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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 :)

simple workflow for filmout

Philipe Ratton

Philipe Ratton

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Hi guys. My question is about a workflow for film out.
Can I edit and CC ( give it a “look“) 4k in a Mac Pro station and prepare it for a film out ? I will edit the QT proxys in Final Cut, send a EDL to redcine and then grade there and prepare the film out ? Any other options or I really have to take the footage to a nice , big and expensive post house ? Another stupid question, if I grade the QT proxys, lets say, in COLOR, what happens to my Raw footage ? Will I get only the HD graded ?
Thanks a lot and sorry about the stupid questions !
 
Philipe Ratton said:
Hi guys. My question is about a workflow for film out.
Can I edit and CC ( give it a “look“) 4k in a Mac Pro station and prepare it for a film out ? I will edit the QT proxys in Final Cut, send a EDL to redcine and then grade there and prepare the film out ? Any other options or I really have to take the footage to a nice , big and expensive post house ? Another stupid question, if I grade the QT proxys, lets say, in COLOR, what happens to my Raw footage ? Will I get only the HD graded ?
Thanks a lot and sorry about the stupid questions !
Click to expand...

These are good, and definitely NOT stupid questions!

If you grade proxies, then that's what you'll get - graded proxies. You'll edit with proxies, and grade the raw files in Color.

You don't have to go to an expensive post house, but if you don't have experience grading for film, at best you'll have a STEEP learning curve, and at worst you'll have spent a lot of money to shoot the neg & prints and not get the result you were looking for.

Editing is no problem, just stick to 23.976 or 24fps depending on your final deliverables (if there is ANYTHING other than film in your projects future you're definitely best off at 23.976).

Redcine does not take EDLs unless I'm way out of date and very mistaken. You can pass projects from FCP to Color, but there are a number of caveats with that workflow, not the least of which is that Color is currently unable to support Red's new color science, so you'll have to work extra hard, and it's already challenging to grade for filmout.

Next, you'll need some sort of color management, and a monitoring setup that can support it. Most computer monitors are not up to the task, monitors that I consider minimally capable start at @ $2k and go up from there. The color management system (I use Cinespace) will allow you to:

a) calibrate the monitor & profile it

b) create a print emulation lookup table using the profile you generated in step 'a'

The reason you need color management is that film is not video or 'computer' - what looks good on your monitor will be relatively meaningless to a film recorder. You need to color correct as the film 'sees' the images, and color management is the best way to do that.

You'll need to be able to manage very large amounts of data (all .r3d files that are used in your cut) and edits, something that Color can do, but not easily. It's difficult enough when there aren't any bugs!

Once you're done with the grade - typical feature film has over 2000 edits, each edit needs a grade - you'll need to render out somewhere in the neighborhood of 144,000 8mb DPX files for a complete feature, in 20 minute 'reels' with universal leader and 2 pop at heads and tails for each reel.

That will need to be part of the edit, as audio needs to match each reel, otherwise audio will - obviously - not sync in your composite print (audio and video composited to a single length of film).

Considering how much money it costs to go to film (really good prices are still well over $30k for a 100 minute feature incl. audio & 1 print), and how complex a job it really is, are you sure it's better to 'do it yourself' or would it be worth it to get someone with some experience to help you make this happen?

Of course it'll be somewhat simpler (and less $$$) if it's a short film...
 
Thanks a lot for all the info John.
What about transcoding my raw footage to , lets say, 2k prores 444, then I shoul be able to CC and prepare the film out on the MAC PRO and still have a very high quality material for the film out right? I mean, in Brazil we only have 2k theaters anyway.
 
Phillipe, it's not the codec that's the issue, or the theatres - it's the viewing conditions and monitoring. You can't prep files to be put to 'film' without having an approximate idea of what you will need to feed the equipment that they will strike the film from, and what that should look like in terms of gamma and color space.

Without a properly calibrated projector showing a correctly spec'd LUT for the type of film you are printing to, you will have no idea if your film out will look once its actually printed to film.

If you are only mastering to HD, so you can project of a format such as HDCAM, then even just a Mac Pro alone won't show you this. You need a Mac Pro and an HD compliant monitoring solution, and a way to feed this (like a Kona 3 card).

Then the post house doing the printing to film, or the mastering to DCI if it's a digital film, will have the tools to convert this HD master to either film or DCI so that it matches what you saw on your calibrated HD monitor as closely as possible.

What matters in color grading isn't so much the quality of the codec (of course it matters greatly, but it's not the key thing). What matters is that the viewing conditions you grade in match what the people further down the chain have so that when doing further conversions for different mastering formats (be it 2K DCI, film prints, or even mastering and SD DVD) they have a reference that accurately matches the decisions you made.

If you work with your footage just on your computer's LCD they have know way of knowing accurately what sort of viewing conditions you were experience, so whatever decisions you made cannot be easily replicated at their end.

Creating something that is a repeatable is the complicated and or expensive part of the process, and if you don't understand exactly how the post place putting your files out to film or DCI are going to replicate what you saw when grading, and/or the post place doesn't understand exactly how they are going to do it, then you can not possibly end up with the same picture - and you could possibly end up with a wildly divergent picture when it ends up in theatres to what you were expecting.
 
John is right. You can trust your luck to chance and use just your uncalibrated/non-profiled LCD monitor and hope that your film will look "in the ballpark" of what you intended it to be, or you can know without a shadow of a doubt that what you see at home or in a studio environment is what you get on film. Do you really need to go to film or is it just an experiment?
There is a reason all the correct tools cost what they do and that price is considered to be consistency and accuracy. I'm not knocking the fact that it worked for Lewis or others but if you are looking for the correct way of going about it John's method is standard.
 
But guys, I do have a Kona 3 and I do have a eCinema FX-C2401.
Its not the best monitor out there but it usually gets the job done.
I'm not doing the CC myself, I have a Colorist who will be with me along the way but he never worked with Red footage before. Anyway, thanks a lot for the info, keep it coming.
 
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