Black Screen? Big Time Newbie

[Jon Hedley]

Hi I've just gotten my first footage from the RED (4K + 23.98fps) and am having trouble viewing it. The footage appears black although in Log and Transfer it seems like I have all of the appropriate metadata and T/C info.
I'm using a quad 3GHZ Mac Pro with 10.5.5, QT 7.5.5, FCP 6.0.5, and version 1 of the RED FCP studio 2 Installer. It seems I've followed all the directions from the "Using RED Media with FCP" whitepaper correctly. Any ideas? The footage was brought to me on a hard drive after the shoot. On set I'm assuming everything was offloaded to a laptop and external hard drive and then copied over. As I was not on set I assume that it was checked and everything was A- OK so I believe I've probably missed a very simple step in my post setup. It appears that the files I have are the full contents of the card and FCP will bring the footage in but it's black. Could this possibly be the result of the camera being newer than build 16?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

 

[Uli Plank]

Try to open it in REDAlert and set the params to "Default". Do you get an image? Then write new QuickTimes.

 

[Jon Hedley]

Yay!!!

Yay!!!

Thank you! I can now see the footage. I've noticed when I set RED Alert back Reset Look to Metadata or Grade the R G B values drop down to zero. Does this mean that they've accidentally "graded" the footage to black on set? Additionally when I'm in the Log and Transfer window if I set the grading preferences to anything but native I get the image. My plan was to use Pro Res HQ should I go back into REDALERT and recreate the quicktime proxies and then follow normally workflows (ie set it back to native and transfer footage in?) Any experienced advice on how to proceed would be much appreciated. Also if anyone has any tips on how things went wonky on set that would also be fantastic. I anticipate many more RED projects in the near future.

Thank you again for your help!

 

[Uli Plank]

This is probably no mistake in settings during shooting, but a bug introduced recently. Haven't see it from my own footage (yet?), but from clients. No idea what's up, but no big deal either.
If you want to stay ProRes, just do a reasonable first-light in RA, save it as a preset and use it on L&T for the conversion. Attention: curves are not respected here.
Since ProRes is 10 bit, you'll still have some room to move for color grading. This is an OK workflow for electronic media like Blu-Ray.

For a film-out you should go native.

 

[Jon Hedley]

That worked well. Thank you again. Your time and expertise is much appreciated.