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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 :)

Why does everything come into Adobe flat?

Chris Chitaroni

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So I posted about this a few years back when it first started happening - and I can't believe its still a thing.

I've been shooting on RED since I bought my EPIC-X back in like 2013. And many cameras later I'm now shooting on a V-Raptor I love R3D files. They're a dream to edit in Adobe. But then a few years ago when they introduced the new pipeline, all of a sudden instead of coming into adobe looking "as shot" - clips came in looking like a flat colour profile. And of course its only a few clicks to go and take it back to my desired colour space and gamma curve, but it's always a pain in the ass.

I complained about this either on here, or on an Adobe forum and had a few people chirp me telling me that this was a better workflow for colourists. My argument was - most projects don't have the luxury of having a colourist on board. And in fact when I have to hand raw footage over to a client, this becomes a big issue because they bring the footage in to Adobe the first time and I ALWAYS get a call asking why everything looks grey and muddy.

Today for example. Working with a seasoned producer on a corporate gig, she's not someone who shies away from doing her own editing, I assumed she'd know what to do with the footage but she calls me 2 hours after wrap in a panic because she's gotta deliver dailies to the client and she says everything is "In S-Log" (lol)

So I had to open my computer, film a quick little "how to" for her, and sure enough we got it all sorted. But that's a headache, and it definitely left a negative impression on her towards RED.

This is only an Adobe problem. Final cut doesn't do this. Resolve doesn't do this (as far as I know). Why is Adobe doing this? It seems like an ass-backwards approach. It would take a seasoned colourist moments to switch a card full of clips back to a flat profile to grade, but a newbie looks at this footage and its a real time suck to figure out. Just a bad user experience overall.
 
I've been having issues with this on my first feature (which is almost, almost done!) and often After Effects would just start glitching out, flipping the image, or "forget" what my clip is supposed to be and I have to reset it in the advanced Interpret Footage menu. My CDNG converted to OpenEXR footage from our early Blackmagic Pocket 4K has issues with this as well from time to time but we didn't film too much with it as it came out during the last phase of reshoots. I don't mind it so much but I have had issues with adjusting ISO values as well as that seems to mess up Adobe's whole system if I save it that way. It's been a few versions since we started but I haven't tried it again on the new version just in case as things have finally gotten pretty stable.
 
Just a little update, GPU acceleration is also a constant issue, went from Quadro RTX 8000 to Geforce 4080 in the hopes of better performance/stability, same problems even with studio drivers. Change Project Settings --> Mercury Software Only, it's currently the only way to go in my book.
 
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