOT MORE) IN TO MAKING POST WORKFLOW EASY AS YOU ARE PUTTING IN TO A CREATING A CLEAN 1080p OUT OF THE CAMERA.

You said it yourself David "perceived workflow bottlenecks" are forcing certain productions into shooting other camera formats. They are not "real" bottlenecks. So who is "perceiving them" to be bottlenecks? Producers? Why? Perhaps they are being misinformed by the minority of editors I am referring to.

I do not put you in this class David. You know your stuff and have always offered to share your ideas and offer solutions to perceived problems.

Nor am I a making a generalization about editors. I am just saying that "some" have created the wrong impression.

And this misinformation has implications on my choice of cameras on a given shoot.

 

[David Battistella]

Dylan,

I know that this was not aimed at me.

Here are a few reasons why I believe this is the state of things. I think that if we were comparing who is courted more we could say that RED's much more interested customers were DOP's because it starts with a Camera "system".

But half of that "system" is what to do with RAW, after it has been exposed and I would say that the community here spends a lot of time on the camera half of the system. For this reason, the "post" part of the system was "to be dealt with later".

In the early days of RED, i knew of some post houses who felt that the tools being offered to them were inferior. There was no documentation and people (like me who had an invested interest) really needed to be here constantly doing their homework and trying to educate others on how to use this stuff.

At it's core RED is a brilliant IMAGING SYSTEM that includes POST. It's not a "thanks-for-the shoot-here's-your-tape-at-the-end-of-the-day" camera. I am comfortable enough in many aspects of film making to embrace this system, but you are correct in deducing that many people are not. NOt everyone shares this enthusiasm.

Even as I type this, most of the best RED post solutions are third party. REDROCKET has enormous potential, but it's a pretty large investment for the owner operator types who don't really want anything to do with post or want the RED to work like an HD camera.

The RED SYSTEM has forced post and camera departments to come out of their respective corners and work together a bit more, but as you stated there are always going to be the folks who just want things to be easy (IE: tape is easy, film scan and dailies are easy, r3d files are a pain in the ass)

Part of the reason we are where we are at in this discussion is because of a lack of back end support at the start.

I think that RED has done a good job of playing "catch up" when it comes to workflow, but their focus on the camera and images (while completely important) remains the front of the ship.

A positive proactive approach?

Work to make REDROCKET work with EDITING systems in realtime, so that it can hand the on-the-fly transcoded images to FCP, PREMIERE, VEGAS, or whatever you are editing with.

I'd rather see 7000 red rocket cards sold to editors using it in a RED REAL TIME FCP system, than 150 post houses offering a dailies service. Maybe the card's cost could come down with a wider customer base.

If I could get a card like that into an FCP system for about a thousand bucks and it did all the heavy lifting of r3d decoding, I could probably guarantee you that you'd never have a single issue selling anyone on the RED SYSTEM.

To me, i'd rather see this before I see a new camera product.

David

 

[Stuart English]

Post Production.

Post Production.

In response to the "post catch up" comments, RED certainly didn't forget the post production issues RED ONE's introduction was about to raise.

We had witnessed the pains of other cameras that "only" tweaked a very few elements of industry accepted DCT compression and yet still had no post production support.

So RED changing the fundamental compression method of the codec, recording 12-bit RAW and ancillary metadata, dramatically increasing the recorded resolution, and using new media and file naming conventions was always likely to cause a major workflow dislocation for both NLE systems and editors.

The fact that post integration has gone as smoothly as it has is a credit to everyone involved, including RED engineering, our SDK technology partners and our customer base.

Can it be better? Of course, and we'll work hard on that issue just like any other.

 

[David Rasberry]

That is good news.

What I am worried about is the "we want a tape at the end of the day" requests, where they would have us record the 1080p out to a tape deck.

What you do with a 1080p 4:2:2 HD-SDI clean feed output is up to you ... it isn't the same as .R3D RAW

Maybe you can sell .R3D RAW to un-educated producers via a similar analogy that HDCAM isn't 35mm film.

The critical element for this is an HD-SDI output that is truly broadcast stable and conforms rigorously to standards. I can see this being a very useful option under some conditions. Then you can record directly to any common deliverable format your producer might request.

 

[David Battistella]

In response to the "post catch up" comments, RED certainly didn't forget the post production issues RED ONE's introduction was about to raise.

We had witnessed the pains of other cameras that "only" tweaked a very few elements of industry accepted DCT compression and yet still had no post production support.

So RED changing the fundamental compression method of the codec, recording 12-bit RAW and ancillary metadata, dramatically increasing the recorded resolution, and using new media and file naming conventions was always likely to cause a major workflow dislocation for both NLE systems and editors.

The fact that post integration has gone as smoothly as it has is a credit to everyone involved, including RED engineering, our SDK technology partners and our customer base.

Can it be better? Of course, and we'll work hard on that issue just like any other.

Stuart,

I take your point completely and you make very valid points, but RED CINE and RED ALERT were the only solutions in the early going.

I remember having to transcode footage with QT proxies and Apple Compressor, before tools like REDLINE, REDRUSHES, REDCINE-X, REDROCKET and the like came along.

CRIMSON, Monkey extract and Clipfinder have been excellent tools for getting at RED Data and they were all (and still are) necessary tools in the RED workflow.

REAL TIME R3D in third party apps (other than SCRATCH) would be a very welcome addition.

Let me make it very clear that no one (in other words I) is questioning the work of the team, we all know RED works hard, but let's not pretend it was all roses in the early going. That would be revisionist history.

I know you are working your asses off to make it as great as it can be, I count myself as one of those people who have been helping you get there, out there, with people who don't share our passion for RED's products.

David

 

[Andy Jarosz]

At some point you have to decide what you are doing. Are you making a camera, or changing the industry?

If you're making a camera, then just give a 1080p out and be done with it. Satisfy everyone.