8k Workflow - How?

[Brendan H. Banks]

Working on a longer project right now in premiere. Shot mixed res 5k/6k/7k with 1080p ProRes LT files in-camera. Imported everything into premiere and attached the proxy files from the camera using their new proxy workflow -- only had to link 1 file out of about 200 and it linked the rest on its own. Editing 1080 files and it'll swap me back to the R3D at the click of a button. Also fun, no matter how you export Premiere will ALWAYS pull from the full-res media for exporting and never use the proxy files. This is great in case you forget to swap, but kinda sucks if you want to quickly export a lo-res version quickly.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Most people are proposing alternate workflows that will require transcoding the 8K material to 4K for post, and those are doable for anybody using a reasonably fast machine for editing and color-correction. Note that the moment you do the transcodes, you lose the ability to make Raw adjustments. Because of that, people will have to be very careful to make sure the DP's choices for color temperature, exposure, and ISO are retained during the transcoding process. In truth, even when I do a project from Raw (I'm doing a 6K project right now), I don't dive into the Raw controls that often except to set a look for a single sequence. But it always helps to get those three details right. Note that sometimes, I have to deviate slightly from the DP's choice just to provide a little more range for correction, or to compensate for a mixed lighting situation.

 

[Phil Holland]

I've now done a couple shoots in 8K and assisted the post houses in "ramping up" a bit. The main culprit has indeed been storage. My last big shoot was about 80TB of 8K VV REDCODE RAW that led to a bunch of very long shots, this was a 4K finish and more or less what Marc described was done. Though there were a few shots worked on in 8K and then scaled down to 4K in the compositing bay.

The next was and 8K to 8K finish. The net result of that shoot was about four hours of material rendered out to 8K 16-bit DPX frames, which filled up a 64TB RAID nicely.
That same 4 hour project was about 575GB work of UHD 4K ProRes 422LT files for dailies.

For smaller projects I'm doing a bit of both native REDCODE and proxy workflow. Just depends. Earlier this year when I did Forged it was all native, but there truly wasn't too much footage to handle.

 

[Marc Wielage]

The next was and 8K to 8K finish. The net result of that shoot was about four hours of material rendered out to 8K 16-bit DPX frames, which filled up a 64TB RAID nicely. That same 4 hour project was about 575GB work of UHD 4K ProRes 422LT files for dailies.

The 575GB I can handle, no problem.

I just walked through a relatively-new LA post facility a few weeks ago that has 72 Petabytes of online storage, which is the biggest I know of in town. That's a big mofo lot of storage. I can only imagine how they handle backups and multiple users.

I'm very curious to see what most post houses would say if you walked in and said "I want an 8K end-to-end workflow on this project," and how this would affect the budget and schedule. All this stuff can be done -- it's just a question of practicality and affordability. The time crunch could wind up being a bigger issue than the cost; it took me the better part of 36 hours to conform, media manage, and back up a 90-minute 21TB 6K project about a week ago, and those were Thunderbolt 2 drives that never stopped running the entire time.

 

[PatrickFaith]

The 575GB I can handle, no problem.

I just walked through a relatively-new LA post facility a few weeks ago that has 72 Petabytes of online storage, which is the biggest I know of in town. That's a big mofo lot of storage. I can only imagine how they handle backups and multiple users.

I'm very curious to see what most post houses would say if you walked in and said "I want an 8K end-to-end workflow on this project," and how this would affect the budget and schedule. All this stuff can be done -- it's just a question of practicality and affordability. The time crunch could wind up being a bigger issue than the cost; it took me the better part of 36 hours to conform, media manage, and back up a 90-minute 21TB 6K project about a week ago, and those were Thunderbolt 2 drives that never stopped running the entire time.

I got the storage side down too, I don't think that's much of a problem for those that have cut over 10g networks and pretty much only move files around in a single post house. Moving files around between posts houses is a problem though, hardly anyone has 10g between cities and continents (the network speed to post in Singapore has been tough this week). Another thing is fps on compositing in 8k, I run between 1 to 3 seconds per frame when I composite with relighting - and I think I'm doing pretty good. I btw don't see a problem editing and stuff, no one has a 8k screen I work with so doing a 1/4 or 1/16 on the resolution is no problem. I'm at 34 megs per frame (stereo 8k top/bottom at 8 bit out of finishing/coloring), which I think is pretty good size. On openexr 8k though, even with dwb, the file sizes can get in the 200 meg per frame in heavy vfx. So the DI file size in vfx I think is also another big problem in a full 8k workflow for a film (i.e. everyone I know always goes to a DI so the raw r3d savings in compression on 8k is dropped fairly quickly in my process). I do think these problems are pretty generic for anyone doing 360 point clouds and vr. Main reason why I need 8k isn't for the resolution initially, but in 360 workflows I need to be able to do a final to "normal" flat screens so I have to frame out a 2k flat image from the spherical (4k spherical to 2k normal distribution is just way to blocky).

 

[Phil Holland]

The 575GB I can handle, no problem.

I just walked through a relatively-new LA post facility a few weeks ago that has 72 Petabytes of online storage, which is the biggest I know of in town. That's a big mofo lot of storage. I can only imagine how they handle backups and multiple users.

I'm very curious to see what most post houses would say if you walked in and said "I want an 8K end-to-end workflow on this project," and how this would affect the budget and schedule. All this stuff can be done -- it's just a question of practicality and affordability. The time crunch could wind up being a bigger issue than the cost; it took me the better part of 36 hours to conform, media manage, and back up a 90-minute 21TB 6K project about a week ago, and those were Thunderbolt 2 drives that never stopped running the entire time.

Well that's moderately what occurred, though it would be pointless in this case to work "end to end" in 8K for this particular shoot. Just client selects and whatever 2D tasks benefitted from 8K. I was the first to bring this particular lost house 5K, 6K, and now recently 8K material. They have certain given me eyebrows a few times, but at the end of the day everybody involved sees the sheer quality of what we've created.

I just backed up my own copy of the 80TB of footage from slow ass USB 3 transport drives. It took the whole week and I built the archive RAIDs on Monday. So there's some very real data considerations for projects of that size. At the same time this all got faster fairly recently. My next shoot I'll likely be exploring a proxy workflow due to edit and audio concerns. I'm going to document that process to show some of the smooth streets and some of the bumpy roads.

8K is going to be tricky for some, but much of "new" is there for the open minded willing to explore different workflows to make it work.

 

[Björn Benckert]

36 hours is most likely less than it took to develop the film for 90 minute project... Sure 8k does not happen in a flash. But for sure it got a lot then dealing with film. We did scans in 4k when DTF II was the standard that was slow. we did 3k scans when domino was splitting every frame into 16 pal frames, that was also slow. Moving 8k from disk to disk today in not slower than moving 6k material from one disk to the other. But sure reading 8k is more painful, and reading 8k dpx 16bit files is so slow so I rather skip the last 4 bits and transfer to 12 bits just to be able to drag the pen along the timeline. It works to a certain point and then, you start to stack some layers and start to wonder why you did not get shit done all morning. I find my self go for coffee number 5, and all I seen that morning is random beautiful frames in 8k....So be carefull what you are doing or it will simply not work. It feels like that first time working in 4k all over again. lol.

 

[Marc Wielage]

36 hours is most likely less than it took to develop the film for 90 minute project...

Naw, it's about 70 hours of material, 21TB give or take. Back in the day, they could develop film on multiple machines at high speed, so that much 35mm negative could "theoretically" be developed in less than a day. Scanning and syncing film dailies is what took more time. With this 5K Red project, I also made two backups simultaneously with Nicolai Waldman's MultiCopy utility, which is very useful (though I did not use the MD5 Checksum feature).

I'm dealing with a 5K project right now and doing just fine, but this is only going to be a 2K delivery. My point is that people are going to have to now worry about backing up the 8K and creating a 4K transcode for post and backing up that 4K transcode, and possibly also making a lower-res version for offline editing. And the latter also has to be backed up. It's a lot of different versions and a lot of time to do all those backups and copies, because drives and networks only go so fast.

And again, people constantly yell about the need to work from Raw files, when the reality is many, many, many major films are finished without using the Raw files. You do have to prep the files that are used correctly, but again, it's another process that requires thought and time and attention. And it does cost money.

I'd still like to see a cost breakdown from an LA post facility on how a 4K end-to-end project would stack up vs. an 8K project.

 

[Mike Nagel]

I don't care how "large films" usually are finished... Working of compressed RAW is the most efficient way period. But, once VFX comes into play u deviate from that anyways, and now we're exponentially cluttering up HDDs... enter EXR.

Or best case scenario: (if possible) use a finishing app like Mistika that incorporates grade and VFX all in one... work off RAW.

But what peeps now finally realize is the insane reality of 8K. And there will be diminishing returns for all that hassle. Unless we're dealing with very unusual screen sizes, there is a perceptional limit that trumps everything... 8K Dragon I would consider. For specific shots.

Although with RED u can by default deduct 1-2 K anyways which u need on top to get a somewhat better image. 3.4K Alexa trumps easily 3.4K RED. Both are bayer. No excuses.

With 8K the backups really start to pile up. .r3d format is genius though.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I don't care how "large films" usually are finished... Working of compressed RAW is the most efficient way period. But, once VFX comes into play u deviate from that anyways, and now we're exponentially cluttering up HDDs... enter EXR.

If you're only dealing with circled takes and trimmed footage that actually winds up in the final project, it's actually not that bad. 2 hours of 4K 10-bit DPX files are only 8TB, and that's not that hard to deal with; 16-bit would add 50% more space (12TB). One advantage of going with DPX is that it takes less computational power to decode, since no debayer is involved.

Many, many episodic network and cable TV series are done every single day from ProRes 444 files, and that's a workflow that doesn't cause too many hitches. You can make a lot of arguments pro and con Raw, but I think 8K needs a lot of special consideration. I'd be curious to see a detailed workflow explanation on the first major Hollywood feature film to shoot in this format.