The FCP Workflow

[Paris Remillard]

"Depth of field is determined by 2 things: lens length and aperture"

"If you move the camera, your DOF will remain the same."

Actually, DOF is determined by Focus Distance also. The closer you are to the object you are focusing on, the less Depth of Field you'll have. So if you move the camera back to maintain the same FOV at 16mm(windowed sensor 2k) as 35mm(4k) then the DOF will be greater in that situation as well as in changing to a wider lens to do so. So either way, to maintain the same framing on a smaller sensor or a smaller portion of the sensor, the DOF will be greater.

 

[M Most]

Actually, DOF is determined by Focus Distance also. The closer you are to the object you are focusing on, the less Depth of Field you'll have.

While that's basically true, it's not really something that's a determinant of the depth of field characteristic. The hyperfocal distance and the actual distances of various focal planes is still determined only by lens and stop. How "in focus" or "out of focus" any element within the frame might be is constant given a particular lens and stop combination. The front falloff and back falloff at any particular focal point is, to be sure, a bit different. But it is primarily determined by the design of the lens. Not to mention that by changing focus, you're essentially changing the focal length of the lens. So what you're saying is true in the practical sense, and what I'm saying is true in the technical sense.

 

[zak forrest]

I can't wait for this thread to get back on track, viva Mark Allen and thank you for posting this. What's the word on Color and R3D.

Sidenote: I have color corrected TV spots before with After Effects without Automatic Duck. I just worked from the final single movie file and used keyframes on my levels and color filters etc. It was a pain but for such few edits it worked beautifully.

Mark have you ever experienced any errors or anything with Automatic Duck?

 

[ChristopherKenworthy]

I can't wait for this thread to get back on track, viva Mark Allen and thank you for posting this. What's the word on Color and R3D.

Color and RD3 would be good. So would Color and the QT wrappers, but no joy.

The only way I can get Red footage to work in Color at all, is to export a sequence from Red Alert or Redcine - DPX, ProRes, whatever. It's painstaking, but it works.

I edit the QT proxies in FCP and select Send To Color. The clips just don't show in Color. So there's no simple way to send to color, grade and roundtrip - we have to export from FCP, Redalert or Redcine.

So, will the RD3s or the QTs ever work in Color? It would make life a lot easier.

 

[Charles Angus]

How "in focus" or "out of focus" any element within the frame might be is constant given a particular lens and stop combination. The front falloff and back falloff at any particular focal point is, to be sure, a bit different. But it is primarily determined by the design of the lens. Not to mention that by changing focus, you're essentially changing the focal length of the lens. So what you're saying is true in the practical sense, and what I'm saying is true in the technical sense.

Design of the lens does not enter into depth of field. Front falloff and back falloff define the depth of field, which is what range either side of the focal plane is acceptably sharp (small circle of confusion). Depth of field is determined by *4* things - lens focal length, aperture, subject distance, and what circle of confusion you are willing to accept.

But in any case, interesting workflow. Scratch seems to be essential for anyone shooting anything of any length, unless skilled interns abound to fulfill the tedious tasks...

 

[Mark Allen]

Mark have you ever experienced any errors or anything with Automatic Duck?

There have been a few oddiities, but I'm not experienced enough with it to really make any public comments because they could have been simply user error / user expectation problems.

With AE, if you're doing color correction, you should cmd-shift-D split your layers at least so that you don't have to mess with keyframes. also easier to copy/paste your effects in bulk that way.

At some point I will provide some follow up experiences in this thread which will include REDcine - right now I'm working on a few non-RED shot projects, so I've not really had a chance to explore anything.

 

[Mark Allen]

So, will the RD3s or the QTs ever work in Color? It would make life a lot easier.

Are you doing 4k? I don't think Color accepts 4k. I could be wrong.

 

[Sverker Hahn]

While that's basically true, it's not really something that's a determinant of the depth of field characteristic. The hyperfocal distance and the actual distances of various focal planes is still determined only by lens and stop. How "in focus" or "out of focus" any element within the frame might be is constant given a particular lens and stop combination. The front falloff and back falloff at any particular focal point is, to be sure, a bit different. But it is primarily determined by the design of the lens. Not to mention that by changing focus, you're essentially changing the focal length of the lens. So what you're saying is true in the practical sense, and what I'm saying is true in the technical sense.

I have learned that DOF is depending on:

a) scale
b) aperture

Example: the DOF at the scale 1:1 is 2 mm at f/11.

If this is correct, then the focal length is of no importance. When you change focal length you change the scale, and the same applies to when you change focus.

Am I totally wrong here?

/Sverker

 

[Charles Angus]

What does scale mean? Scale of what?

 

[Sverker Hahn]

What does scale mean? Scale of what?

Image size / Real size.

 

[ChristopherKenworthy]

Are you doing 4k? I don't think Color accepts 4k. I could be wrong.

Finishing in 2K. Distributors not interested in anything above, yet, from what I can gather. I'll shoot 4K, and if I need to do any reframing I'll go After Effects-DPX.

And if there's no simple way to get Color to take the QT's from FCP, I might just do the Redcine DPX pull list and go to Color that way. Not ideal, means I have to wait a day or so for the DPXs to render out, but at least I'm then in Color with exactly what I need.

 

[Anders Brandt]

Archiveing original material

Archiveing original material

Hi,
I'm new on the forum, and I'm here cause I'm seriously considering buying a RED ONE. However there is a couple of things that I haven't worked out yet in the work flow. I think I get the general idea, but when I'm done editing I do not have my Digibeta original tape to put in my archive. Have any of you considered how to archive the original material?

Kind regards

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

Hi,
I'm new on the forum, and I'm here cause I'm seriously considering buying a RED ONE. However there is a couple of things that I haven't worked out yet in the work flow. I think I get the general idea, but when I'm done editing I do not have my Digibeta original tape to put in my archive. Have any of you considered how to archive the original material?

Kind regards

Hi Anders,

LTO3 or LTO4 ist the way most will go. We do that for archiving projects already. IT-industry standart, very reliable and considerably long lasting.

Hans

 

[Mark Allen]

Hi Anders,

LTO3 or LTO4 ist the way most will go. We do that for archiving projects already. IT-industry standart, very reliable and considerably long lasting.

Hans

What is the quick headlines on that medium? We're still loading everything to SATA drives and putting that in storage because so often clients come back within the year and need something from a project.

By headline I mean:

Unit costs: _______
Cost per gig after unit purchase (i.e. tape cost per gig):_________


(SATA are about 30 cents per gig)

 

[Eric Maran]

R3D to Final Cut Pro

R3D to Final Cut Pro

I played around with the 4k R3D files this weekend and discovered that from 4K R3D to editing in quicktime took exactly 1 minute.

Popped the R3D file into RedAlert (didn't have the quicktime reference file the camera makes), clicked on Create Quicktime Reference (High) and dragged the newly created (SUPER FAST! Like 1 second to create) into Final Cut Pro.

I'm Using Final Cut Studio (not 2) and it worked like a charm.

Now my question is... once you've finished cutting your entire show, can you just export a quicktime reference file of the film that will reference the 4k footage? Or is it a matter of media managing and "onlining" the footage in whatever your finished format is?

Red would be smart to develop a way to "online" the footage in REDCine or REDAlert from a final quicktime reference movie or EDL exported from Final Cut, then immediately output a 2K or 4K DPX.

Then we could load them onto a drive, head over to Technicolor/Deluxe and color time. (Or for the DIYers, drop down to uncompressed HD or ProRes and color yourself).

I still can't believe how absolutely painless it was to go from .R3D to editing. No wonder Soderbergh, Carnahan etc are excited... BEYOND the acquisition capabilities of the camera, which we're all by now very aware of.

We're contemplating shooting a project on RED in the near future, and I'd just create an Automater script to take footage, create reference clips, sort them and drag them into Final Cut. Even easier!

Thoughts?

 

[ChristopherKenworthy]

I played around with the 4k R3D files this weekend and discovered that from 4K R3D to editing in quicktime took exactly 1 minute.

Popped the R3D file into RedAlert (didn't have the quicktime reference file the camera makes), clicked on Create Quicktime Reference (High) and dragged the newly created (SUPER FAST! Like 1 second to create) into Final Cut Pro.

I'm Using Final Cut Studio (not 2) and it worked like a charm.

Now my question is... once you've finished cutting your entire show, can you just export a quicktime reference file of the film that will reference the 4k footage? Or is it a matter of media managing and "onlining" the footage in whatever your finished format is?

Red would be smart to develop a way to "online" the footage in REDCine or REDAlert from a final quicktime reference movie or EDL exported from Final Cut, then immediately output a 2K or 4K DPX.

Then we could load them onto a drive, head over to Technicolor/Deluxe and color time. (Or for the DIYers, drop down to uncompressed HD or ProRes and color yourself).

I still can't believe how absolutely painless it was to go from .R3D to editing. No wonder Soderbergh, Carnahan etc are excited... BEYOND the acquisition capabilities of the camera, which we're all by now very aware of.

We're contemplating shooting a project on RED in the near future, and I'd just create an Automater script to take footage, create reference clips, sort them and drag them into Final Cut. Even easier!

Thoughts?

All that is easy, and a good solution for some projects, but not for film-out, or even a really high quality HD master (depending on who you talk to). My understanding is that the QT refs partly decode the wavelet and therefore if you edit in FCP and Export, even if you Export 2K DPX, you're not getting the same quality as you would by exporting the DPX directly from Red Alert or Red Cine. So, although you can get into FCP easily and edit easily, what's the point? Well, soon you'll be able to send a Pull List to RedCine, output the DPX frames you need... and well, it gets complicated and there are lots of threads out there about this.

What many of us would love is that ease-of-use all the way through. Load all your footage, edit away, move over to Color, back to FCP and output without losing image quality along the way. At present, we're all using workarounds. I'm sure this ease of use will come eventually.

 

[John Tissavary]

I played around with the 4k R3D files this weekend and discovered that from 4K R3D to editing in quicktime took exactly 1 minute.

Popped the R3D file into RedAlert (didn't have the quicktime reference file the camera makes), clicked on Create Quicktime Reference (High) and dragged the newly created (SUPER FAST! Like 1 second to create) into Final Cut Pro.

I'm Using Final Cut Studio (not 2) and it worked like a charm.

Now my question is... once you've finished cutting your entire show, can you just export a quicktime reference file of the film that will reference the 4k footage? Or is it a matter of media managing and "onlining" the footage in whatever your finished format is?

Red would be smart to develop a way to "online" the footage in REDCine or REDAlert from a final quicktime reference movie or EDL exported from Final Cut, then immediately output a 2K or 4K DPX.

Then we could load them onto a drive, head over to Technicolor/Deluxe and color time. (Or for the DIYers, drop down to uncompressed HD or ProRes and color yourself).

I still can't believe how absolutely painless it was to go from .R3D to editing. No wonder Soderbergh, Carnahan etc are excited... BEYOND the acquisition capabilities of the camera, which we're all by now very aware of.

We're contemplating shooting a project on RED in the near future, and I'd just create an Automater script to take footage, create reference clips, sort them and drag them into Final Cut. Even easier!

Thoughts?

This is possible now. For conform just generate an EDL and anyone with Scratch (including me - pm me for details) can provide conform & color services via Scratch, then send it on to Technicolor, eFilm, or whoever's doing your filmout (or tape master).

cheers,

jt

 

[TCurren]

My understanding is that the QT refs partly decode the wavelet and therefore if you edit in FCP and Export, even if you Export 2K DPX, you're not getting the same quality as you would by exporting the DPX directly from Red Alert or Red Cine.

In our testing this bears out. The reference QTs are very noisy and the DPX rendered out files are much cleaner.

 

[Benjamin Rowland]

This is possible now. For conform just generate an EDL and anyone with Scratch (including me - pm me for details) can provide conform & color services via Scratch, then send it on to Technicolor, eFilm, or whoever's doing your filmout (or tape master).

cheers,

jt

Will this be possible to do without Scratch in the near future?

 

[John Tissavary]

Will this be possible to do without Scratch in the near future?

You can do it manually with RedCine or RedAlert now, but there's no automated (i.e. conform) way.

It has been stated by Red that there will be improvements to the QT wrapper decode in FCP, but it is not clear whether that will equal the quality of Scratch/RedCine/RedAlert.

It is also part of the plan for RedCine to get 'pull list' features, but I haven't found official word on exactly now this pull list will work and what it will do.

So, for the time being, Scratch is the best way to: 1) get the best images from .r3d 2) manage .r3d conversions (especially on longer form projects).

Right now one alternative is to manually enter each cut into RedCine or RedAlert for file export, which might work for very short material, but would be nearly unmanageable for anything longer or with a large number of cuts.

The other way to do this is export 'selects' up front, prior to editing, then online from those. But there are two drawbacks here - 1) more stress on processing, network, & storage for longer duration 2) Doing the color correction in Scratch allows the debayer process to happen as the last step, which, as I understand it, ensures the highest quality image output.


cheers,

jt