Marc Wielage
Well-known member
Here's a terrific article on Frame.io's website detailing the workflow choices (dailies formats, operating systems, editing software, and so on) made by the dozen or so films that led the Oscar race this past year.
https://blog.frame.io/2018/03/05/oscar-2018-workflows/
One interesting quote that stood out for me:
Although it’s becoming easier and easier to edit in 4K (and these productions certainly had the budgets for high-end computers), all 11 teams chose to edit in standard 1920 x 1080 resolution. For readers who are used to working on smaller productions where the entire postproduction process happens at the same facility, this might be surprising. These films were all captured or scanned at 4K or higher, and the budgets were plenty large enough to pay for top-of-the-line hardware, so why not edit 4K? If people are editing feature films in raw 6K, surely it can be done in 4K without too much trouble.
If you consider the workflows of these types of films, though, a 4K edit still doesn’t make much sense. Before we ask why these films wouldn’t edit in 4K, we first we have to ask ourselves, “what are the benefits of editing in 4K?”
The primary benefit for most people who edit in 4K is simply the fact that they can skip the offline editing process and do all of their work directly on the camera-original files. Although it’s very easy to design a smooth offline workflow, and all of the major editing packages support it, there is some nice simplicity in avoiding the need to transcode for an offline workflow. If you are doing your color correction and finishing inside of your editor (which is increasingly possible), you have the added significant advantage of being able to move fluidly between phases of your postproduction process. You can spend more time on temporary color-correction as you are editing, knowing that you can continue that work later rather than having to start over again. You can also make edits to the film during the finishing phase, without the headaches of a reverse conform process.
But these feature films, even the low budget ones, all used a traditional offline workflow that involved a handoff from the editors to a separate finishing team at another facility. So there was no possibility of the kind of all-in-one workflows that are now becoming feasible.
As amazing as the iMac Pros and Z840s are for renderless 4K editing, there are still plenty of hiccups and slow-downs involved with editing a significant film in 4K. Temp VFX and color-correction can quickly choke playback on a system that’s not perfectly tuned, and render times stretch out.
The other significant disadvantage to a 4K edit for these films is the size of the storage required, even if you edit off of proxy files instead of the original camera files. At different points in the process, the teams behind Baby Driver, Three Billboards, and The Shape of Water had a complete copy of the film running off of a single hard drive connected to a portable laptop, which would not have been possible had they edited in 4K.
A lot of food for thought here.
https://blog.frame.io/2018/03/05/oscar-2018-workflows/
One interesting quote that stood out for me:
Although it’s becoming easier and easier to edit in 4K (and these productions certainly had the budgets for high-end computers), all 11 teams chose to edit in standard 1920 x 1080 resolution. For readers who are used to working on smaller productions where the entire postproduction process happens at the same facility, this might be surprising. These films were all captured or scanned at 4K or higher, and the budgets were plenty large enough to pay for top-of-the-line hardware, so why not edit 4K? If people are editing feature films in raw 6K, surely it can be done in 4K without too much trouble.
If you consider the workflows of these types of films, though, a 4K edit still doesn’t make much sense. Before we ask why these films wouldn’t edit in 4K, we first we have to ask ourselves, “what are the benefits of editing in 4K?”
The primary benefit for most people who edit in 4K is simply the fact that they can skip the offline editing process and do all of their work directly on the camera-original files. Although it’s very easy to design a smooth offline workflow, and all of the major editing packages support it, there is some nice simplicity in avoiding the need to transcode for an offline workflow. If you are doing your color correction and finishing inside of your editor (which is increasingly possible), you have the added significant advantage of being able to move fluidly between phases of your postproduction process. You can spend more time on temporary color-correction as you are editing, knowing that you can continue that work later rather than having to start over again. You can also make edits to the film during the finishing phase, without the headaches of a reverse conform process.
But these feature films, even the low budget ones, all used a traditional offline workflow that involved a handoff from the editors to a separate finishing team at another facility. So there was no possibility of the kind of all-in-one workflows that are now becoming feasible.
As amazing as the iMac Pros and Z840s are for renderless 4K editing, there are still plenty of hiccups and slow-downs involved with editing a significant film in 4K. Temp VFX and color-correction can quickly choke playback on a system that’s not perfectly tuned, and render times stretch out.
The other significant disadvantage to a 4K edit for these films is the size of the storage required, even if you edit off of proxy files instead of the original camera files. At different points in the process, the teams behind Baby Driver, Three Billboards, and The Shape of Water had a complete copy of the film running off of a single hard drive connected to a portable laptop, which would not have been possible had they edited in 4K.
A lot of food for thought here.
