Shot on RED, Edited on Adobe CS5

[Linda Nelson]

Adobe just did a fantastic story about our use of CS5 for our new feature DELIVERED that we shot on RED. Click here to read the article

We just finished post this week and will start festival submissions right away. Click here to see production stills.

We got a great look right out of the camera with Zeiss Prime Lens. Additional color correction was done inside Premiere Pro in real-time with no rendering required accessing the native RED files.

 

[Felix K.]

Very nice!! Could you tell us a bit about the hardware that was used for editing and VFX?

 

[Linda Nelson]

Sure. We have a PC tower with dual quad core intel processors and 32 gig of RAM and an NVidia Quadro 4800 CUDA to take advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine. It's a 64bit Windows 7 machine. We took the RED files (shot with 4 16gig cards) straight from the camera to the timeline. We had 3 terabytes of footage after 27 days of shooting. Then we did some minor adjustments to the source settings and then set about editing. All the special effects were done in After Effects and dynamically linked to the PP timeline, so we never had to leave PP really. If we needed to output a file, we used Media Encoder and if we need to burn a Blu-ray, we dynamically linked to Encore. Same with sound editing. The cleaning tools in Soundbooth were fantastic. You can lasso bad sound, press the heal button and voila! it's gone. We use a few add-ins like Action Essentials for blood, explosions, gun flashes, etc. and Neat Video to clean up some low-light noise. Otherwise, we never left CS5. It's incredibly stable - never crashes and we have a 107 minute feature film. The best thing was that we didn't need to work with low resolution proxies, we accessed the native RAW files, so we always knew exactly what we were going to get. There is a new "yellow" line in CS5. I call it the yellow brick road. It means that you can probably playback the sequence without rendering. What a joy to try out different "looks", sometimes even split on the same frame and because we were outputting to an LDC 42" flat screen that we calibrated, we could see all the beautiful detail without any rendering required. More than happy to answer any other questions about our experience.

 

[Elsie N]

I told a friend of mine about a year ago that with RED and Adobe, one could have their very own movie studio in a spare bedroom, a den, or basement. Your situation pretty much confirms that.

Just curious but did you shoot with the M sensor or the MX?

 

[Linda Nelson]

You were so right! Here are some great photos from our shoot. You can see our camera setup. It was 106 in the desert so I made saddlebags for the camera body that were made of ziplock sandwich bags filled with ice. It worked out fantastic. Once we started using these (after the first time it overheated and shut down), it never failed again. CS5 with RED has to be the best combo out there, whether you use PC or MAC.

 

[Maz Mawlawi]

"real" movies are edited on FCP...Adobe Premiere is not a Pro tool. FCP is the one and only editing tool that everyone should have.... :001_tongue: (sarcasm!)

But seriously, I am glad Adobe is getting some recognition with Premiere...FCP is now so outdated it's ridiculous! CS5 bis indeed awesome! Congrats on your movie!

 

[Olivier Madar]

What codec did you use in Premiere ? Cineform ?

 

[Aaron McAdam]

Sure. We have a PC tower with dual quad core intel processors and 32 gig of RAM....

Hey Linda, congrats.

I am looking at building a new "REDiting Station", and I keep going back and forth between single and dual processor. Did you guys build your own? I have a pretty killer single CPU spec'd out. Would you be willing to share your setup info for the dual?

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

and how was the performance of the linked comps inside premiere? could you get any kind of real time playback at any res?
while its still the fastest and most versatile system on the market at that price... I think that there is still some shortage in the workflow.. still not everything running in 64-bit and not everything benefiting from CUDA.. especially the RED SDK..

 

[shashbugu]

Hey Linda, congrats.

I am looking at building a new "REDiting Station", and I keep going back and forth between single and dual processor. Did you guys build your own? I have a pretty killer single CPU spec'd out. Would you be willing to share your setup info for the dual?

Thats the newest coolest term ever "Rediting"

 

[shashbugu]

Congrats Linda!!!!!!! I am really looking forward to watching your movie.

 

[Linda Nelson]

Hey Linda, congrats.

I am looking at building a new "REDiting Station", and I keep going back and forth between single and dual processor. Did you guys build your own? I have a pretty killer single CPU spec'd out. Would you be willing to share your setup info for the dual?

We have this great little company called NLE just down the street from us in Glendale, CA. They build custom editing workstations and this is the second editing system they've built for us. They were very patient about working out all the bugs because we were really pushing the limits of the machine with CS4. We had to have five separate projects to hold a feature film. Once we upgraded to Windows 7 and CS5 and 64bit processing, everything just jelled. We were originally trying to use a Matrox box, but just couldn't get it to process the whole film and we were determined to have the whole feature in one project file. Now we have the system working exactly the way we want.

You really need to have access to multiple processors or you're going to spend a lot of time waiting around. Our system used to crash all the time before we had multiple processors and the 64bit operating system. All the components of CS5 share the available memory and you can tweek the settings in the preferences. We also wanted to output to a big flat panel TV, so we could see what the end consumer would see with Blu-ray. Our NVidia card outputs with an HDMI cable to a 42" LCD that we got at Walmart. The image is awesome. We are on a really tight budget, so every dollar counts. The most expensive part of the film was renting Zeiss Primes to use on the RED. They were worth every penny. I'm not sure how technical you want to get re the specs, but you can ask. If I don't know, I'll find out from our vendor.

 

[Linda Nelson]

and how was the performance of the linked comps inside premiere? could you get any kind of real time playback at any res?
while its still the fastest and most versatile system on the market at that price... I think that there is still some shortage in the workflow.. still not everything running in 64-bit and not everything benefiting from CUDA.. especially the RED SDK..

Regarding linked comps in the timeline - we did have to render them in PP in order to have them play back smoothly at 1/2 resolution. Once they were rendered, they played just like they were regular clips. We have a war scene with explosions, several gun battles that required gun flares, blood, flashes of light, etc. The dynamic links just reference the rendered comps, they don't get stored in the project file, which stays fairly compact.

 

[Linda Nelson]

What codec did you use in Premiere ? Cineform ?

We didn't use any codec. CS5 accesses the raw RED files directly from the timeline. We just copied the files from the 16gig cards that were in the camera to our RAID. Then we organized the files into bins in the project panel of premiere. You can just scrub through the footage directly in the source file and drag and drop what you want into the timeline. We reviewed the footage and made notes in the metadata that's stored with the files. We can output anything we want from the timeline depending on where it's going to go. For Blu-ray, we dynamically link to Encore.

 

[Elsie N]

Just curious... how much total time did you spend on render...ballpark figure.

 

[Jon Raymond]

It would be great if you had a detailed system configuration setup (as you describe) available as a package, maybe from your tech resources. I imagine it's quite expensive a setup. But it would be nice to have a resource to go to when the time comes to trade up.

 

[Jim Perry Jr.]

"Sure. We have a PC tower with dual quad core intel processors and 32 gig of RAM"
Which processors were you using? the new Westmere or Nehalem- Whats the cpu speed?

 

[Olivier Madar]

We didn't use any codec. CS5 accesses the raw RED files directly from the timeline. We just copied the files from the 16gig cards that were in the camera to our RAID. Then we organized the files into bins in the project panel of premiere. You can just scrub through the footage directly in the source file and drag and drop what you want into the timeline. We reviewed the footage and made notes in the metadata that's stored with the files. We can output anything we want from the timeline depending on where it's going to go. For Blu-ray, we dynamically link to Encore.

Thank you for sharing this experience.
There must be a codec because Premiere can't write R3D. I have no idea of what PP uses (maybe an interna codec ?). When your project is finished, what kind of master did you create from PP or AE ?
I am asking myself why I stay with FCP. Any comments on CS5 Mac ?


Olivier

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

You only need to render out to a codec upon completion of the project. Internally Premiere will read whatever you throw at it, no conforming necessary, including using the native R3D files right on the timeline. I usually use 10bit uncompressed quicktimes for my render masters, but you can litterally use anything you can install on your system.

 

[LarryMcPhereson]

We have this great little company called NLE just down the street from us in Glendale, CA. They build custom editing workstations and this is the second editing system they've built for us. They were very patient about working out all the bugs because we were really pushing the limits of the machine with CS4. We had to have five separate projects to hold a feature film. Once we upgraded to Windows 7 and CS5 and 64bit processing, everything just jelled. We were originally trying to use a Matrox box, but just couldn't get it to process the whole film and we were determined to have the whole feature in one project file. Now we have the system working exactly the way we want.

You really need to have access to multiple processors or you're going to spend a lot of time waiting around. Our system used to crash all the time before we had multiple processors and the 64bit operating system. All the components of CS5 share the available memory and you can tweek the settings in the preferences. We also wanted to output to a big flat panel TV, so we could see what the end consumer would see with Blu-ray. Our NVidia card outputs with an HDMI cable to a 42" LCD that we got at Walmart. The image is awesome. We are on a really tight budget, so every dollar counts. The most expensive part of the film was renting Zeiss Primes to use on the RED. They were worth every penny. I'm not sure how technical you want to get re the specs, but you can ask. If I don't know, I'll find out from our vendor.

Congratulations and good luck!

Well this is where it is going to start getting really interesting for me as I am just finishing up my first "dream" build and battled with the dual processor vs. single for some time doing a lot of research...

However the fastest system/motherboard right now is not the EVGA SR2 (two CPUs) but the Gigabyte X58A UD9 which is set up for a single six core i7 980 and multiple GPUs. I topped mine out at 24 gigs and am just getting ready to order a CS5 package. I can tell you from watching it upload, it's the fastest computer I've ever seen or used so hopefully you will be wrong about the need for two CPUs as you stack the GPUs.

One word of warning to you guys who are thinking about doing this though. Even if I find this works great, I can't recommend a case for it yet except to say DON'T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ ABOUT WHAT HAS BEEN APPROVED. I had to solve those issues (WHICH WERE HUGE!) with a hacksaw. Best advice is probably Mountain Mods w/a custom designer or some good tools because I don't believe there is a "just assemble it" case that works for this quite substantial board. Anyway I haven't seen one and I won't bad mouth the really nice one I hack sawed because I'm helping them fix their design flaws. Best of luck to you all!