4K Finishing Folly

[Bruce Allen]

I really don't understand this. A few months from now -- perhaps even now -- any high-end editing PC should be able to edit 4K REDCODE online, should it not?

I am doubtful. AFAIK, Red has never said that you could edit 4K REDCODE. They don't even have a QT wrapper for it announced yet. That's why they have REDCINE - you need to convert to a format that you CAN edit.

I remember when people were saying it's impossible or nuts to online 720p without a proxy... that was quickly shown to be simple as pie once people starting rocking HVX's and similar 720p cameras. Why wouldn't the same exact thing happen for 4K compressed? The Data rates are not that different. Either the REDCODE itself, or some other codec like Cineform Prospect 4K should be able to make 4K editing a reality for everyone.

The hard drive data rates are only part of the problem. Cineform is promising, as would be REDCODE if and when they make a QT codec, I agree. But at some point you're going to have to decompress fully in order to push the pixels to the graphics card, or to your dissolve or whatever. 720p is just DV x2.5. 4K is full HD x 4. Which is a lot.

Also, for one thing, the hardware might be able to do it, but the software needs to optimized to work with that hardware too. You can't just add more cores and expect linear scaling of performance.

Bruce

 

[Chris Kenny]

Desktop computers are more than four times as fast now as they were when people started editing 1080p on them....

That said, 4K online just isn't really necessary at the moment. If you don't have a screen which can display it anyway, why not just online at 1080p and conform the 4K later? In many cases it would probably be much later, since there's not much reason to do a 4K conform of an indie film unless it actually gets distribution. (It's probably not worth doing on your own dime even if you get into Sundance or something. They'll take an HDCAM tape, and if your movie is any good, that'll be enough for buyers to get interested.)

 

[Tom Lowe]

Desktop computers are more than four times as fast now as they were when people started editing 1080p on them....

That said, 4K online just isn't really necessary at the moment. If you don't have a screen which can display it anyway, why not just online at 1080p and conform the 4K later? In many cases it would probably be much later, since there's not much reason to do a 4K conform of an indie film unless it actually gets distribution. (It's probably not worth doing on your own dime even if you get into Sundance or something. They'll take an HDCAM tape, and if your movie is any good, that'll be enough for buyers to get interested.)

Not to be stubborn, but why bother with proxies and EDLs and conforms and all that, when you can just edit the native footage at 4K compressed? Does anyone really think the hardware will not be able to handle it? Computers are already blazing fast now, and will only get more powerful over the next year. I have no interest at all in offlining my Red footage if I do not absolutely have to. I like having everything self-contained and archived at the higest res possible in its finished form.

I believe the guys at Cineform when they say 4K will be a walk in the park on a top-end PC over the next 2 years. I also believe that the Red team will offer a great codec we can work with on superfast machines.

 

[Chris Kenny]

As others have pointed out, you don't want unnecessary slowdowns while editing; it screws up the flow of the thing. If Red can deliver something like the Cineform workflow, where you're editing lower resolution video extracted in real-time from the 4K files, and if your NLE will do real-time regardless of codec (as some people suspect the next version of FCP might), then yes, editing from the original files will be the way to go.

But if one or both of those things doesn't happen, editing 720p DVCPRO HD (or whatever) and conforming later is going to be much smoother at first. Sure, in five years editing 4K at full resolution in real-time will be easy and software will all support what it needs to support. But we're not quite there yet, and we probably won't be on the day the cameras start shipping.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm in agreement with Tom. I think the biggest folly with editing 4K is the lack of ways to display it full res without expensive projection systems. REDCODE RAW and even REDCODE RGB don't take up that much space. REDCODE RAW eats up way less disk space than uncompressed 480p 4:2:2 RGB, which lots of people edit in. Most current workstation level systems can handle 2 or more streams of 1080p/2K without stressing, why is it so hard to believe that 4K is that big of a stretch.

Mark my words, by the end of 2008, shooting, editing and finishing in 4K will be no big deal. Just as shooting, editing and finishing in 720p or 1080p is no big deal now when it was just a few years ago. The biggest stumbling block for 4K finish and delivery is going to be film out if needed. And that's not a big deal either, it just costs more than 2K film out. I don't know if it's going to get much cheaper either... Demand for film delivery is going to decline as digital projection increases.

 

[Chris Kenny]

Most current workstation level systems can handle 2 or more streams of 1080p/2K without stressing, why is it so hard to believe that 4K is that big of a stretch.

Like I said, it's mostly going to be a matter of software support. Cineform has already demonstrated the hardware is up to it. (Well, not working at full 4K resolution, but working directly from 4K files, which is basically the same thing at this point since almost nobody can display 4K material.)

 

[Tom Lowe]

Like I said, it's mostly going to be a matter of software support. Cineform has already demonstrated the hardware is up to it. (Well, not working at full 4K resolution, but working directly from 4K files, which is basically the same thing at this point since almost nobody can display 4K material.)

Yep. This conversation is giving me deja vu, because I remember these same things being said about 720p and 1080p. But computer technology just moves at an unassailable pace, and 4K wavelet compressed editing online is the next natural step.

 

[Bruce Allen]

I believe the guys at Cineform when they say 4K will be a walk in the park on a top-end PC over the next 2 years. I also believe that the Red team will offer a great codec we can work with on superfast machines.

Me too, but that's on a high-end machine in 2 years' time. Not now, not 6 months' time, but 2 years. That is a big difference.

Being even just 6 months ahead of your time... sucks. I remember shooting a music video on an FX1E before FCP or Avid could ingest HDV natively. That was a dumb idea. I think I was playing the song 4% faster than it should have been and that my post workflow was 50i -> 25p -> 4% timeline slowdown -> 24p. I thought I was so cutting edge and indie becaise I was going to get a similar product to what I had been doing in the beginning of 2004 with Varicams with Technocranes, but for 1/30th of the budget. Anyway, the process was horrible. If I had waited just a few months for the post side to be solidly there, I would have saved a ton of pain.

Obviously we will get to 4K soon. I mean, in 1996 I was using MediaStudio 2.5 on a 120mhz Pentium and remember that I'd have to cross fingers and defrag the SCSI drive in order to get it to play 384x288 @ 25fps without dropping frames.

All I am saying is that, here and now, 4K finishing is not there yet.

Bruce
www.boacinema.com

 

[Bruce Allen]

ADDENDUM:

By the way, the reason I am up writing this at 2:40 AM is because I am finishing opening titles for a film and #&#&@ After Effects keeps crashing when I try to render an effect on a stack of 10 3000x1800 layers with 3D & shadows. I need to do it at 3000 because I am panning across the layers.

This is on a dual 2.7 G5 with 4gb RAM or something - the second fastest Mac available for AE (until they release an Intel version and Intel versions of all of the plugins I use). I am having to farm out the damn layers one by one across the other 5 G5s.

Thank goodness I don't have to deliver 4K on this one or else I'd have to make the layers I am panning across some stupidly big size like 6000x3000 and then I'd be in even more of a world of pain than I am now.

Okay, I am going to end this happy bulletin from a post house somewhere in Santa Monica and wish you all a more pleasant night than the one I'm having.

Bruce
www.boacinema.com

 

[Jim Arthurs]

Thank goodness I don't have to deliver 4K on this one or else I'd have to make the layers I am panning across some stupidly big size like 6000x3000 and then I'd be in even more of a world of pain than I am now.
www.boacinema.com

That's my #232 good reason to post at 2K/1080... Doing fx at 4K nominal means often needing to do things at a LOT bigger resolution...environment maps, over rendering to prevent jaggies, etc. Stuff that we cringe at today doing 2K. It just isn't pratical YET to do that for a volume of FX shots posting 4K...

 

[Tom Lowe]

I mean, in 1996 I was using MediaStudio 2.5 on a 120mhz Pentium and remember that I'd have to cross fingers and defrag the SCSI drive in order to get it to play 384x288 @ 25fps without dropping frames.

Haha, the good old days.

Bruce I understand what you are saying about 4K uncompressed or with effects, but I think you are underestimating current computers and their ability to edit wavelet compressed 4K at reasonable data rates.

Maybe Graeme, Rob, or David Newman from Cineform will chime in. Even since David said Cineform was doing 4K on a high-end PC a few months ago, it seems that PC power has doubled lately, with no end in sight to the amazing leaps in processing power due to the whole multi-core trend.

Well I'm hoping so anyway.

 

[P Andersson]

that's the way that I understand it to, you should be able to go through and make a rough edit selecting the flow of the piece without color correction etc directly from the 4K wavelet compressed footage, without having to go throught redcine first

then i agree again, as soon as you start to do the effects and more precise moves, you might want to select that part and render it out to different size and add your multilayered stuff onto that

and perhaps we will see a NLE with the ability to handle different sizes in the same timeline so both the unrendered original raw wavelet footage and the sized and manipulated footage can just be exchanged piece by piece

 

[Tom Lowe]

So is it basically that Cineform Prospect HD works with the 4K native wavelet footage, but shows you a sort of proxy on your editing screen, 1080p or whatever? That would be fine, because none of us have monitors that can do 4K anyway. The Dell and Apple cinema widescreens can do 2K, I believe, so maybe that is a good proxy resolution.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

When you work in a wavelett codec you get 1/2^n resolutions for free.

So 4k also is 2k, 1k .5k etc.

So what the editor is able to do is to just show the editor the 1k version and only call/process the 1k version in the viewport until you hit render. And then it does all the math on the 4k resolution image. Essentially they're built in proxies.

I believe what was previously discussed was not real time 4k editing, just real time cc and editing on one of the lighter proxies.

 

[Chris Kenny]

So is it basically that Cineform Prospect HD works with the 4K native wavelet footage, but shows you a sort of proxy on your editing screen, 1080p or whatever?

Yes, exactly. Wavelet compression makes it fairly easy to extract a low resolution proxy without having to decompress and downscale the entire frame. It's not clear if Red could get this to work with just with a cleverly written QuickTime codec or whether it would require more extensive NLE support. If the latter, expect to wait awhile for NLE vendors to catch up.

 

[Tom Lowe]

Yes, exactly. Wavelet compression makes it fairly easy to extract a low resolution proxy without having to decompress and downscale the entire frame. It's not clear if Red could get this to work with just a cleverly written QuickTime codec or whether it would require more extensive NLE support. If the latter, expect to wait awhile for NLE vendors to catch up.

This is great. You could use a Dell 30" for your timeline 2K monitor, right? It does better than 2K resolution.

 

[david farland]

Thank you guys…you rock

How difficult/accurate is it with wavelet compression codecs to conform a low rez version of a high rez master back to that high rez master.....particularly after you’ve done some offline slicing/dicing of the low rez version?

I’m think this is what Rob/Stuart/Graeme have done very successfully with REDCINE!

I think it makes no sense to do ANY traditional offline works in anything other than in a REDCINE low rez offline version i.e. DV, DVCPRO.

Hopefully, RED’s exporting & importing via RPL of REDCINE’s downrezzed footage i.e. DV, DVCPRO will be clean enough when you come to reimport it back into REDCINE.
I don’t know how they do it, but I think as long as you keep to standard offline EDL/XML compliant edits, REDCINE will track those changes via RPL & their pixel mapping between REDCODE and QT/Other codecs.

This tracking in/out of the offline stage hopefully is above the quality bar of what REDCODE produces anyway, so as the RED team have been saying for ages….do it the RED way…use a lowrez REDCINE offline copy….don’t bust your arse offlining in 2K until your ready to online in a 2K/4K version and we’ll help you there with an excellent 2K/4K ‘offlined’ negative! Said like a true fanboy!

So only spend excessive amounts of cash on online computer tasks!

Just a point with future proofing however, i.e. outputing a 1080p master now and when you’re ready produce a 4K copy in the future
…..you’ll need to go back to your 1080p offlined master and do all your online secondary CC’s, compositing, etc again in 4K…Whohoo!

Obvious note: Those other in-camera formats are also required for monitoring and tape (non REDCINE) workflows.
Be interesting to know what the ‘compliance’ is/will be between in-camera outputs i.e. HD-SDI, RAW and REDCINE.

Cheers,
DF

 

[GlennChan]

How difficult/accurate is it with wavelet compression codecs to conform a low rez version of a high rez master back to that high rez master.....particularly after you’ve done some offline slicing/dicing of the low rez version?

Ideally and theoretically, the process would be frame accurate. In some current SDI-based and data based workflows, it is not. When you capture off SDI (i.e. a VTR), sometimes things will come in a frame or more off. (I'm not sure why.)

With data workflows, somethings the FCP Media Managler has weird little bugs that results in non-frame accurate results. But otherwise, if there are no bugs, the process should really be frame-accurate. XML (as implemented in Final Cut and Final Touch) has problems in that speed changes don't carry over (whereas speed changes do carry over with EDLs in other systems).

2- I'm not exactly sure what you mean by pixel mapping.

a- With EDLs, there are fields for source in+out, and project in+out. It's all timecode based and uses references to timecodes.

The EDLmax website has a good guide on how EDLs work. And yes, EDLs do work.

b- Or perhaps you are referring to creating offline cutting copies (as references for audio work, and online conforms). When doing an online conform, you can bring in the cutting copy, superimpose it over what you're conforming, and apply the subtract composite mode. With DV, the picture rarely 'lines up' correctly. (This is hard to explain unless you've done it yourself.)
But basically what's happening is that DV has extremely odd pixel aspect ratio + frame size. The pixel aspect ratio is some weird number. On top of that, not all of the frame is used for active picture- there are extra pixels padded on the sides. On top of THAT, there are different interpretations as to handling PAR and so forth. So when you try to line up the cutting copy on top of the HD footage you're conforming, the pixels don't exactly line up.

A solution to this annoyance (if it's really necessary) would likely be to send offline cutting copies on a HD format (square pixels, no padding).

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

This is great. You could use a Dell 30" for your timeline 2K monitor, right? It does better than 2K resolution.

Yep. I'm staring at dual 30" Dell monitors sitting in front of mey right now. 2K and 1920x1080 HD fit nicely in their own window on these displays with ample room around for all your other tools and widgets. It just reminds me how large 4K really is. These two monster displays together only comprise 1/2 of a 5K frame. :w00t:

 

[david farland]

What I’m suggesting here is not only is the export from REDCODE to a QT wrapped DV, DVCPRO codec…frame accurate, but pixel accurate as well.

Meaning when REDCINE maps a ‘macro block’ (if that the right phase…maybe ‘bunch of pixel’ is better) of REDCODE 4K pixels to a lower rez DV/DVCPRO pixel, REDCINE is somehow able to re-map back that DV/DVCPRO pixel to it’s respective ‘macro block’ of REDCODE 4K pixels.
Either that or they don’t have to, as they’re confident there will be no loss of pixel data when they export from REDCODE to QT’s DVCPRO (for example) and then re-import back to REDCODE.....provided only offline EDL/XML compliant tasks have been performed on the code in the interim.

DF