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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 :)

Foundry STORM - we're online

Peter Majtan said:
Limiting the STORM to R3D is what makes it easier to develop and therefore the lower cost. Other format cameras have a plenty of good workflows to choose from, but there is a huge gap in the market for the RED workflow. As many have said - there are plenty of SW doing parts of the workflow, but there's no app covering the whole workflow from start to finish (as far as image is concern). I was also surprised when I have first heard the price before IBC, but this was rather a pleasant surprise. The idea is that at this price point there really is no excuse to not to have it for anyone owning RED or working with R3D media. The more people adopt one tool, the more it can be used to standardize the workflow, while keeping it flexible to adopt to anyone's specific needs...

In my honest opinion Storm will become the benchmark by which all other workflow tools will be judged...

:devil: Peter
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Well said. Very well said. I am all for Storm. I know the foundry will eventually make it the de facto software to contend with. How I do wish they the foundry will work on an app like Plural Eyes. Time saving technology.
 
Really excited about the possibility of a Foundry NLE. I'm beginning to fear that FCP is going to eventually go the way of shake. I don't really like the Avid approach, and Adobe stuff tends to be a bit bloated and unfocused.

The thing I love about Nuke, Maya, XSI, Houdini is that those products have a really well thought out and extensible framework. You are presented with a predictable core set of functionality, and they you can build and build and build on that. Granted, in some cases, it's like taking a 747 to a grocery store, but the cool thing about these products is that they are flexible enough to feel quick and nimble if that is what you need. The trick about apps in this style, is that you need to acquire deep understanding of how the work to do complex work. Definitely not a preset mindset. But master the framework and you can do it all. There's a reason that the almost every studio feature animation shop aside from PDI and Pixar have built their tools around Maya.

Speaking of which, there are some approaches in Maya that would translate really well to a NLE. There is a single viewport to interact with your content, but the menu sets change based on your task - modeling, animation, effects, etc. I could see a NLE benefiting from this concept. Sets for ingest, tagging, editorial, color, and conform, all tied into a common core.

Anyway, looking forward to it.
 
I'm excited for STORM and for what it will do for RED in facilitating easy post pipelines.

An important piece of information concerning STORM that should be included in this thread and as far as I know it has not yet been mentioned.
And this piece of info is killer for all of us scarlet hopefuls who cannot afford a rocket

Peter Majtan said:
...Storm is being optimized for use without RED Rocket as well ... but even without it Storm will work real-time - especially with 3K RAW data. As it is now the Storm is screaming fast on my MBP without RR - and that is with 4K RAW data. One of my favorite things to do during IBC was when people got amazed how fluid the Storm was even with tasks like range-limited color-correction on the Mac Pro with RR, I would pull out my MBP and show them the exact same clip with the exact same effects and blow them away even further with the performance on the MBP without RR, which was of course real-time...
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here
http://www.scarletuser.com/showpost.php?p=79012&postcount=49
 
As far as I can tell, current Mac Pros should be able to handle half-res decodes from 4K in real-time, with well-optimized software. SCRATCH was doing it with tricked out high-end PCs in the pre-Rocket days, and today's Mac Pros have to be faster than the boxes they had access to then.

Indeed, there are people over on the Creative Cow DaVinci forum reporting that on 12-core Mac Pros, Resolve will do "half-res good" playback of 4K footage in real-time. And Resolve is doing that with grades applied, and outputting via a Decklink card, which requires it to move all of those frames across the system bus at least twice (from RAM to the GPU, and then from the GPU to the Decklink). Straight playback to a screen directly connected to a GPU (a regular monitor hooked up via DVI or DisplayPort, that is) should be easier.

It seems like Red is working pretty closely with the STORM team, so I suspect they'll have the access they need to optimize performance effectively.
 
Ahem.. Some of us are Actually editing RED footage in FCP. And i think you need to be careful about telling these people how to run their business... I think they may have a bit more experience in that area than you are giving them credit for.
 
I think Storm is going to really send shivers down Scratch's spin
The foundry know what they are doing and at Storm's price point RED owners can finally have a solid R3D tool that doesn't cost a fortune, plus its runs on MAC :-)
 
Ian Laurie said:
Ahem.. Some of us are Actually editing RED footage in FCP. And i think you need to be careful about telling these people how to run their business... I think they may have a bit more experience in that area than you are giving them credit for.
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Yup. We're doing dailies and post on another indie feature that starts shooting today -- they're cutting in Final Cut, like the last four indie features we've been involved with over the last few months, and about 90% of the Red projects we come into contact with in general. The Social Network was cut from ProRes transcodes in Final Cut. I think it just might actually be a viable workflow.

I'm really not entirely sure why people are so obsessed with e.g. the fact that Media Composer has R3D support now. The native workflow through AMA is very new, and is not exactly bulletproof yet. Anyway, Media Composer's Rocket support at the moment only works for transcode/rendering, not playback. Guess what? As of a couple of days ago you have nearly the same capability cutting from QT proxies in Final Cut and then sending to Color (which is now Rocket-accellerated) for output -- except that with that approach, you get access to much more powerful color correction tools along the way.

But in my experience, most cutting of Red material on Avid is still being done via DNxHD transcodes, and I imagine people will continue to cut from ProRes in Final Cut for the time being as well. Working with a format optimized for editing just makes things run more smoothy, and relieves editors -- who are supposed to be creative talent, when you get right down to it, and often aren't Red workflow experts -- from having to worry about a lot of technical considerations

I think some people in this forum are a little too obsessed with the technical capabilities of NLEs, when in the real world, editors mostly cut on what they're comfortable with, rather than choosing an NLE based on what codecs it supports. The truth is, for projects requiring maximum image fidelity, there's usually an offline/online workflow anyway, and technical considerations like native R3D access aren't an issue with the NLE at all. They only come into play with the tools used for the online edit; tools like Resolve, SCRATCH, hopefully soon STORM. Meanwhile, for projects that don't have requirements quite as demanding, it's often fine to just finish from ProRes or DNxHD transcodes right from the NLE timeline, so native R3D access isn't really an issue there either.

STORM seems to be targeted very cleverly. It can re-conform from Final Cut, so it can be used as part of bringing a project online after the offline edit is completed. But it can also send metadata/timelines out to Final Cut, so it can be used as a tool for working with Red footage before it gets transcoded; for tagging/organizing footage on set, and for prepping footage for an offline edit. Those are precisely the two places where you really want native R3D support, and as far as I'm aware, STORM is the first tool seriously supporting both pre-offline and post-offline workflow tasks in a single software package.
 
Hi Richard, Jim Geduldick or Peter,

since Peter has demonstrated that its easy to cut, key and cc r3d's on Storm without a rocket then I would plan to complete edit and cc with storm then pay someone (or post house) with a rocket to do the debayer for final delivery. But in the editing process, often I want a lower res intermediate export of the entire project for viewing away from the edit environment. For example a 1280px width prores at reduced quality or quarter res debayer. Can storm handle that without a rocket?
 
Curran Giddens said:
I'm more interested in the conform capabilities of Storm than the actual editing.

You know what would be really useful is a feature like Automatic Duck / Clipfinder. I want to be able to take a FCP timeline edited in ProRes, QT proxies, or "Native" L&T and replace it with .R3D. Then send to Premiere or Avid EDL. That would be awesome!
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OMG that could be utterly fantastic!
 
If I'm understanding your requirement correctly, yes, you will be able to deliver intermediate exports from STORM without a Rocket.

Richard

J Davis said:
Hi Richard, Jim Geduldick or Peter,

since Peter has demonstrated that its easy to cut, key and cc r3d's on Storm without a rocket then I would plan to complete edit and cc with storm then pay someone (or post house) with a rocket to do the debayer for final delivery. But in the editing process, often I want a lower res intermediate export of the entire project for viewing away from the edit environment. For example a 1280px width prores at reduced quality or quarter res debayer. Can storm handle that without a rocket?
Click to expand...
 
One other question. If I want to check color with AJA express. Is that possible? Or is that red rocket only?
 
I have a suggestion. Regarding to video output from Storm, it would be nice if you can include monitor calibration scheme within Storm, then don't have to be concerned about getting the accelerated video out through video I/O cards. So GPU out to HDMI or DVI can be trusted. Video Display like TVLogic has DVI input with parameters with RGB gain and bias (one of the decent Mitsubishi LCD does, too) to control RGB balance through out the whole range, that makes it better than normal Eyeone calibration for serious grading.

Another information, TVLogic OLED 15 display is seriously good. So, say if you have Mac Book Pro connected to OLED 15, say you have RR with PCI express expansion chassis, you are set.
 
Not possible at the moment. We're thinking around AJA, Blackmagic, Rocket and GPU. We'll be interested in what monitoring solutions people feel are suitable in which situations, given the various price, performance, and implementation trade-offs.

Richard

J Davis said:
One other question. If I want to check color with AJA express. Is that possible? Or is that red rocket only?
Click to expand...
 
Are we looking at a Windows version before the free period finishes in new year or is it going to be a windowless period?
 
Tim Hole said:
Are we looking at a Windows version before the free period finishes in new year or is it going to be a windowless period?
Click to expand...
^what he said.
 
Richard Shackleton said:
Not possible at the moment. We're thinking around AJA, Blackmagic, Rocket and GPU. We'll be interested in what monitoring solutions people feel are suitable in which situations, given the various price, performance, and implementation trade-offs.

Richard
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The more I think about this the more I realize that having color correction tools for r3d while in the edit phase (as amazing as it is) is pointless unless we can monitor correctly.

Without correct monitoring, the entire timeline must be moved again to a system that can ie. in that situation STORM will not be a finishing tool.
I have a feeling that you do want STORM to be a finishing tool as well as edit.

All the pieces are there - especially as the source media is RAW. Considering many apple laptops are shipping without PCIe the AJA express solution looks good.
Looking forward to seeing what direction this turns to.
 
Hopeful qus...

Hopeful qus...

Hopeful questions...

1) Say we're shooting multiple cameras in mixed formats (eg, I get a lot of Red shoots with EX1/EX3/7D/5Ds as extra cameras) - can I get them into Storm easily and get them on the same timeline, and grade (with a more limited set of tools, obviously)??

2) There also seems to be mention on the website of using Storm to run automated backups of footage:- Please tell me these can use checksums? And that, again, it will talk with other camera footage??

Loving the idea, loving the look of the GUI, and loving having scopes. Very excited.

Tom Turley
---------------------
tom@filmtom.com
www.filmtom.com
 
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