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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

4k/2K versions of DNxHD ?

Tom Lowe said:
I'm editing and viewing at 4K. and I prefer online edits.

1080p is yesterday's news, in my opinion.
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Actually, not to get technical but 1080P is today's news because most post facilities throughout the country are editing in 1080P or 720P timelines. Tom, you are on the cutting edge, and it's something that I admire in you. But if you were to poll all of these facilities, you'd only find a few that are editing in 4K. Now, two years from now, who knows. At that point, you may be able to laugh and say you've been doing that for years. :-)

It comes down to simple math really. Look at how much footage one can cram on a drive at 1080P DNxHD36. Look at how much realtime effects you get without rendering. For anyone crunching the numbers, that workflow makes fiscal sense right now. If they need to see a shot at full quality they can pop over to Redcine-X. When they need to color grade, they can link back to R3D. That's reality today.

The future is the that which we can never attain because it constantly moves forward at a speed at which we can never reach, and at a cost that has no relation to the present. Someday 4K will be overshadowed by 8K. 8K will be overshadowed by some new high dynamic range, truly organic super fantastic 3D imagery, etc. etc. The future is always ahead of us. Some choose to not even bother trying to catch up but rather stay a close distance, still able to see it unfold but not wrap their arms around it. You happen to be one of the ones that is able to keep up with it.

So I don't say your wrong, I only say that you are currently in the minority.
 
And just to make one more point on this, I'm currently working on a project that will be shown in 4K on a large screen (can't say what it is but it's a VERY cool project), but is being edited at 1080P ProRes. So, I do have a reference point to go on. :-)
 
The future is now, and it's 4K. Why do you think Jim is eating Canon and Sony and Panasonic and Panavision's lunch? By accident? Anyone shooting and finishing a feature at less than 4K right now is making a mistake, in my opinion. "Some day" is now. 1080p was an intermediate stop on the way to the 4K standard.

If you want to offline a 4K edit, that's fine. I prefer to online edit whenever possible.
 
Tom Lowe said:
The future is now, and it's 4K. Why do you think Jim is eating Canon and Sony and Panasonic and Panavision's lunch? By accident? Anyone shooting and finishing a feature at less than 4K right now is making a mistake, in my opinion. "Some day" is now. 1080p was an intermediate stop on the way to the 4K standard.
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I humbly suggest that you are in a rather lonely category.
Most people who care about quality enough to care about 4K also care about quality enough to use a proper finishing program, with the speed and wealth of tools it has to offer.

What do you think all of the current 4K movies were edited on? Avid.

They just used a finishing program to do the 4K bit.

Anyway, If 4K desktop finishing is "now"... where is my sub-$10K 4K monitor, where is the processing power to do it realtime, and where is the affordable software with proper finishing tools? Of course that day is coming soon... but it is not now. Soon though!

Tom Lowe said:
If you want to offline a 4K edit, that's fine. I prefer to online edit whenever possible.
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Most people just want the best, most responsive creative editing environment - and since the best creative editing environments do not work well at 4K currently, they give up the 4K part.

Why do you feel the need to do your entire edit at 4K (and sacrifice responsiveness, good editing tools, etc for this)?

BTW - we have done several trailer titles at 4K for the past few years. Guess how many we design at 4K? Zero. Actually we are only now moving to HD. Rendering gets in the way of creative action. So you leave the 4K bit out until the very end, unless you're on a supercomputer from the future (maybe a year or two we'll be there but not now) with software designed for it.

Again: 4K is not a good resolution to be creative in with desktop hardware because the rendering time gets in your way.

If you do everything at 1080p on a decent package that uses percentage values instead of pixel values (eg not anything Adobe :) then going up to 4K is not a big issue.

Finally - NLE programs - eg Premiere or Media Composer or FCP-X - are currently all MEDIOCRE packages to finish in. There interfaces are not designed for this, they are slow to render and most importantly, they don't have the specialized tools required. Vice versa: you wouldn't want to edit a feature in Smoke or Avid DS...

Personally, I am waiting for Premiere CS7 or Avid Media Composer 7, coupled with the next generation of CPUs and GPUS - for working desktop 4K editing (heck, make it 48fps 3D while you're at it :). Blackmagic Resolve is key as well. With some Nuke and After Effects, MAYBE I won't have to use a dedicated finishing app. But it's not quite there yet. My respectful 2c.

If I were you doing this project, I would:

1. Get something really creative and awesome looking in 1080p
2. Build a relationship with a post house in LA who is sympathetic to your cause (you'd be surprised how nice they can be)
3. Take 1080p master to post house / screen it in a theater with an audience
4. Tweak 1080p master - because once you've seen it on the big screen, you might decide to change things
5. Screen it in a theater again
6. If it looks good... go back and render it out at 4K in Premiere / After Effectse
7. get your 4K render to your friendly post house, who can give you some hours with a Quantel or something that can handle 4K realtime. Do final tweaks in the theatre there in a realtime creative environment.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
But what does absolutely blow in Avid is that when you use .R3D's you are debayering to 2K quality. Now that might be fine, except for when you want fake a camera move and zoom in. Now all of the extra Red resolution has gone to waste. This is very poor.
 
M Most said:
1. Very few people do any of that or have a need for it. In fact, I don't know of any editor who does, regardless of whether they're cutting television or features. And I know an awful lot of editors. What they want is fluidity.

2. Avid also has the DS line, which is resolution independent. And runs on Windows exclusively.

3. If you want to do what you're describing, Cineform is about the only current codec I can think of that can do that semi-gracefully.
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Mike, have your tried color grading on DS? From what I've seen of it, it's not a great system for grading. But I'd love to hear your opinion. Thanks.
 
Bruce Allen said:
Most people who care about quality enough to care about 4K also care about quality enough to use a proper finishing program, with the speed and wealth of tools it has to offer.
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I agree with everything Mike Most and Bruce say above. To me, it's a needless folly to do all your offline decision making at 4K. Compressed 1080 is fine (like Avid DNxHD or Apple ProRes 422 HQ) -- this is no different than using a one-light film workprint in the old days. You'll still be able to see focus issues and camera flaws on a great monitor in 1080HD.

Tom should bear in mind that even David Fincher spent months and months shooting Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 4K (and I guess 5K), then downrezzed everything for the offline. Only when each real was locked was the original material conformed, and then they went through a complete 4K workflow at Lightiron in LA. The current issue of Post magazine has a good story on it in great detail.

My suggestion is that you worry about the content and the flow of the material and the performances at this point. This early in the editing stage, I don't think it's worth worrying about 4K or 2K or any K. Worry about that when you're close to the finish line. Sure, there are devices that can edit 4K even in the offline, but the performance hit you take (and the money you'll spend) dealing with it, particularly in terms of storage and pipelines, will kill you. 2K is hard; 4K is really, really hard.

I think there's a lot of people getting fixed on certain issues (like the amount of K) and losing sight of the most important things that will register with critics, distributors, and the audience: content. A great movie shot in super 8 could conceivably make more money and get a bigger audience than a horrible movie shot in Imax.

Hire a post supervisor and have them go over your workflow now, and do a few trial runs. Talk to some post houses; get some rates. Nail down where you're going to go, and what your distributors are going to require in terms of delivery. All of these things are crucial factors that may drastically effect how you need to approach the final steps in the process.
 
So basically all of you think there is no need for 4K DNxHD? Seems like a good editing intermediate? Or is there something better?

CineForm does support 4K, but I was trying to explore all options, including DNxHD.
 
Well, I cannot edit 5.6K CR2 RAW files native in Premiere, so I have to use an intermediate, which will probably be CineForm RAW. Obviously, if DNxHD does not support 4K, that is a problem for me, and I cannot use it.
 
The one thing that might make all of this real is if Red decided to take further advantage of Avid's SDK and enable the Red Rocket within Avid because currently it does nothing except accelerate transcodes. If it could optimize the editing experience within Symphony or MC then that would be a breakthrough...and since AJA Kona 3G has 4K capture and playback, then in theory one could use this (Kona 3G maps their quad HD/SDI outs over 4 BNC connectors).

But of course as of today within Symphony you can only create a 1080P project, even though the Kona 3G card can support 2K and 4K capture and playback, and is supported in this release...this should be the next step in MC6, but hey I don't work there. And chances are great they don't want to erode their DS platform.

As it is, there's the ATI Radeon card for the displays. There's a slot for the HIIB card for the Nitris DX, a slot for the Red Rocket card, and room for an ATTO R680 for external storage. Maybe the Red Rocket takes the place of the DX card, which then frees up another slot within the Mac Pro.

If Red can release their projector 4K workflow might make some sense. It can't be a pro monitor solution right now as they're way too expensive. For me, I don't know where the advantage lies in seeing footage at 4K on a 20 or 30 inch monitor. For example, when I view my 5K footage in RCXPro on my Cinema Display (which is 2560 x 1440) I cannot discern a colour or detail difference in full resolution vs. 1/2. And the same can be said when the image is scaled down to 1080 for RT playback so I can see things on my external CRT.

I have most of the colour and detail I need working in 10-bit 444, 2 video track 1080P in real time to make my editorial decisions...but why not dream of more?

Realistically, until the Red Ray Pro and Red Projector comes out we are not going to see our films in anything greater than 1080 for the time being. I'm delivering my Psychopaths doc on an HDSR master to CBC (our national broadcaster) in 1080...I was also told by a packaging producer that every Doc Zone project they air is packaged at 145 MB/sec within Avid...then it gets sent up to the satellite, and if we're lucky our satellite or cable provider gives us a 1080 signal...so lots of compression happening. Which is why 5K acquisition is so critical.

Red has some convincing of broadcasters to make the hardware and bandwidth jump to 4K. And this is likely why Jim is cheering on Sony and Panasonic and Canon as they are the ones who have the ability to effect 4K change at a broadcast level, which is where most people are going to see 4K material.

The one thing I have been asking Red a lot about is when for Red Ray Pro...and how is that going to work. Will there be a way to play out 4K to master to the RRP, or do you write a sequence of R3D files to create a master? This is still an unknown.
 
Tom Lowe said:
Well, I cannot edit 5.6K CR2 RAW files native in Premiere, so I have to use an intermediate, which will probably be CineForm RAW. Obviously, if DNxHD does not support 4K, that is a problem for me, and I cannot use it.
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Have you tried installing the Camera Codec pack? (http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=26829) With this installed CR2 image sequences work natively in Vegas Pro 11. Haven't tried with Premiere Pro though. Seems to work across many Windows 7 apps, including the explorer and the default picture viewer. Worth a shot.
 
What I find is that many people today don't seem to see the value in an offline workflow. It's all about matching back to highest quality at some point. Best of both worlds.

FYI, Tree of Life was edited in SD.

Although the film was mostly shot on 35mm 4p, Roldan says that there were also elements of RED 4k, HD, SD Video, 65mm and even lo-res QuickTimes that they were working with. As a result of this huge amount of media, the film was cut in standard def, using 14:1 meridien codec. He also notes that it was a bit of a “juggling act” to run multiple systems seven days a week. “I am the type that likes dependability over ‘latest/greatest,’ so I had us running on a Unity with Mac OSX 10.4 clients and Avid MC 2.6. We rarely had any problems.”
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Jeremy Torrie said:
But of course as of today within Symphony you can only create a 1080P project, even though the Kona 3G card can support 2K and 4K capture and playback, and is supported in this release...this should be the next step in MC6, but hey I don't work there. And chances are great they don't want to erode their DS platform.
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IMHO, Symphony today is absurd. I can't understand why they don't just kill it or merge it into something else.
 
Well, there's very little left to kill, or is there?
Symphony only has the handful of extra color correction features and Universal Mastering (the latter only with Nitris DX attached). I offline on a Symphony, as I like source-based CC a lot for offline (matches takes and does not occupy an effect layer, so it leaves dupe detection active, for instance).

Basically, Symphony is MC plus just one and a half feature. Those sell for more than MC now...
But why kill it? Still a bit of extra revenue for them, I reckon. In this day and age, not unimportant.

I doubt much R&D will be spent implementing RedRocket for playback, though, since ever increasing CPU power is likely to make the Rocket pretty redundant soon.

I own a Rocket card, and use it with Symphony (sometimes), MetaFuze, and RedCine X.

I don't see much use for 4K during picture editing, nor for broadcast. Ever read this?
 
Tom Lowe said:
So basically all of you think there is no need for 4K DNxHD? Seems like a good editing intermediate? Or is there something better?
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For creative editing? What kind of drug have you taken that you base your entire editing workflow around the need to see a 4K version of your rough edit as you cut? That should not be your #1, #2 or even #3 priority.

Your priority should be: good creative cutting workflow.

Basing everything on 4K uber alles is like saying you want to choose the word processor to write your novel based on its ability to show you a 3D render of a photoreal book updating in real time as you write it. Sure, would be nice... but WTF, dude?

For finishing? Yes, would be nice. At the moment, the standard is uncompressed. Because the people who care about going to 4K usually have the budget for uncompressed. But would be very useful, I agree.

Tom, what stage is your edit in?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
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