Luke Holwerda
Well-known member
Hi. I'm shooting my first feature at the moment. I've shot 2 music videos on RED and done a few other short films on other cameras... so I'm not a complete noob, but I have some semi-basic RED questions I'd like to ask. I think the best way for me to keep everything straight is to just number my questions, then under each one, sort of give a little back story. We’ll see how this works…
Just to give some quick info on us and our current situation… I come from the digital photography world. I have a pretty firm grasp on the physical tech side of the camera world. But I’m self-taught, so terminology might be lost on me sometimes. I’m very into figuring things out for myself…. Up to a point… clearly. But I read a lot online about exports and ‘delivery’… and I want to get everything right on this movie. I don’t want to get to the end and go “Crap, we did this all the wrong way.” What we turn out isn’t going to be perfect, I accept that, but I don’t want to have any compromises on the back end, if I can help it. That said… we are still an indie film. Our lead actor is also our producer. My brother and I are still day-job working schleps. My brother bought the RED way back when they first hit. Since then, we’ve only shot this movie and 2 music videos on it. We’re working on Mac’s, so at least were not in the stone age of computing. But at this point, we’re over budget, and were basically working with the software we have available. Which currently is Final Cut studio "3"... All the RED software... and the Davini Resolve demo. I'm on a late-2008 Macbook pro with 4gb memory, brother is on a 2009 MacPro with 12gb. Anyways… this is all just to tell you what we have, and basically, we can’t really afford to buy anything more than what we have… so I need to find the best way to work with what we’ve got. We both have a copy of all the footage on an E-SATA backup drive, and we'll be trading duties on editing. Or more likely in the end, he'll edit, and I'll color.
Ok! Moving on. Let’s just dive right in.
1 – Editing. What’s the best attack route? (File type-wise)
We've been doing dailies and little edits along the way, but we have conflicting methods. When editing officially begins, I want to have the best plan laid out from the start. Currently, with our dailies, it’s just down and dirty… cut something together… sort of thing. But like I said, when we start passing the files around, and I attempt to color something, I see the flaws.
In my head, I think getting a rough edit together using the ¼ proxies is best. Then once we’ve at least selected all the possible clips we might want in a particular scene, I can pull them all into RedCine and give them a baseline “color correction” job… so we’re not gasping as we watch the edits. However, even at this point, I worry about transcoding and effectively “degrading” the image quality by pushing it down to 1080 or 2k. (I worry that passing things in and out of FCP somehow starts to chip away at the image quality) What are the thoughts on that? Transcoding early, and continuing to work on the image. Also, what are the thoughts on the initial phase... as in, which proxy to work with?
2 – Image quality. When to transcode, and what size?
What I would LIKE to do… what sounds best in my head… is to edit the movie all the way through, with “color corrected” footage. Then at the end, be able to make a decision, scene by scene, on how things should look… then go back to the R3D files, re-color correct, transcode to the proper size, then send to the grading software for the final touches. But here are my issues/questions with that…
What SHOULD the final size be? And what QUALITY output? I hear 2k thrown around a lot for theater showings. Since our film is an ULB SAG project, we have to show it in the theater at least once. Not that I think our film is Star Wars or anything… but since it was shot on RED, and has the possibility to look very nice, I’d like to give us the best POSSIBLE product. So I don’t know exactly what that equates to on the export side of things. I was hoping you could elaborate on this a bit. (Codecs, bitrates, dimensions)
3 – Apple Color. Good enough??
Keeping with the previous question’s theme… is Color a “good enough” program to work with? Honestly, I DO feel a bit limited by it sometimes. It feels cumbersome when compared to the RAW editors I’ve worked with on the still image side. I worry, for no real founded reason, that when I render things in Color for the final project, that they will somehow not be as good as possible. For example, there aren’t as many controls when it comes to rendering in Color as there are in FCP or RCX. Should I worry? I know Color can work off the R3D files, which I think is great actually. But SHOULD I be doing that? Or should I work only with files transcoded from RDX? There are no debayer settings in Color, and that bothers me.
I’ve been looking at DaVinci’s Resolve, and I think it looks amazing! But again, I’m running a fairly old Mac, and I don’t really have the cash to spend on another program. Plus, just to run the demo, I have to update my OS! This is my situation currently!! What is the serious consesus here? I know I CAN do it in Color, but is this just a terrible idea? Should I just abandon Color now, and at least start working in the Resolve demo?? (I would assume I could start with the demo, then buy it later and my files should still work??)
4 – Sound? When to start syncing audio?
Ok. Sound. I sort of hate dealing with sound. For this film, as our first serious endeavor, we had to start from scratch. We did the best we could on our budget. We’re using a very nice Sennheiser shotgun boom mic (I forget the model number, but this was expensive, bought at the same time as the RED), we have 3 Sennheiser EW-112 G2 (or maybe G3) lav mics, all into a Tascam DR-680 field recorder. Sound is going to be inconsistent, we all know that. So we’ve accepted the fact that there will be a lot of ADR. Plus, our soundman was just a friend of ours that we taught to use the machine. (I’m sure you’re cringing by this point J) So some of our sound will suck serious ass. But, regardless, we have to work with what we have, then fix what we can. But when is a good point to start syncing individual audio tracks with the video?
Initially, I thought we’d edit the film, then deal with sound. Because I knew between my brother and I, there was every possibility that we’d change things along the way. But now I sort of feel like we should be working on sound scene by scene. However… again with things I don’t fully understand… I want to use Logic to edit our sound. I know it’s another fully integrated Apple product, so I’m happy with that. But do I need to set everything up in FCP, then “send to” Logic, just like video clips to Color?? This is one area I’m pretty lost on.
5 – The final export.
Ok. I probably have more questions that will crop up, but this is something I think about a lot.
Currently, our files are arranged by scene number on a 12TB backup drive. Movie folder > Scene # folder > RED video folders + Audio folders
I plan to edit BASICALLY scene by scene in FCP. So, effectively, we’ll have a FCP project file for roughly every scene number. (Except those that flow very naturally together) So am I correct in thinking that at “the end of all things”, I will be copying and pasting the individual timelines into a “master” timeline? Or should we just keep one giant project file going?
Again… I’m really curious about the best way to actually export things from FCP. Settings-wise. Even for a 90 minute film, the file would be enormous, wouldn’t it? For some reason I can’t wrap my head around this step. I read Blu-ray reviews and I pick up things like “back ground banding” and “transfers” and “AVC encodes”… and I’m lost. Reviewers seem to attack the distributors of the film for the transfer style chosen… I’d like to have an informed decision when it comes to this. J
Ok. There is probably more I could ask… but this will probably take a long time to answer as it is! I thank you in advance. And if something seems very basic or silly, feel free to laugh… but at least give me a shove in the right direction.
-Luke
Just to give some quick info on us and our current situation… I come from the digital photography world. I have a pretty firm grasp on the physical tech side of the camera world. But I’m self-taught, so terminology might be lost on me sometimes. I’m very into figuring things out for myself…. Up to a point… clearly. But I read a lot online about exports and ‘delivery’… and I want to get everything right on this movie. I don’t want to get to the end and go “Crap, we did this all the wrong way.” What we turn out isn’t going to be perfect, I accept that, but I don’t want to have any compromises on the back end, if I can help it. That said… we are still an indie film. Our lead actor is also our producer. My brother and I are still day-job working schleps. My brother bought the RED way back when they first hit. Since then, we’ve only shot this movie and 2 music videos on it. We’re working on Mac’s, so at least were not in the stone age of computing. But at this point, we’re over budget, and were basically working with the software we have available. Which currently is Final Cut studio "3"... All the RED software... and the Davini Resolve demo. I'm on a late-2008 Macbook pro with 4gb memory, brother is on a 2009 MacPro with 12gb. Anyways… this is all just to tell you what we have, and basically, we can’t really afford to buy anything more than what we have… so I need to find the best way to work with what we’ve got. We both have a copy of all the footage on an E-SATA backup drive, and we'll be trading duties on editing. Or more likely in the end, he'll edit, and I'll color.
Ok! Moving on. Let’s just dive right in.
1 – Editing. What’s the best attack route? (File type-wise)
We've been doing dailies and little edits along the way, but we have conflicting methods. When editing officially begins, I want to have the best plan laid out from the start. Currently, with our dailies, it’s just down and dirty… cut something together… sort of thing. But like I said, when we start passing the files around, and I attempt to color something, I see the flaws.
In my head, I think getting a rough edit together using the ¼ proxies is best. Then once we’ve at least selected all the possible clips we might want in a particular scene, I can pull them all into RedCine and give them a baseline “color correction” job… so we’re not gasping as we watch the edits. However, even at this point, I worry about transcoding and effectively “degrading” the image quality by pushing it down to 1080 or 2k. (I worry that passing things in and out of FCP somehow starts to chip away at the image quality) What are the thoughts on that? Transcoding early, and continuing to work on the image. Also, what are the thoughts on the initial phase... as in, which proxy to work with?
2 – Image quality. When to transcode, and what size?
What I would LIKE to do… what sounds best in my head… is to edit the movie all the way through, with “color corrected” footage. Then at the end, be able to make a decision, scene by scene, on how things should look… then go back to the R3D files, re-color correct, transcode to the proper size, then send to the grading software for the final touches. But here are my issues/questions with that…
What SHOULD the final size be? And what QUALITY output? I hear 2k thrown around a lot for theater showings. Since our film is an ULB SAG project, we have to show it in the theater at least once. Not that I think our film is Star Wars or anything… but since it was shot on RED, and has the possibility to look very nice, I’d like to give us the best POSSIBLE product. So I don’t know exactly what that equates to on the export side of things. I was hoping you could elaborate on this a bit. (Codecs, bitrates, dimensions)
3 – Apple Color. Good enough??
Keeping with the previous question’s theme… is Color a “good enough” program to work with? Honestly, I DO feel a bit limited by it sometimes. It feels cumbersome when compared to the RAW editors I’ve worked with on the still image side. I worry, for no real founded reason, that when I render things in Color for the final project, that they will somehow not be as good as possible. For example, there aren’t as many controls when it comes to rendering in Color as there are in FCP or RCX. Should I worry? I know Color can work off the R3D files, which I think is great actually. But SHOULD I be doing that? Or should I work only with files transcoded from RDX? There are no debayer settings in Color, and that bothers me.
I’ve been looking at DaVinci’s Resolve, and I think it looks amazing! But again, I’m running a fairly old Mac, and I don’t really have the cash to spend on another program. Plus, just to run the demo, I have to update my OS! This is my situation currently!! What is the serious consesus here? I know I CAN do it in Color, but is this just a terrible idea? Should I just abandon Color now, and at least start working in the Resolve demo?? (I would assume I could start with the demo, then buy it later and my files should still work??)
4 – Sound? When to start syncing audio?
Ok. Sound. I sort of hate dealing with sound. For this film, as our first serious endeavor, we had to start from scratch. We did the best we could on our budget. We’re using a very nice Sennheiser shotgun boom mic (I forget the model number, but this was expensive, bought at the same time as the RED), we have 3 Sennheiser EW-112 G2 (or maybe G3) lav mics, all into a Tascam DR-680 field recorder. Sound is going to be inconsistent, we all know that. So we’ve accepted the fact that there will be a lot of ADR. Plus, our soundman was just a friend of ours that we taught to use the machine. (I’m sure you’re cringing by this point J) So some of our sound will suck serious ass. But, regardless, we have to work with what we have, then fix what we can. But when is a good point to start syncing individual audio tracks with the video?
Initially, I thought we’d edit the film, then deal with sound. Because I knew between my brother and I, there was every possibility that we’d change things along the way. But now I sort of feel like we should be working on sound scene by scene. However… again with things I don’t fully understand… I want to use Logic to edit our sound. I know it’s another fully integrated Apple product, so I’m happy with that. But do I need to set everything up in FCP, then “send to” Logic, just like video clips to Color?? This is one area I’m pretty lost on.
5 – The final export.
Ok. I probably have more questions that will crop up, but this is something I think about a lot.
Currently, our files are arranged by scene number on a 12TB backup drive. Movie folder > Scene # folder > RED video folders + Audio folders
I plan to edit BASICALLY scene by scene in FCP. So, effectively, we’ll have a FCP project file for roughly every scene number. (Except those that flow very naturally together) So am I correct in thinking that at “the end of all things”, I will be copying and pasting the individual timelines into a “master” timeline? Or should we just keep one giant project file going?
Again… I’m really curious about the best way to actually export things from FCP. Settings-wise. Even for a 90 minute film, the file would be enormous, wouldn’t it? For some reason I can’t wrap my head around this step. I read Blu-ray reviews and I pick up things like “back ground banding” and “transfers” and “AVC encodes”… and I’m lost. Reviewers seem to attack the distributors of the film for the transfer style chosen… I’d like to have an informed decision when it comes to this. J
Ok. There is probably more I could ask… but this will probably take a long time to answer as it is! I thank you in advance. And if something seems very basic or silly, feel free to laugh… but at least give me a shove in the right direction.
-Luke
But good call!