Has anyone figured out a really good workflow for RED and VFX in After Effects?

[Dustin Bowser]

At the Post House I work for, our typical workflow is to edit in Final Cut Studio 3 and Finish in Color, grading the R3D's. The VisFX shots are sent out from editorial to After Effects before they are brought back in to the final edit before everything goes to Color. I was wondering, are there any particular recommendations for how the footage should be sent out to After Effects and handled, to make it the easiest to work with, and then rejoin the rest of the edit the easiest way.

For instance, would it be better to just render out from Clipfinder DPX or Tiff sequences for VFX, and if so what codec, or should the raw R3D's just be used in the compositing in After Effects. Does anyone have any experience with R3D's vs any other format in terms of performance in After Effects when in a really dense comp.

I know that many higher end post houses tend to work with DPX or Tiff or whatever because that's what their pipelines are built around. Would there be any benefit to going that route at a smaller post place where editorial and finishing are all in house?

Ultimately, I'm just wondering, does anyone have a suggestions for a workflow that maintains the most flexibility while still working with footage that is manageable and won't blow up our computers or takes ages to work with.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

I have found the R3D workflow to be very good in after effects. I would say you will get the best results working with the R3D's. There are some instances when you may not want to use R3D's however, and this is for motion tracking. Becasue the r3d is such a high resolution, motion tracking is very slow. For this I'll render out a temporary file to track and then replace with the R3D.

 

[Kim Frank]

Also you'll want an Application like automatic duck that makes it easy to jump between FCP and AE with R3d without any information getting lost (if you don't allready have)
There are also some free soloutions that work fine but are not as enhanced as automatic duck wich is able to translate nearly all the informations.

 

[Shane Betts]

And what would you render out to? Once you do render out, do you then send that, say, ProRes file to Color for the grade or do you grade the original R3Ds and then render out at "online" resolution at the last stage? I've seen some banding and blocking grading DPXs in Color in comparison to grading straight off the R3Ds.

 

[BigLu]

I find it all to be a beast.

RAW in AE i dont like the color science its still noisy in the darks and for keying its a challenging workflow. But ive done it I just dont like it, I have to crush things to hid problem areas.

Stefan mentions that R3D in AE is very useful for tracking and I agree i think thats a great idea for tracking.

What are you doing in AE with your VFX?
Depending on your final delivery, what your pipeline budget allows and what kind of space you have to work with and computer power would dictate what may be most effective for you.
There is no 1 or 2 answer solution.

DPX out of RED Rushes with a flat curve may be one wonderful solution.
or depending on budget
ProRes 422 HQ out of RED Rushes may be another solution.
ie. what we did for REPO CHICK feature film by Alex Cox.

I am prepping for a TV show right now all Green screen and I have to test and re-test and ultimately try a small clip of everything to really dial in what will be the most useful for this project.

Dont mean to carry on but Test, and RE-Test until you get the results your willing to live with.

Hope that helps
best of luck
Luis

 

[Eren Ozkural]

If I'm keeping it simple and working end to end I work on R3D's. Otherwise it's been r3D->QT uncompressed 2K via REDCINE, work in AE, export as DPX's for whoever's conforming/grading.

 

[Alex Carr]

I actually go the opposite way youve mentioned, Offline in FCP then Online in AE and Export 2k Uncompressed or 1080 depending on Delivery to be graded in Color. Just use Camera RGB and RedLog or 709. I dont bother with the Red Settings in AE, just the AE Tools + flexibiliy of the RAW file are more than enough to get a decent Key / Roto.

There is a Waveform / Histogram plugin that you can reference to keep all your details without clipping. For compositing, I absolutely will take R3d over any other format. Its easier to playback and work with than Image Sequences or Uncompressed at 4k.

 

[Matt Weatherly]

Hey guys,
I am pretty new to working with DPX files so I was looking for some basic instruction on doing some green screen compositing in After Effects.

I rendered some 4K DPX files out of Monkey Extract and brought those into After Effects. I changed the color depth to 32 bpc. Now each DPX file represents 1 frame, correct? When I sequence those files onto my timeline (at 23.976) the resulting timeline is longer than the original clip. Why is this and how can I resolve it? Hopefully this is a simple question - I've been trying to find some basic guides for working with DPX in After Effects but I haven't come across anything yet.

Thanks!
Matt

 

[John Tissavary]

Hey guys,
I am pretty new to working with DPX files so I was looking for some basic instruction on doing some green screen compositing in After Effects.

I rendered some 4K DPX files out of Monkey Extract and brought those into After Effects. I changed the color depth to 32 bpc. Now each DPX file represents 1 frame, correct? When I sequence those files onto my timeline (at 23.976) the resulting timeline is longer than the original clip. Why is this and how can I resolve it? Hopefully this is a simple question - I've been trying to find some basic guides for working with DPX in After Effects but I haven't come across anything yet.

Thanks!
Matt

Yes, each image file is one frame of the movie. Kudos to you for using image file sequences - you'll find them to be a far better and more flexible format in VFX post production than monolithic container files like Quicktime.

But, DPX is not the best format to be using for compositing Red footage: It is a 10bit format, and redcode is 12bit.

So, you're dropping 2 bits of data unless you are encoding in a log colorspace (which is NOT good for compositing). You are losing valuable information in your images this way.

A far better choice would be openEXR 16bit float, or TIFF16. This way your image file has sufficient bit depth to maintain all 12bits of the r3d in linear colorspace.

There's something amiss if you have a longer sequence in DPX than r3d, as they do need to be identical.

I know absolutely nothing about Monkey Extract (I use Scratch), but I'm assuming there are a number of adjustable export parameters - make sure those are what they need to be.

Next, check your 'interpretation' settings in AE - is the footage being interpreted as the same framerate it was shot at and exported from Monkey Extract?

Hope this helps...

 

[Matt Weatherly]

Thank you John. It was the timecode base in the AE project settings.