PeterHollander
New member
I’m the editor and post supervisor of the IMAX project Harry Clark’s been posting about these last few days. He’s encouraged me with a RED camera to the side of the head to share some of the workflow decisions I made and my experience with RedCine.
First off, what Harry and I have been working on has all been shot against green screen for later compositing with CGI virtual seta. As such, I’ve modified the traditional Red work flow other’s have been discussing to create one more in keeping with a Visual Effects Production.
I wanted a Editorial Proxy that was compressed with a codec most generic machine’s could read, so I could send dailies to laymen and have them play, that was bigger then the 720x486 4:3 frame I was going to edit in, because depending on the shot, I’m going to be blowing up shots or shrinking them down for position, and I wanted the quality to hold, and IMAX is in fact 4:3. Also, I wanted quick render times in Final Cut, regardless of what box I might be running on at any given day. Some scenes are going to have two or more layers test composited for position. I don’t want Final Cut thinking to much. It makes both of our head’s hurt too much.
Also, I wanted burn-in, first as insurance, second because I’m going to be giving these edits to people who don’t always read, or need to read time code, EDL’s, XML’s, etc. They just want to know what frames are in the edit. Send them a Quicktime® of the cut, and if I do nothing else, or I am hit by a bus, they can do their job.
With all this said, out of RedCine I rendered proxies which were 1024x512, Photo-JPEG, 24 FPS, Burn-in at the top, Roll number, etc., on left side, Time Code on the Right. They are at the top because most of the action area of IMAX is in the bottom two thirds, so if you’re projecting a digital test, no one will notice them up top of the frame.
RedCine.
Lot’s of stuff here to go over, just rattle off my experience. I had lot’s of initial problems getting it to render. What I did to make it work was the following, take it with a grain of salt, it worked for me. Quicktime® 7.3.1., REDCodec 1.5, RecCine 090 build. Leopard.
Simple destination file and drive names. That means no funny characters, like ƒ, or spaces. Both of which I’m a prime abuser of.
As little as possible running in the background of your system. Backup, Plaxo, Weather Bug, Mail, etc.. Find and quit with Activity Monitor if need be, all of these little buggers.
I got the freeze frame issue on every long set of renders I did. Sometimes it would go twenty shots, sometimes 30, but any long ones crappped out toward the 30th shot. Personally, I always thought it was because some background process had started and RedCine lost it’s place because of it. I’m not a Terminal Guy, or a log reader, so I can’t verify it, but that was my gut feeling.
I also trashed a lot of RedCine Folders in the library before it worked twice in a row.
My solution once I got a render to work, I’m superstitious remember, was to keep using it. Every time I got done with a render, or had to do a pickup of the shots that freeze framed, I go into RedCine and delete the previously rendered shots, and click render on the ones I needed to do a pickup on. When I was done with a batch, I’d delete them all, so the library was enpty, and import the next set in. The folder/setup was working for me. Doing this I never had another problem.
My settings were based on Harry’s research about having the display quality match the render quality to help RedCine not have to display screens twice.
1/2 res High for the display. Process Standard. JPEG normal, I played with this, and low just broke up too much. And as I said earlier, 1024x512, which is also film 1K with the height set to match. We shot 2:1 with the camera.
Once I got the proxies rendered out. Opened the Camera Proxies from the Red r3d folder, extracted the sound track, and pasted it into the Editorial Proxie I had created out of RedCine. Then saved that out as a self-contained Quicktime® so it wouldn’t need the original around any more to reference the sound.
That’s it. Pushing 400 gigs of footage at the moment. 350 Editorial Proxies., a third with sound.
Starting real editing tomorrow.
First off, what Harry and I have been working on has all been shot against green screen for later compositing with CGI virtual seta. As such, I’ve modified the traditional Red work flow other’s have been discussing to create one more in keeping with a Visual Effects Production.
I wanted a Editorial Proxy that was compressed with a codec most generic machine’s could read, so I could send dailies to laymen and have them play, that was bigger then the 720x486 4:3 frame I was going to edit in, because depending on the shot, I’m going to be blowing up shots or shrinking them down for position, and I wanted the quality to hold, and IMAX is in fact 4:3. Also, I wanted quick render times in Final Cut, regardless of what box I might be running on at any given day. Some scenes are going to have two or more layers test composited for position. I don’t want Final Cut thinking to much. It makes both of our head’s hurt too much.
Also, I wanted burn-in, first as insurance, second because I’m going to be giving these edits to people who don’t always read, or need to read time code, EDL’s, XML’s, etc. They just want to know what frames are in the edit. Send them a Quicktime® of the cut, and if I do nothing else, or I am hit by a bus, they can do their job.
With all this said, out of RedCine I rendered proxies which were 1024x512, Photo-JPEG, 24 FPS, Burn-in at the top, Roll number, etc., on left side, Time Code on the Right. They are at the top because most of the action area of IMAX is in the bottom two thirds, so if you’re projecting a digital test, no one will notice them up top of the frame.
RedCine.
Lot’s of stuff here to go over, just rattle off my experience. I had lot’s of initial problems getting it to render. What I did to make it work was the following, take it with a grain of salt, it worked for me. Quicktime® 7.3.1., REDCodec 1.5, RecCine 090 build. Leopard.
Simple destination file and drive names. That means no funny characters, like ƒ, or spaces. Both of which I’m a prime abuser of.
As little as possible running in the background of your system. Backup, Plaxo, Weather Bug, Mail, etc.. Find and quit with Activity Monitor if need be, all of these little buggers.
I got the freeze frame issue on every long set of renders I did. Sometimes it would go twenty shots, sometimes 30, but any long ones crappped out toward the 30th shot. Personally, I always thought it was because some background process had started and RedCine lost it’s place because of it. I’m not a Terminal Guy, or a log reader, so I can’t verify it, but that was my gut feeling.
I also trashed a lot of RedCine Folders in the library before it worked twice in a row.
My solution once I got a render to work, I’m superstitious remember, was to keep using it. Every time I got done with a render, or had to do a pickup of the shots that freeze framed, I go into RedCine and delete the previously rendered shots, and click render on the ones I needed to do a pickup on. When I was done with a batch, I’d delete them all, so the library was enpty, and import the next set in. The folder/setup was working for me. Doing this I never had another problem.
My settings were based on Harry’s research about having the display quality match the render quality to help RedCine not have to display screens twice.
1/2 res High for the display. Process Standard. JPEG normal, I played with this, and low just broke up too much. And as I said earlier, 1024x512, which is also film 1K with the height set to match. We shot 2:1 with the camera.
Once I got the proxies rendered out. Opened the Camera Proxies from the Red r3d folder, extracted the sound track, and pasted it into the Editorial Proxie I had created out of RedCine. Then saved that out as a self-contained Quicktime® so it wouldn’t need the original around any more to reference the sound.
That’s it. Pushing 400 gigs of footage at the moment. 350 Editorial Proxies., a third with sound.
Starting real editing tomorrow.