CineForm posts updated Mac workflow

[Kaku Ito]

David,

I read the readme notes.

First I have 8 core MacPro which is faster than the minimum hardware requirements and the software is all updated.

I chose RGB 4:4:4 encoding in the compression option.
The clips is encoded with Cineform from REDCINE but I think I chose 4096 x 2048, maybe this is making things slow. I'm encoding with 4000 x 2048 in the back ground with fit width option now, so I will let you know how this goes. Do you think keeping the aspect ratio would make things easier? Like choosing 4000 x 2000 when we shoot 2:1?

FCP works better if I drop the cineform clip to the timeline and match the clip's format. However, what sequence setting do you recommend if I was working with 1080 project but want to use cineform 4k file to take advantage of having higher resolution for zooming in edit?

 

[David Taylor]

Kaku,

FCP will not even allow you to put a 4096 clip in the bin, but it will allow 4000 wide files. (BTW, QT does not have this problem).

When we convert 4K Dalsa (Raw) clips to CineForm RAW for use in FCP we trim them to 4000 wide but leave full vertical resolution at 2048. We do it this way for Raw source data because you cannot rescale Raw data. But because RedCine is doing a full demosaic when exporting to CineForm 444, you can rescale to 4000x2000, but...our recommendation would be to select 2048 as the max horizontal resolution for most exports from RedCine if going into FCP. If you need to keep some files at 4000 (or 4096) wide that's fine (After Effects for instance), but FCP doesn't really like images this big.

Also, if you use the Digital Cinema Display, FCP will always render (on playback) to 1920x1080 for display. This is why the playback framerate drops when using Digital Cinema Display. You can get around this by using the Preview window in FCP instead of Digital Cinema Display. The best performance will be if you select specifically 50% or 25% for preview size.

Regarding project settings, unfortunately FCP doesn't like clip settings that don't match the project settings, so FCP will always make you render if you put a 4K clip in a 1080p project.

Like most Red camera owners we hope Apple will upgrade their engine to better support spatial resolutions up to 4096.