Red EPIC-W Post Workflow

[Dennis S.]

Hey guys,

first of all, merry christmas to all of you.
We probably will go the upgrade route to the RED Epic-W at the end of January.
My question is, what would you consider a capable machine of handling the 8K material the camera produces if there is any hardware at all.
We purchased a new workstation a while ago and this one is finally able to handle 4K good enough but there is probably not enough headroom for 8K.

I imagine every regular machine will have serious trouble giving real time playback at the native 8K resolution.
With the lack of an 8K display there is obviously no urgent reason to work with 8K shots in its original resolution but i am still curious what kind of horsepower would be required to
give proper playback in Premiere CC/Resolve.

So to all the EPIC-W owners out there, how do you handle that 8K shots i n post. do you go and do the actual editing entirely in 4K ProRes (Proxy) or DNxHR or how do you deal with it.
As for a non camera expert a little bit of an amateur question but wehats the big idea behind an 8K camera when we not even (completly) there when it comes to UltraHD/4K?
Is it just to have a larger image that you can fiddle more aroudn with it in post instead of actually using it @ 8K or whats the general idea behgind those cameras?

Thank you very much for your time and help.

Dennis

 

[Jon D Kline]

I would guess that any 8K work I'll be seeing in the next year or two will be either be future-proofed documentary or visual effects designed to be delivered in 4K or less. Or maybe something non-standard like a video wall installation.

Unless you think you can get multiple clients to pay for working in 8K, I think you're better off keeping your current edit workstation and waiting for Moore's Law to catch up.

 

[Wil Wong]

Upgrade Program ends Dec 31/16 I think...

https://support.red.com/hc/en-us/articles/228235748-RED-Owner-Pricing-Program-Details

 

[Marc Wielage]

With the lack of an 8K display there is obviously no urgent reason to work with 8K shots in its original resolution but i am still curious what kind of horsepower would be required to give proper playback in Premiere CC/Resolve.

BMD's own config spec mentions an HP z840 dual 14-core for Windows. I would say that plus 128GB of RAM, internal SSD, very fast external storage, and 8 GPUs would handle quite a bit in terms of real-time 4K.

I think the concept of shooting a big frame and then cropping to a smaller one for post is a good one, provided you shoot tests and determine what aspect ratio you need for the final. David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did this fairly well:

One can make a good case for editing proxies, just to facilitate editing on small computers and laptops on the go. You can always go back to the original files for the final conform for color and delivery.

You can also make an argument that you could shoot in 8K, then immediately transcode to 4K 444 (even DNxHR or ProRes or DPX) for the entire post process. The key to me is making sure all the Raw settings are optimal for providing a reasonable range for final color.

 

[Adam Montville]

So far everything that I have done has not required any VFX, or anything special in Adobe, so I'm doing LQ 1080p proxies in a 4k timeline. Edits very quick and smooth, then EDL to Resolve. I have been trying to figure out what I would do for green screen shots, or if I needed to do any kind of tracking in Adobe, how that would work... I'm pretty new with the proxy workflow, as I have always worked with 5k R3D directly, but the 8k is too much for my computer (and USB3.0, non-RAID hard drives).