Help a Beginner Out Please

[Andrew Rieger]

So I've been a member of this forum for a little while but I've never really had the opportunity to work with Red in post. I've op'd on a shoot or two with the Red One but never handled any of the footage in post (I'm mostly a lighting guy). One of my friends has brought me on board a shoot and is kinda asking me to take on the role of the DIT which I've never really done before. Needless to say, I don't want to screw up and ruin the footage when it comes time to offload the files.

We are going to be shooting on a new Dragon and he wants me to offload the cards and transcode the footage into DVCPRO HD 1080p since its a test shoot for a bigger production down the line. What would be the simplest and most time efficient way to do this. We are using a relatively new Macbook Pro to do this (no Rocket card). I assume that this can all be done in REDCINE X Pro but I've never worked with that program before so:

1. Do you have any tips, tricks, or essential info of any kind that I should know about prior to the shoot.

2. Are there any good sources of Red Epic Dragon .r3d files that I can play with so I can nail the process.

3. If you are feeling super generous, could you quickly run through the steps in redcine that I will need to go through. This is really simple, offload the cards, transcode into DVCPRO HD, save to external drive and offload the cards so they can be reused.

We shoot in two days and I have very limited time to get to know this process. Any help is appreciated (links to helpful tutorials are also appreciated).

 

[Zeb B]

Paging Phil

 

[Jonathan Petts]

Okay I am by no means a professional D.I.T (I am currently learning to be one) but this is my method for typically offload and transcoding and what we do for our Epic!

Please take note there are other more experienced people than me on this forum I'm just chiming in what I have been doing.

Speed
Okay so firstly make sure you have a USB 3 card reader this will maximise your offload speeds as you are on a Mac Book Pro I'm guessing you will have USB 3 on that Mac. In terms of hard drives what type do you have are they RAID drives or just normal USB 3 HDD ? Depending on your amount of cards and speed of shooting consider testing offloading a full card to see how long it takes onto you drive of choice. Or contact the rental house or person who you are renting the camera off and asking if you and the DoP could go over and do some tests.

Back-up
Which leads me onto my next point. Security for insurance and your safety make sure you do checksums or some sort of back-up verification don't just drop the files onto the drive. I use Shotput Pro 5 which copies over the footage (onto one or more drives) and creates a checksum for you to verify ALL the footage have been copied. (I don't know your level of understanding on this so sorry if you know this). This just makes things easy, then just simply open the footage in RED Cine-x and scrub through some clips to make sure everything is playing okay.


Transcode
So once you are copied I usually do my transcodes in Red Cine-X when I have to do them.

I don't work on massive budget projects so what I have ended up doing is doing the transcodes when I get back and doing them on my custom built machine which does them much faster as a lot of the sets I work on are running about in lots of different places, so I guess consider the shooting style and where you all be. I saw in your post you said Transcode > offload > Save to external drive > give back card.

I would do it like Back-up card > Second drive back-up (if not at the same time) > give back card > Transcode (this is what I have found easier).

What I would then suggest is once you have done a test copy of a full dragon card, see how long inside red cine-x it will take to transcode a whole card. You may find that you cannot transcode in between getting new cards so you might have to do them at lunch or at the end of the day, depending on the power of your mac.

So in terms of working with Red Cine-X here is a helpful tutorial from red in how to export -
http://www.red.com/learn/workflow/redcine-x-exporting

This is why I suggest you sit down with your DoP and create and export preset, he might want timecode over it, or a custom Look or what ever over these transcodes so talk with him and sit down in RED cine-x when you do these tests and fine tune it all. You can buy transcodes programs such as Silverstack (http://pomfort.com/silverstack/) that do a one stop shop for backing up and transcodes but I have not used this yet as it is quite pricey!

It's very simple to use, you can select to render an entire folder of clips to a certain preset with a certain look preset or any other requirements you need. I sometimes have a request from the DoP to do a slight grade on footage for the producers and directors to edit with and look through sometimes, so ask what your DoP may want.


I DONT HAVE TIME

Okay so what if you don't have time to test all these things?

Back-Ups

If you don't have any fancy quick way to copy over cards faster like some DIT's and just a normal Mac Book Pro and some Hard drives real depends on the speed of the hard drives you have, if you have an array of SSD drives or RAID drives you can get like 5-10 mins backup time but if you have 7,200 RPM USB3 drives look at around 30 mins possibly (this is just based off Epic footage). Make sure you will still check-sums though, I am aware of some free checksum solutions that use terminal and have been made by other REDUSERS but I would suggest getting ShotPut Pro 5 or some other program to verify back-ups. Make sure you have 3/4 drives. Three for back-ups and one for Transcodes possible or even two for transcodes and three for back-ups, depends on your budget.

Transcodes

Watch the video form RED above. Set-up your offload presets, find some stock dragon footage on the forums and run one clip through it, or rename the file (X) amount of times until you have 128GB worth of it and run that though RED Cine-X tonight and see how long it takes, boom! You have a time estimation you might be able to do it in-between cards.


I hope something in here can be of use to you! I do not work on massive set's this is just what I have found to work for me so far, If anyone else can chime in please tear my method apart! As If I can improve it I would love too! This might help you get by for the the shoot you have but if the project go through, certainly get it refined!

 

[Phil Holland]

Paging Phil

Heh. Okay.

I assume that this can all be done in REDCINE X Pro but I've never worked with that program before

Redcine-X Pro is pretty easy to navigate around, but if you haven't used it before at all. The general concept is that you are going to want to click the Export Tab near the bottom of the screen. You then want to hit the "+" button to create a new preset. You are looking for Quicktime and then in the video options you can select the DVCPRO HD you require. You'll need to choose an audio codec and then after you are done there you can specify your output resolution. Pretty simple and straight forward.

You can export single clips, timelines, or batches of clips to transcode to your format and resolution you desire.

Your clips will be ingested with the in camera Color Space and Gamma Curve applied (most Dragon shooters default use DRAGONcolor/REDgamma4 at the moment). If you need to do a "one light" correction or anything you can get it done right in Redcine-X Pro via the Looks panels on the right hand side.

The Macbook Pro isn't going to be the most ideal transcoding system, but GPU acceleration has essentially changed the game when it comes to transcoding, so it's faster than ever. If you need faster you need a bigger system and/or a Rocket-X.

Good luck!

 

[Andrew Rieger]

Thanks Phil and Jonathan, this info is exactly what I was looking for. Much appreciated. I'm still waiting to find out about the type of hard drives that I will backing the footage up to but I'm fairly confident that I have the transcoding process down once I have the files in Redcine X.

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Hopefully there is a specific reason for converting to DVCPro HD because not only is it less efficient type of compression, it doesn't use square pixels and achieve full HD resolution.

 

[Tom Van]

On the topic of transcoding, I transcoded some 5k files to ProRes and received an extra .mov file (identical aside from the filename)... does anyone know why?


Input...
A001_C001_06170B.R3D

Output...
A001_C001_06170B.mov
A001_C001_06170B_S000.mov

 

[Marc Wielage]

I bet somebody could write a very good book on the vast responsibilities of a D.I.T., and how much it's changed in the last 10 years (and how it's evolving into something else in the next 10 years).

 

[Timur Civan]

If I we're you, just from the transcoding point of view, I would see if you can get a pro res recorder, and transcode the pro res into dvcpro HD. There us no way you can transcode to dvcpro on the fly from 16bit Dragon fires without a red rocket x.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

On the topic of transcoding, I transcoded some 5k files to ProRes and received an extra .mov file (identical aside from the filename)... does anyone know why?


Input...
A001_C001_06170B.R3D

Output...
A001_C001_06170B.mov
A001_C001_06170B_S000.mov

You probably said "Export all clips on timeline" and you had multiple sub-clips of one shot. So if you use the cut tool and split a clip it'll export two clips. The S_000 is an option in the export settings to either overwrite or else rename. It's renaming the new clips as "S000" since there was already a clip of the same name. Another option is that you started an export to that folder and then exported again to the same folder. Instead of overwriting the existing clips you had it set to rename so it named it S000 if you rendered again you would get S001, S002 etc.