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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 :)

RGB and deliverables

S

Stuart English

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Time for a new thread here I think. RGB v's RAW is a great subject for discussion.

Part one is about deliverables and NLE compatibility, part two about sensor usage and dynamic range / color space.

So what is a deliverable? Is it the thing you hand off to your client at the end of a days shoot, or the final product you deliver after post production and on the target delivery medium?

An obvious answer is both. But lets explore the end of the day's shoot deliverable. What is your expectation about what you will show to the client, give the client, and what they will do with that?

Also when we describe RGB we really do mean RGB 4:4:4, not Y,Pb,Pr 4:2:2, so some transcoding to "television color space" is still required.
 
Stuart is right (as usual), Jim is wrong... oops

I have fixed my other post. Sorry about that.

Jim
 
Stuart English said:
An obvious answer is both. But lets explore the end of the day's shoot deliverable. What is your expectation about what you will show to the client, give the client, and what they will do with that?
Click to expand...

Stuart,

Thanks for starting this thread.

It seems clear that REDCine can deliver most types of deliverables needed for any Final Cut System. Final Cut may support the format natively or REDCine can transcode it to another type of quicktime. I understand that all RED formats will be RGB.

The primary economic issue is how much transcoding is needed prior to editing. What does it take to support a client who doesn't want 4K or doesn't use Final Cut Pro or worse isn't upgrading to FCP6.

So here are my questions for RED:

1. How labor and time intensive is REDCine per hour of footage? Give us two standard apple setups, a Macbook Pro and a MacPro tower, and some popular transcodes like 4K to DVCProHD (a question you may not be able to answer at this time. But I think we established in the "losers" thread this is really a deciding factor.)
2. Does shooting in a smaller format in camera reduce the time and labor or increase support in alternative NLE's or FCP less than 6?
3. How does REDCine support other NLE's such as AVID, Premiere or Vegas etc.?
4. What about RED support on PC's where every quicktime codec is not available?
5. Also what about Red's quicktime components on non-intel systems like G5's.

90 percent of what I do is handed off to clients straight from camera. In no circumstances will I dictate to them their post production pipeline. Many of them have fast turnarounds. I need to be able to say "yes" to them... hand off a drive... and the next day I only hear about how good the footage looks.

Warm thanks,
IBloom

6. One more question, will you compile REDCine for Linux. Sounds like a wierd question but it makes a lot of sense if you are looking for a stable robust and cheap system to do some grunt work.
 
I am not too sure about handing drives to a client yet.

unless they bring there own....good luck. or you give them one, good luck
gettting it back. But I sure there are some who will have better luck than others.

I dont know about other ENF/EFP guys but I am hoping to do tape on the scene so they can walk with that, end of story. if its run and gun, not sure.
 
Stuart,

Like Ibloom, unless I'm shooting something for myself, I will be handing off a drive to the client at the end of the day. I shoot nature docs for TV. They will decide which format I will be shooting in and they will get the files from the camera as shot.

Keith
 
Stuart English said:
Also when we describe RGB we really do mean RGB 4:4:4, not Y,Pb,Pr 4:2:2, so some transcoding to "television color space" is still required.
Click to expand...

So are you saying recording to tape is not possible unless we have an hdcam
sr or an outboard converter?
 
iBloom & Keith, you do realise that you'll still have to transcode your footage before you hand it to your client don't you? You can't just hand them a drive with REDCODE RGB files (regardless of the resolution) unless they have a workflow themselves that supports REDCODE. So either they can support REDCODE (in which case the resolution doesn't matter) or you'll have to convert it for them.
 
Yeah, there seems to be the need for some sort of laptop intermediate step for the standard hand-to-client-at-end-of-day deliverable. Could you run REDQUICK from, say, a PDA or a palmtop?
 
Stuart English said:
So what is a deliverable? Is it the thing you hand off to your client at the end of a days shoot, or the final product you deliver after post production and on the target delivery medium?
Click to expand...

Stuart,

Here is how I would handle POST deliverables. 24P HD universal mastering is becoming the current standard for broadcast. This format allows the most flexibility and range of markets to sell into. With a 24P master you can sell to virtually any broadcaster via, most likely, your distributer. As a producer you want this format ad it relieves a huge burden of multiple HD SD formats and frame rates.

Theatrical releases currently rely on 2K digital projection or a film print. In the future affordable 4K projection may be the answer.

So a 2k timeline in FCP could go to a file, a film print or a 24P master tape. With that same 2K timeline you also use compressor to make SD, or web deliverables. At this stage who cares, is just encoding times.

If you know that you are not going to deliver in anything but SD then work with 1K proxies as you masters. You always have the 4K to go back to.

As a small content producer, creating, short film, corporate, tv or web it is still very worthwhile to shoot 4K at all times and over cranked 2K sometimes. This allows me to produce at the highest quality and scale the best possible image down the pipeline all the way to youtube. So for these, in house productions, this really is the only workflow that makes sense. The key is to PLAN for it.


Stuart English said:
An obvious answer is both. But lets explore the end of the day's shoot deliverable. What is your expectation about what you will show to the client, give the client, and what they will do with that?
Click to expand...

The deliverable you hand your client could be the same thing, a 4K RED file. The question you ask your client is not, so you want 720P or 1080P because with a 4K RED file you are giving them that.

The thing to ask your client whether they are using FCP. If your client is an FCP house then you should provide them with the 4K files that can be scaled back to what ever format they are editing or finsihing in. Why would you limit their potential to go bigger, etc.?

I would suggest making REDCINE a free download and allowing us to put it on the drives we hand the client to limit the amount of initial confusion. Acceptance of a new format will partially be driven by how easy we make it for people to use.

In my experience people do not like closed systems, or ones which require a lot of effort on their part. If it's as simple as "have your editor go here and get the download and you are set to go in FCP" or "everything you need is on the drives" then I think people will quickly warm to this new file system.

At the end of the day if the client wants a tape, the client wants a tape and there is no real way to address that situation without warming them to this new standard of working. Once people understand that it is actually a time saver and you are giving them an image you could project on the side of a building, they will eventually see how much sense it makes.

David
 
phaz said:
I am not too sure about handing drives to a client yet.

unless they bring there own....good luck. or you give them one, good luck
gettting it back. But I sure there are some who will have better luck than others.

I dont know about other ENF/EFP guys but I am hoping to do tape on the scene so they can walk with that, end of story. if its run and gun, not sure.
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about a RED drive. But yes after I copy the footage, I often hand drives to clients, sometimes they bought it, sometimes its a loaner. I also have a standard letter that I give to editors with information on the codecs and framerates on the drive. Why would you give them a tape and make them re-import footage that is already on a drive and seperated into clips???

IBloom
 
Preparing for NLE

Preparing for NLE

ibloom said:
It seems clear that REDCine can deliver most types of deliverables needed for any Final Cut System. Final Cut may support the format natively or REDCine can transcode it to another type of quicktime. I understand that all RED formats will be RGB.

The primary economic issue is how much transcoding is needed prior to editing. What does it take to support a client who doesn't want 4K or doesn't use Final Cut Pro or worse isn't upgrading to FCP6.
Click to expand...

Bottom line is that unless the NLE has native support for Wavelets, there is no ability to immediately edit a RED ONE recordng made at 4K RAW, 1080p RGB or 720p 4:2:2 (even if we offered the latter) without a transcode.

The landscape is changing rapidly here, and the new data point is multi-resolution timelines and ability to edit / decode directly from RAW data. As I mentioned in another thread, I have been playing Quicktime reference movies on my 15" laptop in Quicktime Player - the codec is extracting proxy data in real time from the 4K REDCODE RAW data set. - That's pretty sweet.

If you need to deliver to an older NLE, recording REDCODE RGB or REDCODE RAW is the same or very similar render time, because Wavelets compression is a different animal than DCT based codecs that these NLEs been using. The advantage in staying RAW is wider color space and higher dynamic range. Its a purer record, with little or no downsides (except for maximum recordable frame rate at 4K RAW v's 2K RGB)

Again, just information, please to engage in the discussion.
 
Stephen Webb said:
iBloom & Keith, you do realise that you'll still have to transcode your footage before you hand it to your client don't you? You can't just hand them a drive with REDCODE RGB files (regardless of the resolution) unless they have a workflow themselves that supports REDCODE. So either they can support REDCODE (in which case the resolution doesn't matter) or you'll have to convert it for them.
Click to expand...

I think in some cases you can. If they are cutting on FCP6 you will be able to say, here you go, you can use this and its better. FCP6 is format independant, so they don't even need to adjust their timeline settings.

However a 4K file is still 4K. Its compressed but still about 4 times the size of HDCAM. That means 4 times the storage and 4 times the throughput on the transcoder.

Remember REDCine doesn't have a FPGA to accelerate compression, it runs off and is limited to the processing power of your computer. A computer you need to have near you at the end of a day of shooting if you expect to deliver the next morning.

IBloom
 
Instant review

Instant review

Stephen Webb said:
You can't just hand them a drive with REDCODE RGB files (regardless of the resolution) unless they have a workflow themselves that supports REDCODE. .
Click to expand...

True, but from the perspective of being able to instantly review the footage that is on the drive, the Quicktime reference (proxy) files that the camera or secondary RED software can rapidly generate, will provide your client a viewable video clip decodeable on the majority of Macs or PCs. So the infrastructure needed for this our RED Quicktime plug in component.

That's what I have been doing on this 15" laptop - reading a 510K resolution file which extracts directly from the native 4K REDCODE RAW data recorded on CF or RED-DRIVE - b.t.w we always reserve 200MB of space on the media to permit Quicktime reference files to be written.
 
battistella said:
I would suggest making REDCINE a free download and allowing us to put it on the drives we hand the client to limit the amount of initial confusion. Acceptance of a new format will partially be driven by how easy we make it for people to use.

David
Click to expand...

Well said and I agree - this is something I've been wanting since the get-go. Allowing RedCine to be downloadable will make the RedCode viable immediately.

It also takes the pressure off us as shooters to turnaround footage so quickly.

A client version of RedCine doesn't need to be fully-featured, either - just useable enough for them to edit in their NLE of choice and transcode out their desired format(s). Or is that full functionality anyway?:huh:
 
Stuart English said:
True, but from the perspective of being able to instantly review the footage that is on the drive, the Quicktime reference (proxy) files that the camera or secondary RED software can rapidly generate, will provide your client a viewable video clip decodeable on the majority of Macs or PCs. So the infrastructure needed for this our RED Quicktime plug in component.
Click to expand...

Just saw this on Jim's ENG thread

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3501&page=2...

so RedQuick sounds like the thing we've been wanting. Now, can a client edit with RedQuick QTs? Seems like they could... which means... no transcode times?:ohmy:
 
Stuart English said:
True, but from the perspective of being able to instantly review the footage that is on the drive, the Quicktime reference (proxy) files that the camera or secondary RED software can rapidly generate, will provide your client a viewable video clip decodeable on the majority of Macs or PCs. So the infrastructure needed for this our RED Quicktime plug in component.

That's what I have been doing on this 15" laptop - reading a 510K resolution file which extracts directly from the native 4K REDCODE RAW data recorded on CF or RED-DRIVE - b.t.w we always reserve 200MB of space on the media to permit Quicktime reference files to be written.
Click to expand...

So much new information...so many new questions. You mentioned that it always reserves 200MB of space, so I take it that is for the entire media? So in essence I would have 200 MB less of formatted space on my CF's and RED DRIVE? I know it will probably be minimal when it comes down to REDCODE data rates, just curious.
 
Workflow to get footage into an AVID or non REDCode supporting pipeline/system

from 1080p:
Copy to RAID from recording medium.
Transcode to DVCPro.
Copy to deliverable drive.

from 2k or 4k RAW:
Copy to Raid from recording medium.
Transcode to DVCPro
Copy to deliverable drive.

Workflow to get footage into a REDCode supported workflow (REDcined client or compatible NLE)

from 1080p:
Copy to RAID from recording medium.
Copy to deliverable drive.

from 2k or 4k RAW:
Copy to Raid from recording medium.
Copy to deliverable drive.

So what's the problem with RAW again?
 
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