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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 :)

Building a post production workflow

DeaneThrussell

DeaneThrussell

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i've just moved in to a new office with machine room and five edit suite....lovely But i'm building a post workflow. i have a red camera on order like any one with half a brain..But also already have 3 avid which i love, also got a few G5 with final cut...so has any one used automatic duck and is this a way i could use my avids as a offline solution with some kind of proxy file...as i know loads of great freelance avid editors and also feel more comfortable sat on a avid with a client behind me than final cut

http://www.itsjuice.com
 
Well, first off we're going to need to know what you want to come out of the computer. Are you wanting 4k or just plain old 1080?

Basic workflow looks like this.

1. Shoot w/ Red Camera
2. Transcode Redcode Raw to something the Avid can manipulate (ie DNxHD)
3. Edit
4. Finnish to Tape, or
5. Export ALE or somekind of edl for 4k online. (ALE works for Scratch)
6. Output for Film or Digital file.

Should be no problem. We'll see how long it takes to transcode to DNxHD. But that's something an assistant can do. I'm sure eventually Avid will edit the Redcode natively or with proxies, but that'll have to wait till the camera actually gets out to a larger group of people.

Nice thing is if you're going to do an offline, then all you need is the Media Composer software. You don't need the Adrenaline w/ HD or Nitris box for an offline, you can use full screen playback on a secondary monitor for basic viewing. For that matter you could use Xpress for an offline, but you won't get as many DNxHD resolutions to play with. Now if you need 1080 output then you'll need a BOB or rental on another Media Composer.


Chris
 
Automatic Duck should work just fine with a RED workflow going from avid to fcp. We've done a lot of work with offlining on MCA in dnxhd and finishing uncompressed on FCP using automatic duck. It is by far the easiest and fastest way to go from avid to fcp. You simply export your timeline out of avid and import it into fcp with automatic duck. All your effects and transitions are there and then you relink to the higher quality media. That's the basic jist of it, there are more specifics involved, but it is very simple and easy to work with.

best regards,

jeremy
 
angeleye said:
5. Export ALE or somekind of edl for 4k online. (ALE works for Scratch)
Click to expand...

Just wanted to point out that an ALE-based workflow is almost exclusively for film, as ALE is meant to track Keycode.

For any RED-based project, an EDL is a better way to move timeline metadata from FCP/Avid -> SCRATCH.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.
www.assimilateinc.com
 
Hi ,

If you start with Avid MC , you can export your file in OMF format , then finish the work on a rental Autodesk Smoke/Lustre station (for best performance and quality) Or Avid DS . ALL editing work is preserved in one file . The only thing i ignore is how much $ it will cost when compared to scratch or other systems.

Regards .
 
I'm very curious about the workflow -by way of example we too have 3 Avid's but we have a feature that was shot S16, transferred to HD SR and now I am ready to online, but the color timing has been a big question, and upgrading to Adrenaline BOB with Xcel card is more expensive that buying a brand new Mac with FCP and AJA I/O to online in HD. We already have a very nice Sony BVM-D20Uwith HD-SDi for external monitoring, but I have not been able to glean much info online about how scary (or not) it would be to take your EDL from Avid to FCP. If I can be convinced, I'm ready to order the FCP system, grade in Color and save some cash by not going to compressed 10 bit HD via Avid. Would love to hear some feedback.

Also, are there any items I should be aware of as far as expectance of functionality from FCP? I have heard that rendering for just about everything is required, and obviously I realize this would be the case with Color before having to output. I was considering getting Speedgrade and/or Assimilate to handle the grading side of things, which would only up the cost above and beyond...

I should also point out that I will be mastering to HD SR as well, and by going the Avid route (as proposed) this would have very little advantage technically and econimically.
 
Torrie I worked in an environment briefly that had 3 Mac editing rooms with client monitors, networked storage, and AJA cards. It work pretty well for them and the clients didn't care what they were editing on. I know for a fact you don't have to render for almost everything. I am on a Mac Pro 3ghz machine 2 x 3 ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon with 2 gigs of Memory. Every effect that will work in realtime is in bold The question you need to ask yourself is what format will you be editing in? I assume this will be Pro Res 422 and if that is the case nobody here can tell you how difficult that is to edit as we haven't used it either. I do know that DVCPROHD cuts like butter in FCP. Since Apple made this codec for FCP I would assume the same.

As far as Color goes if you get the fastest Mac Pro with 4GB memory and the fastest Graphics card, a AJA ioHD, and Raided Storage I am sure you can get some realtime performance in 1080p24. All that will still be cheaper than any other professional color grading package. I am sure it would be mostly realtime in SD or 720p24. You have to realize most folks that will be editing won't have a $6000 Mac Pro so mileage will vary. Hope that helped.
 
HD SR is not 720P...it is Sony's codec and it is 4:4:4 10 bit 1080/24P so it is very good quality, so no I will not be in Pro Res and not in a compressed resolution like DCVPro (I can edit fine in Avid with that codec and output for that matter).

I'm sure there are performance improvements -all I care about is can I edit in the format as described and output this 100 minute feature back to HD SR via HD-SDI? I assume so, but want to be sure. BTW, there are really no effects to be concerned about -only cuts, and the audio is being done at another facility.

IoHD is not available for awhile yet anyway, and it would be the equivalent of the Avid Adrenaline HD solution, albeit at a much lesser cost.

Also I haven't found the Color manual online yet, and want to know what it renders out to -10 bit 4:4:4? 4:2:2?
 
Well what I am saying is you can edit in Pro Res 4:2:2 then go back to 10 bit 4:4:4 1080p24 when you export to Color. Color grade in 10 bit 1080p24. Color does export 4:4:4 10 bit in 1080p24. If you are going back to film then yeah this workflow will give you the highest quality, but if not I would say in Pro Res 4:2:2 the whole way. On the Movie "Next" they shot Viper 1080p 4:4:4 and used avidDNxHD codec to edit http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technique/casestudies/8063.html
The movie Crank was finished in 4:2:2 1080p. And visual it held up well on the big screen.
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/7118.html

Hope this helps.
 
My understanding/interpretation of the article was that it was edited and viewed in HD, not output to film with DNXcel codecs. I would find that quite incredible to believe, especially when they can go back to the original tape via timecode (with the exception of S/FX) and recapture at full resolution. I don't believe a studio would allow them to deal with sub-2K resolution for a film print. But I could be wrong.
 
Okay to clarify it was the movie Crank that was finished in 4:2:2
on a DS Nitris.

BRIAN BERDAN: There was a grey area. We knew we were going to do a lot of split screens. And with an HDCAM-shot show, we knew we were going to finish electronically at 4:2:2. I wanted to work in a way that eventually translated from offline to online. I even hate to use the word online, because it sounds so video. That meant going with the Avid DS Nitris or the Symphony Nitris.

Did you test the image quality, too?

Just to see how things looked on the big screen. This was shot on HDCAM SR, which has 4:4:4 color space. We were concerned that the DS was only at 4:2:2, and we were curious how much resolution loss that was. So we conformed in both color spaces and went out to film and saw very little difference between the two. That meant we could use the DS Nitris without trying one of the new Bluefish cards. That workflow isn’t seamless. You have to hand-conform a lot of things because it’s frame-based instead of time-code based. So we were lucky we were happy with the look of the 4:2:2! There’s a little color fringing on intense red lights. Otherwise, it looked great. Having set up that workflow and tested it, we felt confident that anything we did in the offline would show up in the end.
Click to expand...
 
4:2:2 reduces quality somewhat if (and really only if) you have very saturated colors, like red lights and such. Notice that with JPEGs, they don't subsample the chroma until you hit a certain quality. At very high bitrates, chroma subsampling is inferior to DCT compression. The first is visually noticeable, light amounts of the second is not.

2- Anyways, it could be a moot point. It's not that expensive to get a FCP system with a beefy RAID. If you do other production work, the RAID will come in handy because you have a lot of space to play with (instead of sitting around carefully deleting files to make space for stuff).

3- I remember FCP/Final Touch being used to color grade some HDCAM SR material so it does work. This was at Frameblender in Toronto.

4- As far as the offline/online process goes, EDLs do work in FCP. As with any conform process, export a copy of your offline cut (with TC burns) to check that material comes in frame accurate and correctly. You may need to slip everything into sync, because sometimes things will come in a frame off (this happens on high-end stuff too).
Subtract composite the offline reference or do a picture in picture to eyeball sync.

5-
Every effect that will work in realtime is in bold
Click to expand...
In my experience, FCP's real-time is way overhyped in its marketing materials (but then again, Apple's marketing team is good). Only a handful of effects are full frame rate and full resolution, and of those you have to make sure you don't touch certain parameters. In the color corrector, performance drops significantly if you touch the softening. But you can get work done on it fine, just don't listen to Apple's marketing. The bolded stuff will play back without rendering (at reduced res or frame rate if your system can't handle it).

You'll likely be grading in Color and it is decent. You can get work done on it. Though again, it is not real-time if you start doing things in the ColorFX room, or if you want more than one gaussian blur (I think one is the limit, and for some reason their blur looks weird/boxy). With the money you save, you can spend on spending more time on your project or getting a talented operator (which will do good things for your final output quality).
 
Don't forget Final Cut Pro is 8 bit only for any rendering in 4:4:4. Color is not though. But it does mean that even a disolve in a 10 bit RGB timeline gets truncated to 8 bit.

Disapointed Apple didn't sort that one out in FCP 6.

I've got my copy of Final Cut Studio 2, but since I'm in the middle of a job I need to wait a while to install it. Damn!
 
Installed here :-)

Problem I'm faced with at the moment is exporting 10bit clips from FCP as TGA sequences.. seem to get runcated as well.. as it seems to use QT. Which isn't reccomeded to go over 8bit with. :-/

And blackmagic codec has errors on import the orig movies into Shake at the moment :(
 
Nick Shaw said:
Don't forget Final Cut Pro is 8 bit only for any rendering in 4:4:4.
Click to expand...

This isn't strictly true. FCP is 8-bit in RGB mode. However, its "High-precision YUV" mode (which is 32-bit) is 4:4:4 (with a 4:4:4 codec, of course). YUV enables chroma sub-sampling, but it doesn't require it.
 
As far as I know, FCP doesn't actually ship with any codecs that are 4:4:4 and that let you use high-precisiion YUV mode. However, Graeme has mentioned REDCODE RGB should be able to do this.
 
Hey Chris: I'd like to think I'm an intelligent guy, but I'm not sure what you mean by the above. Can I work and edit and output in 10 bit 4:4:4 -but only in YUV colorspace, or is it higher, or am I a little foggy? And what about other codecs in order to achieve this? It's not supposed to be this convoluted -is it?
 
FCP can do YUV (well, technically YCbCr, but FCP calls it YUV in the interface) at color depths of 32 bits/channel, and all of Final Cut's own processing, including in YUV mode, is 4:4:4.

The catch is that in order to take advantage of this and actually end up with 4:4:4 data processed through Final Cut and stored back to disk at a deeper bit depth than 8 bits, you need a codec which is 4:4:4 and which presents YCbCr image data to Final Cut and which is itself better than 8-bit.

As far as I know, there presently is no such codec. However, based on what Graeme has said, it sounds like REDCODE RGB will be such a codec. We know it's 4:4:4, we know it's better-than 8-bits, and Graeme has mentioned (as in the post I linked to above) that it will be able to present itself as a YCbCr codec to Final Cut (by doing internal color space conversions).

As an added bonus, we know it's going to get RT support in an update to FCP 6 (though there's no word on exactly when that update will come), and it seems that you'll be able to mix REDCODE RAW and REDCODE RGB on the same timeline.

This should create a fairly compelling FCP workflow based around Red's codec, which I've tried to detail in more depth here and here. (Rob Lohman has said those posts are pretty much accurate, though everything is subject to change, etc.)
 
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