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how to edit 6k dragon for 4k delivery

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Pascal Payant

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Hi
I'm preparing to edit my feature film shot on the dragon in 6k
The delievery will be in 4k.
I will be using premiere CC for the editing
what is the best method, process to edit the film?
to edit in a 6k timeline and export 4k? this way i can stabilize some of the shot or it's better to edit right away in a 4k timeline to do reframing. then if i have a 6k shot to stabilize i do it in 6k and send it back to 4k?
it is the best approach?
i would love to hear your thoughts. thanks
 
there are essentially two ways to do this:

offline online, you create proxies to cut with and then relink to your 6k at the end of the edit. so you can still do your stabilizing/grading on 6k raw...but there is no reason to necessarily bog down your machine with the offline edit in 6k.

VS

avoid needing proxy media and cutting in 6k all the way through output...but much more intensive on your machine...so you need a rocket x, or faster storage, or a super computer...or all of the above depending on the duration of the timeline.. a way to sneak by is don't view at full quality, view at reduced quality and then go to full quality for coloring. you can avoid making proxy media but still not bog down the machine as bad this way... so two prevailing thoughts on these matters...

ps i have a rocket x available for rent via TCS and can rent it to you, or do your transcodes, whatever you need man
 
6k rwaw ead perfectly on premiere CC at half quality. that's not a problem. you still didn't say if i should edit on a 6k timeline or 4k :)
 
I always Edit in the native format, so in this case, 6K using 1/2 res playback. Then I reframe in the 6K timeline, mark the shot and do final reframing, stabilization, and export in Resolve. Using 6K in resolve and exporting the correct aspect ratio and resolution 4K in this case. Bring that back into Premiere in a 4K timeline, keeping it all in sync with all audio.
 
The proxy direction has never made sense to me since Adobe, Avid, Resolve, and FCPX added native R3d support, except when on a very old machine (4-5years). With GPU Debayering now added. No matter how old your machine, $600-$1500 for a graphics card seems a small price to pay for the time to transcode an entire feature to prores.

Pascal, do you have VFX in this film?
 
So obviously no one has had project file corruption & looooooong project openings as the project gets bigger within premier ?
 
Pascal, I think I saw this over in the shot on section. Looks good. If you need any color work or tech advice you can reach me on here, i check it daily.

Backup Backup Backup. Tripple Duplicates, Fast RAIDs and no problems beside the project file corruption once for me anyways. You can/can't really edit a feature on usb3 drives. Thats not really practical. Using a Thunderbolt, SAS, or Fibre Raid system is really the way to go when getting into the features realm. USB3 drives can be fast enough to work from if in a pinch or on the go, but a raid setup via thunderbolt (windows/mac) or Fiber/SAS (universal) is the way to go. I'm all thunderbolt raid with a 4Gb/s fiber RAID for backup and archival.

What are you working off of Mike?
 
I just did a 4k dragon shoot for a commercial the past couple days, and the avid editor had me transcode it all to prores despite the fact he works at a post house (and has access to a beefy system) AND its short form pieces. Offline online is really common still, and probably will be forever. It makes the editing process very fluid. 6k even at half res is still taxing on a machine when your doing long form projects with effects, layers, grades, etc. But if your dead set on doing it in 6k then make a 6k timeline and go for it... but I think you may discover as to why even big post houses still embrace offline online workflows by going that route..

I personally like resolve a lot for offline/online since you don't need to make extra media, but rather just change your timeline settings. I work in projects natively a lot myself, but to be honest it really can be taxing, whether its r3d or other formats. There is a reason why so many places prefer the offline online path, and it quickly makes sense once you run into issues at high res if your doing a lot to it. Working with one layer isn't so bad, but what if you need to turn on audio data and add effects and stuff like that? It will naturally bog down at that point, so I see lots of enthusiasm for both strategies...Best to test it out and if you run into issues you can always change strategies later..
 
Derek Morrison said:
The proxy direction has never made sense to me since Adobe, Avid, Resolve, and FCPX added native R3d support, except when on a very old machine (4-5years).
Click to expand...
You have to wonder why a major A-list director like David Fincher chose to edit Gone Girl with proxies for 8 months this year, given that it was a $60M film with major, heavy-duty technological support at every step of the post process.
 
If I'm remembering correctly they shot 6K (framed 5K) then went to 2K proxies for offline editorial in Premiere Pro with center extraction.

When I was on FCP7 I used the proxy method, of course back then no one was really outputting 4K masters, all 2K or 1080.

This is a quote from an article on the editorial for Gone Girl: "Speaking of the native R3D, what where your offline specs as far as timeline settings and resolution? Were you monitoring at larger than HD or scaling down for client monitor viewing?

Tyler Nelson: We didn’t cut in native R3D. We’ve always used a proxy and probably will until latency between the on-the-fly debayer is pretty much nothing."

I've never seen any lag issues with realtime debayering. And with a Rocket or Rocket-X on a good fast RAID, definitely not.

Article Link: http://tinyurl.com/nkpddj9

At the end of the article, it says they did 6K DPX renders to send to Light Iron for final color and finishing. Ian Vortovec was the DI on Gone Girl. I know that Light Iron does all their finishing on Quantel Pablo Rio beast machines.

Not to turn this into a Gone Girl editorial thread, I'll leave with one more thing. They did use GPU Debayer, but it sounds like they used it to render out on multiple machines instead of using it in real-time playback, except I guess for a VFX review? Seems a little convoluted IMO. I know I've kept the 2 Features I've worked on simple. Edit native, render VFX if needed, Online grade and finish in Resolve.

But all in all find the workflow that works best for you and your project each one is different in some aspect.
 
Derek Morrison said:
Tyler Nelson: We didn’t cut in native R3D. We’ve always used a proxy and probably will until latency between the on-the-fly debayer is pretty much nothing." I've never seen any lag issues with realtime debayering. And with a Rocket or Rocket-X on a good fast RAID, definitely not.
Click to expand...
Tyler's a sharp guy, and I suspect he knows about the Rocket and had good reasons not to use it. Bear in mind that the movie had 2200 visual effects.

I'm just saying that many, many major films still cut in proxies and than conform the camera files (and/or DPX files) for the final. There's many ways to get to the final, but it's not necessarily important to see super-high res uncompressed files when you're just cutting for performance and content.
 
Pretty much the way I've been working is for projects 10 minutes and under I edit via native .R3D. Anything over that length I utilize ProRes 422 HQ or LT proxies in 1080p and relink to native REDCODE .R3D for export and/or color then export.

This is mostly because I'll work on tweaking things and having the project in tiny and very fast to work files makes quick editing techniques happen.

Editors on larger productions like features or 1 hour dramas don't really need to mess around with full resolution .R3Ds as their primary concern is speed in cutting and loading various projects or sequences so the Director doesn't get up and go for a jog.

Many ways to work these days. Just up to you to choose the best workflow for the project.
 
Anything Dragon I used Red Cine-X to generate ProRes444 files at usually 5K or 4K then cut at 4K. If it's a 1080p project I'll generate ProRes444 at 3K and edit from there for reframing. If I need to re-connect or the project calls for it I'll jump back to the R3Ds. I edited a lot with the native R3D files for while in Premiere, my only hang up is when you have two or more tracks of R3D layers in Premiere the Rocket trys to decode all of them and it slows things down quite a bit. This is on a 2TB SSD RAID 0 set up.

I've been doing this with Dragon because the noise control offered in RedCine-X is really good, especially with D.E.B. I'm really hoping the Rocket-X gets D.E.B. support soon to churn out the R3D files quicker.

I feel like I trust the RedCine-X Debayer and processing of the R3D file much more than I do Premiere CC, though Premiere CC is great at pretty much everything else.

That's my process interesting to see how others do it.
 
Call me crazy. Or stupid. Or both...
I am editing a feature lengh documentary that I shot with an Epic MX and a Scarlet Dragon on Premiere CC.
all on a 4K timeline with the original R3D's (obviously backed up numerous times). And the computer I'm using is a Mac Mini from 2012. With USB3 drives.
My timeline is over 1 hour now, and it's still working fine. I have some dropped frames once in a while on playback at ¼ resolution, but nothing that throws you off.
is it ideal? Of course not. I wish I had all the bells and whistles of a top end system. But that goes to show you that a bare bones system can handle a lot of native R3d's...
 

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the theory is even with the additional encoding time and additional storage costs of proxy media, compared to the heroic supercomputer needed to cut natively at full res your saving yourself time AND money. you don't need to render as much, or wait for things to load, scrubbing is fluid, audio data can be displayed on the waveform level to help cut away breaths and umms and the list goes on, it just makes everything snappy to work in media that the program prefers, and its more than just an avid thing, even in CC, or fcp or whatever your using certain codecs are just more snappy to work with when your trying to work fast, 'way she goes... So it just makes a lot of sense, and to say "oh your just running a four year old machine" is not always a likely reason to do this, sure its one of the reasons...but my machine is brand new and when i don't have my rocket x hooked up performance is considerably worse unfortunately...to the point that even when I can't get people to budget for Rocket X I realize I am doing myself a disservice to not bring it for my own sanity...

anyway i was on low budget shoot and they didn't have enough cards to do check sums, and encoding without rocket x just sucked. I am totally against situations like this, I will never miss a card on my own, but I do rely on check sums, and I rely heavily on rocket x to get people out the door at wrap... I have decided from now on I just gotta bring my rocket x on all red jobs, whether its post, on set, doesn't matter. even if they won't pay for it, it just makes things easier on ME at the end of the day... i was told on this gig its just basic media management, sorry for the rate and NO TRANSCODES...but I'm not sure what happened but the editor needed transcodes to work fluidly, so I did my best to help him but wow without rocket x and even on half debayer this was a PIA to be blunt. I swear by this thing man, rocket x and offline is the way to go i think in general...i don't like waiting for stuff, neither do sets or post houses...it just makes sense to keep things speedy when the relative complexity of a relink is so easy these days on many apps. i once used to advocate for the native format approach, but boy is it tough to keep things going fast with that route, whether post or on set or what have you i think rockets and offline just help things along...its great to have choice and I'm glad native is an option, i try to use it as much as possible but if things go amiss never scoff at the chance to dumb down it to dnxhd36 and just relink later...whether its a small or a large project offline in dnxhd or prores just really can help at a certain point... and for longer form projects its darn tough to work even with reduced playback settings...

to test your system out by doing so isn't a bad thing, i think you should go for it...but i'd expect mid edit you may want to change paths if things get bogged down too much for your needs. even playback kind of sucks for me without rocket x, waiting for buffers in redcine... idk man just starts to get to me personally speaking, but maybe I'm too entrenched in the offline concept now to see things like i once did. avoiding relinks and extra media storage used to be great, but dnxhd36 is so small these days relative to the arri raw or r3d or sony raw, that its not that big a deal storage wise anyway. plus these other raw formats do not benefit from rocket x obviously, so they can be very taxing to work with on damn near any machine is the problem...proceed with low expectations if your edits get really in depth is all i'm advocating for, cheers!
 
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cool stuff, yea its def possible...but depending how extensive some parts of your stuff can be it can become a little laggy i'd imagine.. its tough to ever paint the world in black and white terms cuz certain effects, reverb for instance, are just PIAs...if you don't need reverb, multi cam, can reduce playback settings, stuff of that nature its possible to skirt by...but when your not only talking about r3d files but many kinds of raw processing intensive codecs sometimes offline and online are just the ways to go...maybe i opened this discussion up to wayy to much with the potentiality for additional codecs, but its the way the world works usually, mixed cameras, stuff like that. so i think its hard to necessarily just say offline isn't relative these days, in certain applications offline or online make sense... but the nice part is NLEs and coloring software have ways to accommodate both schools of thought, so everyone wins..

Daniel Stilling said:
Call me crazy. Or stupid. Or both...
I am editing a feature lengh documentary that I shot with an Epic MX and a Scarlet Dragon on Premiere CC.
all on a 4K timeline with the original R3D's (obviously backed up numerous times). And the computer I'm using is a Mac Mini from 2012. With USB3 drives.
My timeline is over 1 hour now, and it's still working fine. I have some dropped frames once in a while on playback at ¼ resolution, but nothing that throws you off.
is it ideal? Of course not. I wish I had all the bells and whistles of a top end system. But that goes to show you that a bare bones system can handle a lot of native R3d's...
Click to expand...
 
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Phil Holland said:
Pretty much the way I've been working is for projects 10 minutes and under I edit via native .R3D. Anything over that length I utilize ProRes 422 HQ or LT proxies in 1080p and relink to native REDCODE .R3D for export and/or color then export.
Click to expand...
That's a very good reason to use proxies. When you're drowning in 10TB, 20TB, 30TB or more of footage, having everything online and getting fast access to it is a major headache, especially in longform projects. I have great sympathy for people working in episodic TV, where at any one point they have at least 4 or 5 episodes going through the pipeline in various stages of completion.

Daniel Stilling said:
Call me crazy. Or stupid. Or both... I am editing a feature lengh documentary that I shot with an Epic MX and a Scarlet Dragon on Premiere CC. all on a 4K timeline with the original R3D's (obviously backed up numerous times).
Click to expand...
I once worked on a major feature documentary that had 420 hours of material, all which eventually got cut down to two hours. How much space would that take to have all the 4K R3D files online? How fast a pipeline would you need? How fast would the processors need to be? And how much money would a post system capable of handling all this cost?

Now, scale all that down to HD proxies. I bet you could do the whole thing for $10K, out the door. With backups. And you could still use the R3D for the final deliveries. As the Gone Girl post team has explained in many interviews, they chose to go with proxies even though they had a $60,000,000 feature, edited over 9 months with a crew of dozens of people, because it was much faster and more convenient to do so. And that was a 6K movie, done by very sophisticated people with a lot of post experience who had a fairly large budget to draw upon. The real savings was in time, since it was so much faster to use proxies than it would have been to use 6K for everything from start to finish.

Somebody, I think it will be possible to do 6K as an end-to-end workflow inexpensively and quickly. But by the time we can do that for $995, the world will have moved on to 18K and 24-bit files.
 
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