Newbie RED Workflow Questions

[Christian Simpson]

I shot my first music video on RED two weeks ago and am looking for help with workflow issues Im having with FCS3. Heres what I did.

Used L&T window to ingest footage with preferences set to ProRes Proxy so that I could work with the footage quickly.

I noticed that ProRes Proxy imports 4k footage at 1080p and all my slow mo stuff comes in at 2k. (I shot 16x9 and not 2:1 by the way)

1. Does it matter that my 4k footage imported at 1080P (1920x1080)? And why would the 2k clips come in at their original resolution?

So my edit is locked in and ready for grading. Following the FCS3 whitepapers I created a RED sequence as instructed and followed the re-conforming steps to create an offline sequence with .r3d files. This all worked fine except that the files reconformed at 1080P (again except for the 2k slow mo stuff)

2. When I reconform, should the clips come back in at their original resolution?

My goal is to grade the 4k and 2k clips to create a master at the highest quality possibe. The deliverable will be HDCAM SR and web (and possibly Blu-Ray)

Now that its time to move to Color I really get lost.

3. What should my "render proxy" and "grading proxy" resolutions be set to? (in the user pref tab in the setup tab.

4. What should my "resolution preset" be set to in the project settings in the setup tab?

I have it setup to render to prores 4444 when I'm done with my color corrections.

I'm afraid that I am scaling up clips that are 1080P (thats how the clips are listed in the browser window of FCP) to work with in color and I dont want to do that.

5. Is there a way to change to resolution of clips brought in and encoded in the L&T window?

Thanks for your help! (No one in charlotte, NC knows how to work with this stuff!)

 

[Christian Simpson]

I recently discovered that all my footage shot at 4k actually has a resolution of 3840 x 2160. Does anyone know what that is? It looks like Log& Transfer is bringing it in at half resolution which actually is 1920. Here are some screenshots showing the resolution.

Anyone know how this could happen?

 

[ThomtheEditor]

3k 16x9 maybe? i'm not a shooter but looks like something got bumped on the camera.

#3: it depends on your workstation, we run a macpro color bay and are getting good results playback @ 1/4 res (to maintain framerate) grade @ half-res (so color can keep up with you) and render at full-res (so you get the advantage of full 4k shooting and full debayer quality, trust me the renders are beautiful and worth the extra render time!)

#4 again depends on your final quality; even for film out we've been doing proresHQ @ 2k; 4^4 is really meant for doing vfx work; scaling in color under the geometry tab with red is actually zooming in on the full 4k raw not the 1080 quicktimes, no real resolution loss until at 150% or so.

Instead of conforming thru apple; try conforming thru clipfinder; you can set your conform to 2k 16x9 and everything will be uniform in your timeline.

Clipfinder is available for free at: http://www.daun.ch/software/

 

[Christian Simpson]

Ive been doing some more research and it appears there are 3 4k settings. 4k 2:1 4k 16x9 and 4k HD which is what I think this odd resolution is.

I guess my question is this. What should I set the sequence preset in color to? I have stuff shot at 3840x 2160 and 2k slow mo stuff. I assume I should set it to 2k 16x9. And then once the grade is done I send it to FCP where I send it out at the deliverable resolution? Is that right?

 

[Luca Immesi]

4k HD (3840x2160) is the exact double of 1920x1080 HD (that's why it's called 4k HD), so set the project in Color to 1920x1080 HD.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yep, you shot 4KHD mode. Color still reads them fine and can work from the full 3840x2160 resolution. Final Cut will size them to 1080p because that's how it works. Final Cut takes all "4K" modes and runs them at 2K (or 1080p in the case of 4KHD).

 

[Christian Simpson]

Yeah I finally figured things out. I set my sequence preset to 2k 16x9 actually and it has worked out fine. This was my first time working with RED and it has been a learning experience to say the least. I'll be posting my music video soon. Thanks for everyones help.