how to edit 6k dragon for 4k delivery

[Daniel Stilling]

Now, I understand these different kinds of pipelines. Drawing from my own experience in posting this Doc. feature, I don't see what kind of time I would have saved by going proxy. Au the contrary, I see spending a ton of time making proxies out of the 100's of hours of footage, and then later fixing all the different issues that might pop up when relinking the original files.
Right now, I don't wait on the computer for anything. What kind of time would I save going proxy?

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?

/QUOTE]

That's kinda of what I'm doing right now. I have 5 USB3 drives of different sizes with the files, all connected to my Mac Mini, and I'm cutting it all in ¼ resolution, which is about what my monitor can do anyway.
So you can see you can do it with not a lot of money. And it does work. Try it...

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Gone Girl[/I] 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.

I'm going to disagree a bit with this statement. Complex workflows are possible when you have a team of dozens of people and 9 months. That means you can optimize and specialize the footage for each step of the way. The ultimate example of this is when you have an entire VFX Post facility where you can have dedicated people just to transcoding and exchange of formats. Online/Offlineing though comes with a pretty large cost not in computing power or space but in complexity and software. Hardware is cheap, people are expensive. Gone Girl chose a very labor intensive and expensive process because they are a $60m film. Simply loading R3Ds and sticking to R3Ds is in many ways substantially easier. Yes you need a bunch of external drives or a big NAS but compare the price of a big NAS that will last a couple years ($5k - $10k) to that of an editor who might have a $500 day rate and will cost just as much after a couple weeks.

I completely agree that it's easier for the editor and arguably faster to edit on proxies, but only if there is someone to do all of the online/offline conforming for them. Hopefully Adobe recognizes this and makes it completely transparent.

 

[AndreasOberg]

In FCPX you can zoom forward and back in time super fast when you use proxies. Can you do this with a Rocket?
I would imagine it would be slower even with a rocket but I haven't had the chance to try.
/Andreas

 

[Björn Benckert]

According to my experience shit just starts to go wrong if you atempt to have a large time line filled up with r3d's especially if the source from that timeline is drawn from a really big source. I do not know why but it seams like the file pointers just can keep up in speed. And yes, think that was the only reason why fincher worked with proxies if there was a way he and adobe would for sure wanted to see it all happen from the native files. I think it's possible if the film and the source is devided up in 5 acts and possilby held on different machines / source drives but if you try to keep a full feature with a hefty amount of material all on one server and also start to edit from different machines accessing that server, well then that like asking for trouble. I hit the wall on this so many times and really want to make it work but I never managed to. So in a way I was a bit relieved to hear that Mr Fincher could not do it either even though he probably had guys from adobe in the edit suite all trough the process, and they could pick what ever gear they wanted to get the job done... still they had to take the proxy path.


I actually like making small proxies, like HD proress LT or such. It allows all proxy source to be available on one little raid. Then when done editing it's quite easy to take out the EDL do a r3d trim onto a "sellected takes drive" and then grade from there and then reconform. To me that workflow keeps things nice and clean and all the R3D's does not need to be available at the same time which if you got a huge amount of material will slow things down.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I completely agree that it's easier for the editor and arguably faster to edit on proxies, but only if there is someone to do all of the online/offline conforming for them. Hopefully Adobe recognizes this and makes it completely transparent.

As I often say: "this is not a technology problem; this is a people problem." Whether you're trying to do this for no money and can't afford to hire people is not necessarily a valid excuse. To me, it's possible to hire an inexpensive assistant editor to come in and do all the drudge work. Making proxies is a batch process you can literally dump into a machine at midnight, select various options, then let it merrily chug along all night while you go home and sleep. Come back at 7AM, organize bins, set everything up for the editor... all done.

USB3 would not be my choice for a large documentary project with terabytes and terabytes of files. I just saw where two or three companies have 24TB Thunderbolt 2 RAIDs for about $3000. Even with backups, that would allow spending only a modest amount of money and keeping all the files together... but it doesn't solve the problem of heavily weighing down timelines with lots of 5K or 6K footage. Even the Gone Girl people mentioned there were shots in the movie with nine simultaneous layers of 5K footage at one time. Good luck doing that with USB.

Michael Cioni had the best line of the evening on the Gone Girl post presentation, and it basically went like this: "Talking about a 6K pipeline is one thing, but you have to consider that the moment you load all the files and then push Play, it takes about $250,000 to solve the problem of getting the image to actually play at that point." So this is not a simple problem, especially when you take into consideration 4K monitoring.

The workflow of Gone Girl provided a lot of lessons for people mulling over the feasibility of 6K Dragon acquisition for 4K delivery, and I think they had to tackle some fairly monumental challenges in getting it done. The Quantel rep mentioned several times why they felt the Pablo Rio was the best choice for a large facility doing work this complex, and I have to admit, this kind of overhead would be very hard to sustain by a lot of competing products, except possibly for Mistika. Baselight, Resolve, and the other players would be much more limited in the conform and finish, but it's doable to a point.

 

[Phil Holland]

The thing I personally like here is that there's no "one way". Meaning when I want to edit native REDCODE RAW I can or if I want to utilize a proxy workflow I can.

Seems like every gig I've had where I've been responsible for capture, edit, color, and post in the last few years I've been able to choose the best workflow to work with the clients needs.

Which is where the real power is honestly.

 

[Michael Gyori]

I'm editing our first feature film (shot on Red Epics) in Premiere CC. I'm editing the original 5k R3D files on a 4kHD (2.35 aspect ratio, 3840x1634) timeline, which is what I intend to deliver the project in. The project media is about 8tb is size and I have it all on a local RAID 0 drive composed of 3 4tb WD Black drives (backed up to multiple sets of 5tb Seagate externals). My PC computer is about 2 years old... an i7 3770k with 16gb ram. I have 2 GPUs, one nVidia 770 GTX and one 560 GTX. I view the timeline at 1/4 while editing, which provides realtime playback. I have a 3 monitor setup with my playback window on a $700 4k Asus monitor I just bought, which enables me to see renders in their 4k beauty.

I see no need for proxies at this point.

The only issues I have are Premiere bugs, some introduced by the recent Premiere update in October, and a long load time for the project (anywhere from 1 to 4 minutes)... although this seems like a bug to me too. Other than those issues, editing the original files works well and provides me with so much flexibility in reframing and playing with Red metadata.