Carelton Holt
Well-known member
- Joined
- Nov 11, 2011
- Messages
- 144
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 0
- Location
- Kennesaw, GA
- Website
- www.gdifilms.com
Hey Soon to be RED Users,
We anxiously await delivery of our Scarlet, but until yesterday were nervous about our ability to handle 4K RAW footage in the edit bay. I am posting this "non-scientific" finding for anyone who has not worked in 4K and are nervous about how your current edit system will deal with 4K RAW footage. We have been shooting on Sony EX1, EX3 and Canon 5d Mark II for about two years and were concerned about our PC based edit system not being able to handle 4K footage. RED User Gunleik Groven was kind enough to post up several short 4K RAW clips so we could put our system through some typical tasks using the RAW footage.
Editing:
We are working on a PC based machine using the latest version of Adobe CS5.5 Creative Suite with a Quadro 4000 GPU. (I will post system specs below for comparative purposes) We imported six clips, all about 5 seconds apiece. to Initially the footage dragged heavily on the timeline, but reducing the playback resolution to 1/4 or 1/2 immediately remedied the issue. The footage played flawlessly and even aggressive scrubbing was perfectly smooth. We left the pause resolution at full so we would be able to see the clip at full resolution at any individual frame.
Effects:
We then opened our favorite color tool Magic Bullit Looks and started to have some real fun. We layered on as many as 10 filters on several of the clips including lens flares, diffusion, vignettes, exposure, white balance, gradients... you name it! And even with these filters applied, the footage ran perfectly at 1/4 playback resolution and acceptable at 1/2 playback resolution. And at any point on the timeline we paused we were able to view the frame in full resolution... pretty incredible.
For those of us who were aquiring on Sony EX1s or Canon 5D IIs, you will just be AMAZED at what you are able to do in post!!! Presets and filters that completely blew up footage in the past looked awesome on the 4K RAW footage. In the past, we have almost never been able to apply ANY of the Magic Bullit pre-sets due to the degredation of the footage... not that we use pre-sets, but we often commented that the presets were overdone and not really useable at all... even as a jumping off point (that is until we get our hands on the Scarlet!)
Rendering:
We put filters on all six clips and went to render out our test 30 second sequence. Whether rendering out to 4K r3d, Cineform 4K 444 RGB, Cineform 1080P 422, H2.64 or even flv, our 30 second sequence took roughly 5 minutes, give or take. Past 1080P renders to Cineform 444 would probably have taken just over a minute, so we are definitely going to have to allow a bit more time for rendering, BUT what we saw on the timeline was definitely how it came out in the final render.
Summary:
I hope this helps put a few minds at ease or helps push someone over the edge on their Scarlet purchasing decision. We are all going to have to make some additional expenditures beyond the camera purchases. The file sizes are definitely a little intimidating, but hard drives are cheap now days. I for one am not going to have any trouble passing along a small "storage" surcharge on many of my commercial projects, especially when the clients gets a look at the finished project!
Our system specs are below. It is a pretty robust PC, but certainly nothing extreme. We paid around $4500 complete.
Cheers and good shooting,
Carelton
System Specs:
Intel Core i7 970, 3.2GHz (Six Core) 12000K Coolermaster GeminII S, 5 Copper Heat Pipes, Extra Quiet CPU fan Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R X58, DDR3, SATA3, SLI & X Fire, GB LAN, USB 3.0,iEEE 24GB (6x4GB) PC3 10600 DDR3 1333 Triple Channel
nVidia Quadro 4000
Operating System Drive(s)
WD Caviar Black 1 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
WD Caviar Black 1 TB Internal hard drive - SATA- 7200 rpm
RAID0 (OS, Software, Scratch Drive, and swap space)
Data Drive(s)
WD Caviar Green 2 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
WD Caviar Green 2 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
RAID0
LG Blu-ray 10X Recorder,16x LightScribe DVD Recorder SATA combo drive Realtek HD digital audio (onboard) Ethernet network adapter (onboard) Cooler Master CM 690 II black, front USB & eSATA Antec Quattro 850w Extra Quiet ATX Power Supply SLI & X-fire ready Microsoft Windows 7 Pro 64bit DVD
We anxiously await delivery of our Scarlet, but until yesterday were nervous about our ability to handle 4K RAW footage in the edit bay. I am posting this "non-scientific" finding for anyone who has not worked in 4K and are nervous about how your current edit system will deal with 4K RAW footage. We have been shooting on Sony EX1, EX3 and Canon 5d Mark II for about two years and were concerned about our PC based edit system not being able to handle 4K footage. RED User Gunleik Groven was kind enough to post up several short 4K RAW clips so we could put our system through some typical tasks using the RAW footage.
Editing:
We are working on a PC based machine using the latest version of Adobe CS5.5 Creative Suite with a Quadro 4000 GPU. (I will post system specs below for comparative purposes) We imported six clips, all about 5 seconds apiece. to Initially the footage dragged heavily on the timeline, but reducing the playback resolution to 1/4 or 1/2 immediately remedied the issue. The footage played flawlessly and even aggressive scrubbing was perfectly smooth. We left the pause resolution at full so we would be able to see the clip at full resolution at any individual frame.
Effects:
We then opened our favorite color tool Magic Bullit Looks and started to have some real fun. We layered on as many as 10 filters on several of the clips including lens flares, diffusion, vignettes, exposure, white balance, gradients... you name it! And even with these filters applied, the footage ran perfectly at 1/4 playback resolution and acceptable at 1/2 playback resolution. And at any point on the timeline we paused we were able to view the frame in full resolution... pretty incredible.
For those of us who were aquiring on Sony EX1s or Canon 5D IIs, you will just be AMAZED at what you are able to do in post!!! Presets and filters that completely blew up footage in the past looked awesome on the 4K RAW footage. In the past, we have almost never been able to apply ANY of the Magic Bullit pre-sets due to the degredation of the footage... not that we use pre-sets, but we often commented that the presets were overdone and not really useable at all... even as a jumping off point (that is until we get our hands on the Scarlet!)
Rendering:
We put filters on all six clips and went to render out our test 30 second sequence. Whether rendering out to 4K r3d, Cineform 4K 444 RGB, Cineform 1080P 422, H2.64 or even flv, our 30 second sequence took roughly 5 minutes, give or take. Past 1080P renders to Cineform 444 would probably have taken just over a minute, so we are definitely going to have to allow a bit more time for rendering, BUT what we saw on the timeline was definitely how it came out in the final render.
Summary:
I hope this helps put a few minds at ease or helps push someone over the edge on their Scarlet purchasing decision. We are all going to have to make some additional expenditures beyond the camera purchases. The file sizes are definitely a little intimidating, but hard drives are cheap now days. I for one am not going to have any trouble passing along a small "storage" surcharge on many of my commercial projects, especially when the clients gets a look at the finished project!
Our system specs are below. It is a pretty robust PC, but certainly nothing extreme. We paid around $4500 complete.
Cheers and good shooting,
Carelton
System Specs:
Intel Core i7 970, 3.2GHz (Six Core) 12000K Coolermaster GeminII S, 5 Copper Heat Pipes, Extra Quiet CPU fan Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R X58, DDR3, SATA3, SLI & X Fire, GB LAN, USB 3.0,iEEE 24GB (6x4GB) PC3 10600 DDR3 1333 Triple Channel
nVidia Quadro 4000
Operating System Drive(s)
WD Caviar Black 1 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
WD Caviar Black 1 TB Internal hard drive - SATA- 7200 rpm
RAID0 (OS, Software, Scratch Drive, and swap space)
Data Drive(s)
WD Caviar Green 2 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
WD Caviar Green 2 TB Internal hard drive - SATA - 7200 rpm
RAID0
LG Blu-ray 10X Recorder,16x LightScribe DVD Recorder SATA combo drive Realtek HD digital audio (onboard) Ethernet network adapter (onboard) Cooler Master CM 690 II black, front USB & eSATA Antec Quattro 850w Extra Quiet ATX Power Supply SLI & X-fire ready Microsoft Windows 7 Pro 64bit DVD
