Problems with .R3D Apple Color Roundtrip

[Toni Tillmann]

Hey evryone,

as I am new at this forum and did't find anything about that issue right away I just created this thread. If I placed it wrong, please tell me.

I am a film student from Munich/Germany and got the chance to shoot a project on a Red One. So far, everything worked out pretty well and am done with cutting.

The specs:

I was shooting on 2K 16:9 at 100 fps.
Most of it at about ISO 360.
Shutter between 1/100 and 1/500.
I imported the footage via "log and transfer" into FCP (Red plug-in installed -> conversion "native") and dragged it into a 24 fps timeline.
After cutting I just used the "send to -> color" dialogue and started grading.
First I did a quick exposure and color gain correction in the Red tab and than fine-tuned it.


My problem:

Some darker shots of the footage came out of the camera a little grainy... a little. It looked more like film grain and was very unremarkable.

After the grading (im not sure when exactely it happened) the footage lost a lot of quality. Especially the grainier shots got super ugly with huge artifacts all over them.
In my opinion the rendered footage looked like a super compessed image.

On apples website I found that:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2855?viewlocale=en_US

do you think that has anything to do with it? I will upload some screenshots tomorrow so you guys can see what I mean.

I only have about 10 days left and there is still a lot work to do on this project so :
PLEASE HEEEELP

thanks in advance

 

[Manuel Wenger]

Hard to give advice without seeing anything, but in general make sure:

That you set the desired resolution in the project setup e.g. 2K 16:9
That you set proxy to full resolution rendering in the user preferences.
Don´t expect Color to deliver high quality renderings, color is not optimized yet in
taking full advance of the SDK, it´s lacking the detail, NR and high detail debayering, which you´ll find in Redcine. This makes a huge difference in the final output Color vs. Redcine.

Good Luck !
Manuel