Strange workflow needed, involves speed ramping and 5K pan&zoom

[Adam Watson]

I'm creating and have already shot a spec ad that is essentially a timelapse of someone drawing on a dry erase board. Only one overhead camera setup pointed directly at the board. Shot it in 5K with the intention to "follow" the artist as he draws using basic pan & zoom features found in any NLE or effects program. In order to make the flow of timing good and match the music and VO and a storytelling sense I'm going to have to be all over the place on the edit, cutting out sections where nothing is happening, where the artist messed up and had to redraw a section etc. and also go crazy with the speed ramping or timewarp or whatever you want to call it to control the pacing of the timelapse to match the VO and music.

I was hoping to make small offline transcodes and edit in AVID and do all the timewarp stuff. Then I wanted to export an EDL to reconnect the edit with the original Raw footage in to Redcine and export the edit in 5K. then from there bring it in to After Effects and do all of the pan & zooms with all those K's available to me, render out an HD clip, bring it back in to Avid to marry it with the audio and call it a day.

I hit a snag when while researching I found that it seems that you can't have timewarps in an EDL, which throws a wrench in my whole plan.

Now I think my only option is to transcode the Raw footage wholesale in to a 5K .mov or whatever, bring it in to After effects and basically edit in there, (which will suck hard for what I'm doing), do the pan & zoom stuff too, then put out an HD render and bring that in to Avid to marry with the audio.

That's the best plan I got, anyone have any ideas or insights to improve my workflow?

 

[Chad Cooper]

have you considered xml'ing to resolve instead of red cine? you can do your pan and scans right there too so you don't even have to send to AE. time warps handle fine (coming from FCP7 at least, i'd hope avid would work just as ok).

also, just an idea, why not send an xml from avid right to AE? i'm not an adobe user myself, but i'm almost positive AE can handle r3d's (i wonder if it can handle speed ramps though......?)

 

[Adam Watson]

That could be good but FCP isn't an option for me :/

 

[MichaelP]

You might want to take a look at the FrameFlex feature in Media Composer v7. Timing may be off with release date, but that is exactly what its intent is for - and the AAF will describe the move from the 5K image (even for conform in MC back to the original 5K. Delivery is always HD, but the quality is an extraction from the 5K and not from the rescaled image. You can PM me for a few additional details, beta is under NDA, but the NAB demo videos floating around can show what I am referring to. The question is whether getting on the beta program is possible at this point, and whether it would work for at this time.

Michael

 

[Adam Watson]

Looks like AE actually works fairly quickly with R3D's and not horrendously slow so I might not have the problems I thought, I'll report my experience here.

 

[Dermot Shane]

Another option would be to AFE it to Avid|DS, speed ramps come through cleanly (if you have MC6 + DS11.02), relink to the R3D's in DS

 

[Mike Harrington]

Adam....
Did the exact same thing you are doing.....
5k single camera....dry erase board...edit and time in avid...finish in AE

Well, I helped the editor with the workflow...
We used automatic duck, and the time warps came through....but there was a catch to it...can't quite remember what it was...