Still Store, Changing A Look, And Comparing

[Grant Yoshida]

The Stills tab is currently tied to the clip in the viewer. This may change in a future release.

Harry, you can go back to the 'live' clip by deselecting the current still in the Stills tab (click in an empty area).

 

[Harry Clark]

Yes, but you understand Eric's and my dilemma. We want to be able to see stills of OTHER shots and toggle back and forth with the "live" clip.
Fingers crossed here...
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Steve Sherrick]

Ideally there would be a true still store where you could do comparison splits to match up two shots, even if it's a quick dailies grade. Not sure if there are some restrictions inside RCX that would make this difficult or not. Grant or Matthew is that on the feature request list?

 

[Marc Wielage]

Yes, but that's precisely what we all use Redcine-X Pro for; "best-light" dailies. And on location, a DP or DIT has to work fast. And a still store is a terrific way to quickly toggle between corrections.

Best light dailies are rarely meticulously matched. That's based on almost 30 years experience occasionally working in dailies here in LA, for Technicolor and a dozen other firms. Expecting more is unrealistic, expensive, and very time-consuming. One of the key issues is: you wind up correcting miles of footage that will never, ever be in the final film. I have no problem matching close-ups to wide shots (and vice versa), but only in the ballpark sense. And I have no problem operating from the DPs notes when they say, "this is day for night! Make it dark!" We get that.

A better choice, in my opinion, is to get a rough cut assembled and then do a temporary color correction on it so that it can be played to crew members, investors, producers, studio people, distributors, and even test audiences. Doing it any other way is way overkill, unless you have an extraordinarily high budget.

I do know of some $100,000,000-$200,000,000 films that meticulously color correct all dailies, match every shot, redo cutaways and reshoots, drop in temporary power windows, and a hundred other advanced techniques. They have the time, money, and people to do this. Not many people do.

 

[Harry Clark]

Marc,
I basically agree with you. And my perspective is from a guy that ONLY works in commercials, so I cannot speak about episodic, or large or small films. But I think there is value in a little on-set massaging.
It takes a few moments to tweak a shot prior to either transcoding or moving along to review the next shots. The DIT is watching all the footage anyway, AND these days we are adding a 16x9 framing preset since we are now in 1.9:1 land with Epic, so why not spend 15 seconds and make sure the RMD that goes with the RAW file is the best it can be?
I'm not talking power windows or cages. I'm not talking extensive noodling with lift/ gamma/ gain or secondary correction. And I'm only talking about a quick tweak when you go from wide shot to closeup to reverse. Just like you said; "ballpark sense". There are real-world mismatches that happen. Sometimes it's a 2-camera show and the often cameras don't match (actually make that ALWAYS the cameras don't match) You may want a "preset" RMD for each camera. Two different brand/ era of lenses? A little change of contrast might help. Ever zoom in from 24 to 250 or 275 or 290 (three well-known and very excellent zoom lenses, two of which I personally own)? Guess what. Aperture ramp. Maybe up to 1/3 stop. So the closeup doesn't "sing" like the wide shot. Just a quick FLUT and it's fixed. Etc. etc etc. Each tweak takes only a few seconds, but cumulatively, the effect of having dailies look so good is a strong motivator for having the DP and his team back. The editor, director, and agency will all remark how great and consistent everything looked. They certainly WILL remark if there are things that stand out as "mistakes" even though, like film, it can be easily matched later.
I have NEVER been an advocate for the dark tent, paintbox-tethered way of shooting where an engineer is shouting that we can't shoot yet because he hasn't gotten the chart in. I'm a film guy. Even when I was pushing the Pro-35 on broadcast cameras I was a real snob about NOT having a paintbox. Set a look and go. But now with Red we have a powerful tool that lets us do that work quietly, behind the scene, AFTER the shot, BEFORE anyone sees the work. And if it doesn't slow down the day, why not?
I agree with you that very specific and subtle color grading is both best done later and best left to a colorist. Certainly the FINAL grade must (in my opinion) be done by a real colorist. But RedcineX Pro lets us make our work shine, so why not ask the Red Team to make one enhancement to the software to help us?
Cheers,
Harry

 

[Eric Haase]

I agree with you here Harry. It would be really useful to be able to compare DIFFERENT shots even in a quick dailies grade with a still store. Just shooting 2 different lenses with 2 cameras will cause a noticeable color difference in shots. So we need to even this out in the dailies. People watch cuts of dailies material over and over and over and they take note when things jump around. Sometimes they don't know better and blame the DP for what they think is a mistake. So my job is to deliver the best looking footage I can in the given amount of time and budget. In commercials especially, it is customary for all shots in dailies to match pretty well. Delivering consistent material helps us get hired again.

And looking into the future if I have the tools at my disposal, I WILL start throwing in power windows and secondaries. I'll noodle as much as I can to get my vision across in the most consistent way possible. The old paradigms of the film chain and dailies cororists are rapidly diminishing in my rear view mirror. I used to have to write notes describing the look I was going for to a dailies colorist or send along photoshopped stills. Now I can jump on and do it myself or have a great DIt on set who can do so much more with the footage than we used to be able to do just a few years ago. I DO expect more from dailies now that we have these tools at our disposal.