RedCine or Premiere pro ?

[jorge krausch]

If you can import R3D files directly to Premiere now, are there any disadvantages to skipping the color corrections in Redcine and doing them in Premiere?
Sorry for the silly question.. workflow is new to me.. My last gradings were at Duart in New York in the 90's!!!

 

[Aaron Shirley]

I'm actually working on a short training video that gives an overview of this, but it's a few weeks away from being ready to show, so here's the basics:

You probably already know that grading in RCX, then exporting to your NLE, bakes in the meta-data settings; and grading R3D's in Premiere gives you access to meta-data changes. So there's a plus for grading R3Ds in Premiere.

Once you're in Premiere, the grading work flow is kind of odd. There seems to be 3 levels of R3D grading:

-First, you can go into RCX from Premiere (CS6) and do a coarse grade. This affects the original R3D, so even if your scene is cut up in the timeline, these changes will affect each clip taken from that RCX file. I only do this if my R3D is really out of wack and I need to bring it into "first light" territory.

-Second, you can use Premiere's (hobbled) R3D meta data editor. The nice thing about this is that changes made here only affect the clip you're working on, not other clips edited from the same R3D file. The drawbacks are- There is no RED Color 3 or RED Gamma 3 for some reason, only 1, 2, and log. Also, you don't get as many controls and curves here as in RCX, so in a sense, it's more coarse than RCX is. You can set your HDR here or use these settings to strip out an HDR track. I like to use this one if I need to do a drastic fix on one clip but don't want to have to go back to the original RCX file, make a copy, and re-import it, just so I can do the change in RCX.

-Third, is the folder of video effects with the color correction sub folder. Most of these tools are baffling to me, but the few that I've learned to like are '3-way color' (for tertiary grading selected colors), 'RGB curves' (for coming up with the right look), and 'RGB corrector' (for scene correction and shot matching). You pretty much drop all three of these on each clip and go to work on the settings, then copy&paste each effect (with your new settings), onto other clips as applicable. They stack nicely, and I've found that they often work better if you need to make multiple settings changes to one effect, you can drag&drop that effect onto the clip several times and make a different change to each one. This way, you can more easily choose what changes you want to C&P from clip to clip, and the multiple changes are less likely to muck up each other.

PS- there's also SpeedGrade, but to get your timeline in there, you have to either render your ungraded R3Ds from your Premiere timeline (which is out of the question); or you have to export and EDL from Premiere. After your changes are made in SpeedGrade, you have to render out to get back into Premiere for titles and and finishing (opticals, graphics, sound, etc), which you could have done the same way with RCX or Resolve for that matter. Hopefully they'll fix the work flow for SpeedGrade.

 

[Sven Seynaeve]

you are wrong about redcolor 3 and redgamma 3, you have to patch it yourself after downloading it from adobes servers

 

[Aaron Shirley]

you are wrong about redcolor 3 and redgamma 3, you have to patch it yourself after downloading it from adobes servers

Thank you! I was hoping there was a current solution to this issue! I'll look for that right now!

 

[Pablo Moreno]

If you can import R3D files directly to Premiere now, are there any disadvantages to skipping the color corrections in Redcine and doing them in Premiere? Sorry for the silly question.. workflow is new to me.. My last gradings were at Duart in New York in the 90's!!!

Don't forget..

You can import the R3d onto Premiere with the defaults RCX's settings by saving its RMD..

Premiere will read the settings automatically as long as you keep the RMD in the same folder as your R3D. (Sorry, you guys probably know that, but we can't assume that everyone does)

 

[Aaron Shirley]

you are wrong about redcolor 3 and redgamma 3, you have to patch it yourself after downloading it from adobes servers

Well, installing that patch on a PC was a real roller-coaster ride... I assume, your patch was for mac and went in smoothly?

Mine kept giving me a missing dll error and told me to reinstall Premiere. When I tried that, I uninstalled with windows add/remove software and cloud wouldn't let me reinstall because it thought Premiere was still installed. I had to get a level 3 (third guy I talked to anyway) tech support to take control of my machine to fix that. Then he had the patch tell him the same thing on his PC, so he spent a couple of days figuring out the solution (copying and moving several files), and so now, I finally have RED color 3 and RED Gamma 3 on my Premiere PC install.

...again, I hope Adobe fixes this.

 

[Leif Thomas]

Would you mind sharing your solution with us?

 

[Jonas Kvist Jensen]

It's worth a note to say that, RCX can actually import Premiere EDL's as well. I've used a workflow where, I did all the editing in Premiere, on the as-shot R3D's. I like editing before any grading is done, just to save time. Then export an EDL, import it in RCX and do all you can there. What you do then, is basically save all the changes to the R3D's and the go back to Premiere. I found a nifty little tool somewhere (will find it again if someone needs it) that does a force reload of all the RED footage in a premiere project, which then brings all you changes from RCX in there.

Hope this makes sense.

As RCX doesn't do secondary, masks and such I would probably go with Speedgrade for the final touch up, but I definitely prefer to do as much as possible in RCX.

EDIT: Found the above mentioned tool, as per request. Get it here!/

 

[Will Steer]

+ 1 for everything said here. If your deliverable is 1080p and you have a CUDA-accelerated system, Da Vinci Resolve Lite is a free and extremely powerful grading tool to use also.

 

[Jean-Claude Benet]

It's worth a note to say that, RCX can actually import Premiere EDL's as well. I've used a workflow where, I did all the editing in Premiere, on the as-shot R3D's. I like editing before any grading is done, just to save time. Then export an EDL, import it in RCX and do all you can there. What you do then, is basically save all the changes to the R3D's and the go back to Premiere. I found a nifty little tool somewhere (will find it again if someone needs it) that does a force reload of all the RED footage in a premiere project, which then brings all you changes from RCX in there.

Hope this makes sense.

As RCX doesn't do secondary, masks and such I would probably go with Speedgrade for the final touch up, but I definitely prefer to do as much as possible in RCX.

Jonas, your workflow is what I believe to be the most effective for the majority of my projects. However, I would LOVE to know your nifty little tool to reload RMD's to every clip in the premiere timeline once you bring it back! Please share?

 

[James McLellan]

I'm actually working on a short training video that gives an overview of this, but it's a few weeks away from being ready to show, so here's the basics:

-Second, you can use Premiere's (hobbled) R3D meta data editor. The nice thing about this is that changes made here only affect the clip you're working on, not other clips edited from the same R3D file. The drawbacks are- There is no RED Color 3 or RED Gamma 3 for some reason, only 1, 2, and log. Also, you don't get as many controls and curves here as in RCX, so in a sense, it's more coarse than RCX is. You can set your HDR here or use these settings to strip out an HDR track. I like to use this one if I need to do a drastic fix on one clip but don't want to have to go back to the original RCX file, make a copy, and re-import it, just so I can do the change in RCX.

Hi Aaron,

How hobbled are the grading controls in Premiere compared to RCX? We used to use RCX a few years back then switched to Apple Color and now we grade right in Premiere. Can someone point out a difference? The controls sure look the same to me. Also, has anyone figured out how to pull up basic monitors in Premiere while adjusting source settings? It seems we can't bring up anything other than a histogram.

Also what I have found is the source setting changes in Premiere pro do affect every instance of the clip in the timeline to my knowledge. There is only one exception to this: If you have a clip that bridges several files ( i.e. 001.r3d & 002.r3d) AND you import BOTH files, you can grade each separately essentially resulting in the same clip having multiple grades. That's what I have observed.

J

 

[Jean-Claude Benet]

The grading controls in REDCINE are better than CS6, CS6 is good for quick grades on clips, but taking an EDL to redcine is what I find better not only because of the graphs but because I can easily scroll through the timeline and compare different clip's grades = not possible when using source settings in premiere for adjusting RAW.

Once you do that, you only need to save the RMD's to the clips and reload them in Premiere for export, voila!

 

[Aaron Shirley]

Would you mind sharing your solution with us?

I wish I could be more detailed than to say, I called Adobe's tech support, described what I was trying to do (to 3 different people), and they finally took control of my computer and moved a bunch of files around and ran a couple of installs. I tried to follow what they were doing but between the C&P keyboard shortcuts and some fumbling around, I couldn't, and when I asked for a recap, it was pretty clear the tech wasn't able to recall it in any sort of step by step. So if you're in my situation (don't have RED color/gamma 3 or magic motion in Premiere), don't try to uninstall/reinstall anything, just look up their local number and call them.

Hi Aaron,

How hobbled are the grading controls in Premiere compared to RCX? We used to use RCX a few years back then switched to Apple Color and now we grade right in Premiere. Can someone point out a difference? The controls sure look the same to me. Also, has anyone figured out how to pull up basic monitors in Premiere while adjusting source settings? It seems we can't bring up anything other than a histogram.

Also what I have found is the source setting changes in Premiere pro do affect every instance of the clip in the timeline to my knowledge. There is only one exception to this: If you have a clip that bridges several files ( i.e. 001.r3d & 002.r3d) AND you import BOTH files, you can grade each separately essentially resulting in the same clip having multiple grades. That's what I have observed.

J

I pretty much agree with Jean. RCX has 2 to 3 times the functionality of Premiere for raw grading so you certainly get more power with RCX as long as you keep the clips unique to the imported files (more on that below), however, if you're under a tight deadline and your footage doesn't need careful tweaking at the raw level, Premiere's raw editor isn't bad as long as you have color/gamma 3 (it's just simple). Then, as most people here have said, for final tweaks and FX level grading: Premiere, SpeedGrade, and Resolve have a whole suite of effects, looks, and mattings; which RCX doesn't have.

For monitoring, you can right click in the preview or program monitor, click "Display monitors" and choose from around 10 different read-outs, if that's what you mean.

Just to clarify, what you're describing in editing the "source settings" in Premiere, there are two ways to edit/grade the raw data of your footage:

-Source Settings... [this is Premiere's RAW editor/grader and changes made here affect the corresponding clip that you imported to Premiere's bin folders. If you imported both files of a spanned clip ie 001, 002, then there are two complete instances of this footage that can be independently graded by Premiere's RAW editor. You can also "Duplicate" a clip to have two independent instances of it for separate RAW grading, and any one of these can "Reload form RMD" or "Save to RMD" which is the RAW settings that RCX uses]

-Edit Original [this command will open the original R3D file that your imported instance of your clip is pointing at, into RCX and grading edits you make here will be read by Premiere upon import, or "Reload from RMD"]

 

[John Parkin]

I wish I could be more detailed than to say, I called Adobe's tech support, described what I was trying to do (to 3 different people), and they finally took control of my computer and moved a bunch of files around and ran a couple of installs. I tried to follow what they were doing but between the C&P keyboard shortcuts and some fumbling around, I couldn't, and when I asked for a recap, it was pretty clear the tech wasn't able to recall it in any sort of step by step. So if you're in my situation (don't have RED color/gamma 3 or magic motion in Premiere), don't try to uninstall/reinstall anything, just look up their local number and call them.

Not sure why you are having so many problems, the install is really simple... You download two files from the Adobe labs server, find where the files with the same names are located on your system and replace them. Done.

 

[James McLellan]

My question about the monitoring is can you pull up monitors with the source settings window up? The major weakness to me of Premiere Pro is that the monitoring cannot be accomplished while in source settings.

The other major weakness is of course that you cannot compare clip grades easily. This seems like it should be an easy fix for the future. Other than that what is the difference between RXC and PPro? Are there any other concrete examples?

 

[Jonas Kvist Jensen]

Jonas, your workflow is what I believe to be the most effective for the majority of my projects. However, I would LOVE to know your nifty little tool to reload RMD's to every clip in the premiere timeline once you bring it back! Please share?

Yeah. I should have propably just taken the time to find it first time around It's right here though, for both PC and MAC: http://www.fallenempiredigital.com/blog/2012/07/29/batch-reload-redcine-x-rmd-raw-adjustments-in-adobe-premiere-pro/

 

[Oliver Lee]

Thanks for sharing Jonas, I was looking for something like this. Can't wait to give it a try!

 

[Aaron Shirley]

Not sure why you are having so many problems, the install is really simple... You download two files from the Adobe labs server, find where the files with the same names are located on your system and replace them. Done.

I think the problem was... how did you know to do that?!?

I know if you're on a mac, it's standard procedure to uninstall software by deleting an icon, or upgrade software by deleting an icon and replacing it with a new one, but on a pc, that method is extremely rare. If installing a patch or software, you usually download and double click an .exe file and that file tells other files where to copy to and what to replace. Did I just miss Adobe's instructions to install this way? Why didn't 3 Adobe techs know to do this?

 

[John Parkin]

I think the problem was... how did you know to do that?!?

I know if you're on a mac, it's standard procedure to uninstall software by deleting an icon, or upgrade software by deleting an icon and replacing it with a new one, but on a pc, that method is extremely rare. If installing a patch or software, you usually download and double click an .exe file and that file tells other files where to copy to and what to replace. Did I just miss Adobe's instructions to install this way? Why didn't 3 Adobe techs know to do this?

http://labsdownload.adobe.com/pub/labs/redepic_importer/redepic_importer_install_cs6.pdf :thumbsup: