PRORES recording for DRAGON

[Jeffery Anderson]

What you are saying here describes the DIT job to a T.

As a DP ( & DIT) I would not want to be labored with making dailies on my lunch break and if they are required, then a DIT should be hired to do them. Simple offloading of footage via error checking software like Shotput Pro or Double Data ( I use Silverstack ) with a laptop would be the very most I would recommend on set without a DIT to do more complex things like primary color, audio syncing and transcoding. Otherwise you are overburdening yourself in your job as a DP, and costing another migrant filmworker a valuable job.

It's sorta a mixed back of sh*t as to what a DIT does on set.

if it's a muticam shoot or live to broadcast it get far more complicated, than a single camera commercial.

But the basics are setting ISO/ASA for each shot and compression ratios(or in Alexa's case, recording format)... Simply ISO isn't about exposure, it's about containing the light and dark levels with in a shot so you can go into post and get a great image.

If you search Phil's posts he has a lot of practical information about the Red Epic.


In concern to external recorders:
For what I know, the signal out from the HD-SDI is a full debayer of the sensor. And what I've done is have an external recorder/monitor with peaking and the Red Touch set to False Color, exposing for what the Red see's...


End of the day it's all about getting clean image that's broadcast friendly.

with all the new computers, you could simply set up RedCine Pro w/Look you've designed and preview clips from there.

 

[Phil Holland]

It's difficult to define DIT roles on all types of jobs. The brilliant potential here is having that ProRes file as quick as you offload the MINI-MAG. That's going to be powerful stuff. Video Op (if not already capturing) can slug that into an edit on set even. If the job doesn't call for color work outside of what's captured in camera then it gets pretty simple.

On two shoots I've had this year I served as DP, Co-Director, DIT, and Colorist because these two particular projects I want to have my thumbprint pressed way in on the footage. It's pretty tremendous being able too wear those hats and that's a personal thing I desire overall for my career on certain projects. Having files I can quickly dish to the studio right from the get go is going to be great.

It's also good that ProRes on Windows now officially supported through REDCINE-X PRO will make life a heck of a lot easier as well. I've been testing it thoroughly and it's working great, minus that damn gamma shift bug that we have been dealing with for years. Hopefully that can get solved at some point and then it's all gravy.

 

[Jeffery Anderson]

Hey Phil, I think at one time R3D RAW had the stigma associated with it being hard to work with and that you needed a NASA computer to edit the footage... and ARRI could bake in ProRes, ready for delivery, 30-minutes or less...

Also, I think what's confusing people with the new ProRes is how the Alexa for a long time used ProRes as an acquisition media or container ...and for most modern workflows that done and dead and in the past.

From what I'm hearing about the Weapon, it's going to have different compression options that will raise the bar, so you would never think of using ProRes for acquisition, but use it to quickly cut together scenes on set for dailies.


Lot of the Broadcast gear should also be exciting too ... Live applications of real-time LUTs will simplify the process and give Engineers confidence in what you're getting out of the camera. This will change a lot of people's idea about how to use Red Epic or Weapons.

... I think Red(Jim) smart to leave a lot of the smaller prosumer camera to fight over 4k ProRes and move on to something bigger... be very cool to see Live Broadcasts in 4k, something like American Idol shooting on 20+ Red Weapons.

 

[Bruce Schultz]

I understand the attraction of "instant" in camera dailies via ProRes, however, the elephant in the room here is the ability and need to apply a decent LUT/LOOK to each and every shot so that it gets recorded on the camera media. I for one have never ever had one of the canned LUTs like RedGamma 1,2,3,4 look great on all shots throughout a shooting day. There is always a compromise in contrast from one scene to another where it works on one but not another. So plugging in a LOOK on a per-shot/per-scene basis is essential which is why I eschew using RedGammas (except in rare cases usually exterior quick shots) and always do a Live Grade on set to make a 3D LUT to send along with the camera metadata to post and send out live to video village. When striking dailies on set, then it gets applied there and then usually through Resolve but sometimes RedCine X.

This is all DIT work which protects the DP & Director's look by embedding it from the start so some assistant editor a week later can't screw up a set of dailies by slapping on a canned LUT. To really make in camera ProRes work, you would need to have this ability to essentially grade each shot/scene or else you'll be applying a generic look via RedGamma or just sending out flat log footage to editorial. You could do this via the new curve editor which works great, or load in a LOOK the other way via RedCine X but that does take time away from production to set up. What I am expressing here is that the existing process of having a DIT record ProRes external to the camera in order to facilitate the embedding of an on set look is a process that works and works well. Recording ProRes in camera with a generic LUT would not be my first choice of production methodology.

As far as 4K ProRes goes, Red does a beautiful and complex raw recording giving nearly infinite choices to massage later, ProRes log footage is a much narrower avenue for later adjustment and so I think why bother with 4K ProRes proxy/dailies until edit systems require or request them.

 

[Phil Holland]

Hey Phil, I think at one time R3D RAW had the stigma associated with it being hard to work with and that you needed a NASA computer to edit the footage... and ARRI could bake in ProRes, ready for delivery, 30-minutes or less...

Also, I think what's confusing people with the new ProRes is how the Alexa for a long time used ProRes as an acquisition media or container ...and for most modern workflows that done and dead and in the past.

From what I'm hearing about the Weapon, it's going to have different compression options that will raise the bar, so you would never think of using ProRes for acquisition, but use it to quickly cut together scenes on set for dailies.


Lot of the Broadcast gear should also be exciting too ... Live applications of real-time LUTs will simplify the process and give Engineers confidence in what you're getting out of the camera. This will change a lot of people's idea about how to use Red Epic or Weapons.

... I think Red(Jim) smart to leave a lot of the smaller prosumer camera to fight over 4k ProRes and move on to something bigger... be very cool to see Live Broadcasts in 4k, something like American Idol shooting on 20+ Red Weapons.

Yep. I agree and I agree with Jim about REDCODE RAW being the right choice for acquisition. .R3D isn't exactly hard too work with these days, but for many it's more overhead than they need. People like editors for instance who will bring a film around with them on a MacBook Pro and a small portable Hard Drive. Also, just the general edit workflow where speed is precedence.

There are some however who need ProRes as an acquisition format and even acquisition that can go straight to delivery. A good deal of studio level television shows have adopted this workflow mainly for speed because they are racing to the air. We're in the early days of Weapon here, but if RED can find a way to allow for internal ProRes recording as the acquisition format for 2K and 4K you will see a dynamic shift and change of perception about where RED cameras can be used. We'll see what the engineers over there can figure out as time goes on.

Right now having the 3D LUTs in camera is pretty big as well. Both for monitoring and embedding in ProRes. The REDCAST Module also supports 3D LUTs for UHD 4K Broadcast, which is fantastic. I spoke to several "news gathering" types of people who are finally upgrading their trucks to handle 4K. This is one of the professions where 720p is still very much used and even hearing that tells me that there's forward progress. And the news gatherers out there are occasionally capturing history in the making, so in my mind they really should put the effort in.

For my projects and pretty much everyting I work on REDCODE RAW will still be my "choice" format because I'm trying to squeak out the highest quality footage 100% of the time and that's where I can achieve that in so many ways. Nothing is baked in. You have access to your full format resolution. And the various advantages of REDCODE RAW are very much appealing to my color/post workflow. I just cut a 2 hour piece right off of 6K .R3Ds and it worked great. But I'm certainly not everybody and everybody has different wants and needs.

 

[Ted Parkes]

I suspect the new Sound Device Pix E5 will retain the Red file names.. The pix240 does. Everyone likes to work differently and I always push for a DIT on set but when I can't have one I use the pix240. Reliable prores and great for playback. Saves messing with the redmag and you have the entire days footage to look back on if necessary.

 

[Björn Benckert]

I suspect the new Sound Device Pix E5 will retain the Red file names.. The pix240 does. Everyone likes to work differently and I always push for a DIT on set but when I can't have one I use the pix240. Reliable prores and great for playback. Saves messing with the redmag and you have the entire days footage to look back on if necessary.

The pix Works like a charm if the files are to be used as finals when not using sound... If the files are used as proxies then the files from the pix work less good, as the trigger is +-3 frames off for timecode/cliplength.

 

[Mike Garrick]

Thanks Bjorn I thought so.

 

[Hal Long]

I'm not sure why there is all the pushback against having a prores recorder on the camera these days. I frequently have clients insist on a prores back up even when there isn't much budget for a DIT. Most of the common recorders do a fine job for this, but, as Bjorn pointed out, all too often they are 1-3 frames off so using them as to proxies is difficult. We tried this at length on a TV show earlier this year and ultimately decided to run everything through Redcine for frame accurate proxies. When there's a budget for a DIT it's great, but that's not always the case.

On the flipside, I've grown rather fond of using my color control panel at the top of set ups to create a client approved look file that is baked into the prores. This really provides more precise control over the look on projects with a quick turnaround that likely won't go to final color correct.

 

[Mert Icgoren]

So, my Blackmagic Pocket Cam has enough processing power to record RAW and Prores(I know its 1080, but still), but my 25K Red Dragon is not powerful enough to do that ?


I can't believe we're debating which external recorder to buy when we can ask RED to figure out a way and release a firmware update to solve this problem.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

What if .....

You could control and create a CDL on LiveGrade or Foolcontrol direct to the camera and the camera saves the CDL values in the R3D - and it's also saved in a sidecar in the app (LiveGrade or Foolcontrol ) and you viewed it live out of the camera - BUT - the recorded prores proxy is LOG (REDLOG FILM).

And then what if I told you that an iPad app (or computer app) for viewing dailies could read those CDL values from a sidecard file and render them over an H264 stream of the LOG footage in realtime - on the fly with the GPU. And you could CHANGE the CDL values on the fly for dailies - without rendering or re-rendering.

And what if FCPX and PREMIERE will soon do the same thing ... realtime GPU render of CDL values over ProRes LOG footage .....

Of course I'm taking dailies here. But "dailies" - aka: viewing media and editorial media - are a massive part of "workflow".

The future is render free.

 

[Leroy Jackson]

ProRes On Dragon

ProRes On Dragon

Hi there.
Why wouldn't we be able at least get ProRes on our Dragons?
I mean we don't have to be able to record 2 stream at once like the Weapon.
But we should be giving the option to record Prores to RedMag surly theres
enough horsepower un the Dragon brain to handle it. Thoughts?

 

[Akin A]

Hi there.
Why wouldn't we be able at least get ProRes on our Dragons?
I mean we don't have to be able to record 2 stream at once like the Weapon.
But we should be giving the option to record Prores to RedMag surly theres
enough horsepower un the Dragon brain to handle it. Thoughts?

I think you mean Epic. Weapon is a Dragon at the moment. Not trying to nitpick, just clarifying for others who might be confused.

 

[Todd T]

Technically HDRX is one stream, it only alternates the shutter speed between frames, so there is little (if any) processing overhead.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Technically HDRX is one stream, it only alternates the shutter speed between frames, so there is little (if any) processing overhead.

The little I know about coding a codec is that it's pretty processing intensive to do an on the fly debayering and transcoding into ProRes. The other HDRx stream is just RAW data compressed through r3D, should be lesser processing intensive.

 

[Kevin Marshall]

Hi there.
Why wouldn't we be able at least get ProRes on our Dragons?
I mean we don't have to be able to record 2 stream at once like the Weapon.
But we should be giving the option to record Prores to RedMag surly theres
enough horsepower un the Dragon brain to handle it. Thoughts?

The processors in the Epic are pretty narrow-focus. You can't just reprogram one to encode ProRes, you'd need a separate, new chip.

 

[David Battistella]

Here is my guess.

1. It is not possible on EPIC DRAGON or it would have been done.
2. he prores licence probably only qualifies certain models of camera (IE Weapon) and does not cover Legacy products (IE: anything prior).
3. You will not be seeing prores on Dragon.

 

[Leroy Jackson]

Oh well. Just thought I would ask. You guys gotta admit though. That would have been nice.
I remember when I got my Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 some years ago... I think 3 maybe 4 years ago
you could only do Raw via SDI or DnxHD. And BAM about 6 months after I had it they enabled ProRes.
I personally hope some how some way they would but David being a insider says they ain't gonna do it
.....so I guess they ain't gonna do it

 

[Leroy Jackson]

If HDrX is one stream why does it cut the Frame rate in half and jacks up compression 2 I think. I haven't used it in a long while
but yeah I think it bumps up compression quite a bit. I just feel that if this fine camera was able to do all these fancy tricks that Red would add
just 1 more lol.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Here is my guess.

1. It is not possible on EPIC DRAGON or it would have been done.
2. he prores licence probably only qualifies certain models of camera (IE Weapon) and does not cover Legacy products (IE: anything prior).
3. You will not be seeing prores on Dragon.

Come to think of it, is it possible to squeeze in another codec? I mean, ProRes as it is in Weapon is high quality for the most part, but would it be possible with let's say DNxHD 36? It makes sense to get offline files. Even though I don't think there's enough horsepower to do it, there have to be other codecs avalible that work native in NLE's like Avid?

If HDrX is one stream why does it cut the Frame rate in half and jacks up compression 2 I think. I haven't used it in a long while
but yeah I think it bumps up compression quite a bit. I just feel that if this fine camera was able to do all these fancy tricks that Red would add
just 1 more lol.

It's two streams, A-Track and X-track, that's why it's cut in half.