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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

REDCINE to DNxHD

Jeff Brue said:
DNxHD is not a mastering format even though they advertise it as such. The algorithm is really quite messy. Compare it to DVCproHD not cineform or redcode rgb.
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I think DNxHD makes a perfectly fine finishing format in the real world if treated with a little bit of care!

A company I worked for printed over 10 trailers to film from DNxHD. Going DNxHD meant they could online in-house, which saved them a ton of money. They spent that money on more DaVinci time and mixing time and also passed a little bit on to the client. The client loved the images and said it was a massive improvement from when they were onlining out of house. The out of house onlines had been done uncompressed on Avid DS or discreet fire suites.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Its not the issue of audience perception its the real world work practice of multiple recompression steps that invariably happen in post. So far the only compression methodology I'm willing to give a shot is a wavlet based method (I rather like cineform). Not just for the reduced cost of hardware but for just the logic of it, including its scalability with multiple processors.

As far as mastering formats forgive me its not about what you can actually see in the image after a final compression its what you're able to push the image to do to allow for finer granularity in control of the image. My classic case in point is tracking points for 3D tracking where the contrast neededs to be bumped up a lot to get a decent track sometimes or keying where artifacting in the hair causes the need to blur. I saw a rather horrible thing the other day when a vfx facility was given dnxhd 8 bit plates, they couldn't pull a key to save their lives out of it.


In regards to the realtime debayering well all the ones I've seen have some form of artifacting usually in the form of moireing so for any kind of editorial workflow where they HAVE to output from editorial and not do a conform they're not going to be willing to accept that as a file.

Ultimatly the thing I have a problem with is that the editorial and gear companies are flexing their engineering muscles and saying, yes you have this great new camera but we're going to limit what you can do with it.

So many people have so many purposes for this camera that the lines between everything is blurring and its making life extremely hard for anyone outside of a proscribed editorial workflow.

Its insane that you're going to have to run a transcode through RedCine into an avid dnxhd wrapped quicktime add compression and still have to manually edit the timecode, scene, and take info. The turn around time for something like that is slower than a film workflow.

Ok end of rant ;-) As I said I've been working on these exact same problems with the stwo/viper workflow. They're not easy because essentially we're talking about dragging the entire film and post industry into the future. It took stwo years to get their product to the state its at now (something that actually works). These same problems will be presented to anyone that actually attempts to make a living off of DAQ (digital aquisition).
 
I saw a rather horrible thing the other day when a vfx facility was given dnxhd 8 bit plates, they couldn't pull a key to save their lives out of it.

In my experience, difference keying with DNxHD actually kind of works (albiet DNxHD was used for acquistion... recording straight into an Avid MC). The key is noisy but matte choking cleans it up for the most part. So it might be for other reasons that DNxHD didn't work for them?
*The Avid crashed on some takes. Not cool.
 
Er I just don't get that mentality....especially when you can capture into final cut uncompressed 10 bit for a tenth of the cost.
 
Jeff you're right in that a FCP system would've been a better choice for that application, but the circumstances worked out that I ended up using the Avid. It was for a no-budget short I messed around with.
A- The Avid MC was free.
B- I couldn't work off the RAID, so I had to transfer my footage onto a FW400 drive and work at home. DNxHD compression, ironically, since I did have drive throughput issues.

2- Anyways I guess the point is... DNxHD is perhaps not ideal, but workable.
 
Ah indie you do what you need to do. I'm more along the line that if you're paying a vfx facility huge amounts of money you don't want them cleaning up with roto a badly artifacting matte.

In any case though I'm a strong believer in the right tool for the right job. I'm just still trying to figure out what and how avid fits into this entire mess (without buying a 45 thousand dollar media composer). Its like come on guys I'd rather buy another seatt of scratch.
 
Jeff,

don't forget that not everyone with a Red camera will be shooting features. I for one, am a documentary producer and for most of my broadcast-intended work DNxHD will be just fine.
 
Well its not even so much the feature thing. Its just there are better codecs out there, and honestly I want avid to step up and meet the competition. As far as documentaries are concerned a wavlet based compression makes so much more sense in terms of file size. Thats why I'm hoping the 2k redcode RGB becomes a standard for editorial. That would be the perfect run and gun editorial codec, any other type of software conversion for an editorial codec is going to get time consuming quickly.
 
In any case though I'm a strong believer in the right tool for the right job. I'm just still trying to figure out what and how avid fits into this entire mess (without buying a 45 thousand dollar media composer). Its like come on guys I'd rather buy another seatt of scratch.
Click to expand...
I think perhaps the problem is two-fold:

A- Avid charges a lot for their systems. MC isn't really designed for the highest online quality; you're looking at Symphony and Nitris (no compression). And for that price, you can get something arguably as good for a lower price.

B- Data/file-centric workflows aren't standardized and therefore not all systems work with them. If you can get your data to appear as a tape VTR, then things will work exactly like the traditional workflow. This is what I like about XDCAM HD. You also get the benefits of data (i.e. scene detection, faster than real-time transfer/ingest) in the offline editing stage if your offline editor supports it.

With Red, perhaps support for traditional workflows could be solved if they were to integrate with a DDR vendor like raveHD (which could act like a virtual VTR?).
*I'm not sure why something like this didn't work for you for your Viper projects. / It may not work for you.

C- In the future, perhaps vendors could standardize on a data workflow.
Standard wrapper
Standardized essence (i.e. all SDI formats, plus metadata for matrix, black point, white point, and gamma/transfer function)
Standard project exchange (EDL, AAF, or something else)

So far this stuff is a mess. For example, MXF was supposed to standardize the wrapper but not every app supports all its flavours.
 
Jeff Brue said:
In any case though I'm a strong believer in the right tool for the right job. I'm just still trying to figure out what and how avid fits into this entire mess (without buying a 45 thousand dollar media composer). Its like come on guys I'd rather buy another seatt of scratch.
Click to expand...

Perhaps I am confused, but we only pay about $4k for media composer, much less than $45K if I understand your post correctly. Media composer Adrenaline is about $21k last time I checked, but you only need that for tape ingest, not data workflow. Media Composer (software only) does everything MC Adrenaline does and is actually a bit faster without the Adrenaline hardware in all of our tests.

I agree you need Symphony or DS Nitris for an uncompressed Online. But you can do a pretty nice job with 10bit DNxHD include pulling keys and tracking and lots of other stuff these days in MC.
 
Mike Devlin said:
Perhaps I am confused, but we only pay about $4k for media composer, much less than $45K if I understand your post correctly. Media composer Adrenaline is about $21k last time I checked, but you only need that for tape ingest, not data workflow. Media Composer (software only) does everything MC Adrenaline does and is actually a bit faster without the Adrenaline hardware in all of our tests.

I agree you need Symphony or DS Nitris for an uncompressed Online. But you can do a pretty nice job with 10bit DNxHD include pulling keys and tracking and lots of other stuff these days in MC.
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And then can't you walk over to a post-house with your hard-drive for a single day's rental on their Nitris? That is if you even need to (i.e., after a sale or to meet broadcaster requirements). For most indie projects, I would bet this stage is never needed. And one day's rental doesn't seem so bad if you already have a sale.
 
Good point Sean. And with a bit of care the confrom from MC to Symphony or DS is much more straight forward than other alternatives. No EDL, just bring your timeline&media over. Depending on how much final grading you are doing it might be a couple of days rather than one. However, Avid lets you do an effects-rich HD offline with a (relatively) easy conform to the uncompressed online, so you can do more of the work in the offline. Horses for courses as several people have said, but it is not a bad option.
 
The only workflow I would consider for an Avid offline is a REDCINE export to DNxHD MXF with translated metadata.

Importing a Quicktime file will give the offline editor a clip name and a UNC.
This will force the editor or the assistants to manually add information/metadata to the clip.
It also adds an extra step when importing the clips into the MediaFiles folder since Avid doesn't use Quicktime as a native format.

I really hope RED and Avid has a solution for this when the camera ships.
In order of convenience:

1. REDCINE exports directly to Avid MXF with metadata without the extra step through Quicktime.

2. Avid MetaFuze (will it ever be released?) imports REDCODE with metadata and saves as Avid MXF.

3. REDCINE saves an ALE and then you import the clips directly from REDCODE codec.

This is one surprise that I hope Red delivers at NAB.
A new camera is great, but without the "standard" editing workflow it will take a while before the industry adopts this new technology.
 
The 45k mark was what I was quoted for an HD-SDI solution. Essentially the same thing you get from a 5k final cut box. Personally I hope avid starts playing nice, but I think they believe themselves to be the adobe of post...taking a year to release MC 2.7 is kind of silly, I hope they have something better to present at NAB.
 
Jeff Brue said:
The 45k mark was what I was quoted for an HD-SDI solution. Essentially the same thing you get from a 5k final cut box.
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Your FCP box isn't a solution because you haven't counted the hard drive array. Look at Mike Curtis' DV.com article for realistic FCP solutions.
http://www.dv.com/features/features_item.php?articleId=196602702
His mid-range system is 12k.

I totally agree, Avid needs to improve. But DNxHD means that you need to spend less on a fancy drive array - since its data rates are similar to uncompressed SD you can even re-use an old Avid array.

If you want to do long-form, want to go RAID-5 want to have some kind of backup system for your HD media (useful if you don't want to do offline / online), the FCP solution balloons in price because of the massive cost of uncompressed storage.

Avid needs to improve but Final Cut Pro needs something like Cineform built in ASAP.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Actually Bruce my 6K Final Cut system IS a solution .Cineform is actually coming to FCP but I don't need for an offline workflow as I use DVCProHD as my offline codec which doesn't actually need a fast RAID array at all, I've actually run DVCPro HD clips from my i-pod!. Most of the time we actually finish with it as well, the quality is excellent and from what I've seen compares well with the DNxHD quality.

However If I need to I can online at 10 bit uncompressed HD on my 2.5TB RAID array that cost me just $2000. My FCP system cost me in total with the RAID array some $6000. OK it's not RAID 5 but I'll accept the risk as my projects are always backed up.

No chance at all of matching that with an Avid system, I'm not knocking Avid but it's not cheap if you want Uncompressed HD.
 
Ah, DVCPROHD - gotcha, makes more sense now. I used that and like it but personally I think DVCPROHD can look bad when printing to film, while DNxHD at 10 bit and highest quality is just good enough to be a theatrical solution. I do agree that DVCPROHD probably a good solution for many other things and also agree with you that FCP kills Avid at uncompressed output prices. I just think that with DNxHD you don't really need uncompressed.

Also, cheap Avids can do DVCPROHD. Why don't you compare a cheap Avid to a cheap FCP system? The only place the cheap Avid falls down is if you want to go with a HD-SDI input and transcode to DVCPROHD, but since you're probably renting the HDCAM or D5 deck for something in the range of $700 per day, it is perhaps a false economy in some cases? Depends on the nature of the project, long-form or short-form, turnaround time, etc, budget approval stages, etc, I guess. I could see how FCP could totally beat Avid in value in many situations.

I too am excited about Cineform on FCP. If FCP had that, it would really have the format bases covered with a nice selection of quality / compression levels for all kinds of projects. I just wish Cineform didn't cost extra.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
Well again I think it comes down to what you have to do with the material you are shooting, and what your end goal of it is. I'm working on a horrible green screen shot right now and I'm having my ass saved constantly by having the higher bit rate uncompressed frame off the viper. If I did not have the capability to push the under lit green screen into no mans land this shot would remain horrible and not possible.

DNxHD as a mastering format gives vfx backend guys like me the chills. I KNOW whats being discarded, and after working for so many years to generate every pixel in 3D , you find out what you can do with them in compositing. Its not something that matters for a documetary about the penal system, but I guarantee you if you're shooting the latest doc on skiing or graveyards, having imagery thats of a non artifacting nature with greater bit depth does make a difference.
 
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