Getting Useable Off-Line Footage

[Andrew McCarrick]

If I were to shoot in FilmStream mode, how would get I useable white balanced footage for use in an offline edit?

[Keith Mottram]

If I were to shoot in FilmStream mode, how would get I useable white balanced footage for use in an offline edit?

 

there are many different ways, depending on how you record your footage. if you shoot to dpx then you could use glue tools or something of its ilk and batch convert to qt's for edit in compressor, with a simple color correction applied within compressor. or if you record to sr you could play out into your edit suite with a LUT box to rebalance. Other options may be possible with s2/ codex toasters so it really depends on your recording end.

[Andrew McCarrick]

there are many different ways, depending on how you record your footage. if you shoot to dpx then you could use glue tools or something of its ilk and batch convert to qt's for edit in compressor, with a simple color correction applied within compressor. or if you record to sr you could play out into your edit suite with a LUT box to rebalance. Other options may be possible with s2/ codex toasters so it really depends on your recording end.

 

We're recording Codex Digital (the non-portable unit), all editing will be done on Windows based systems.

[Phil Rhodes]

Oh you're in for some fun ;)

 

What're you cutting on? It can be fun to make software that's available on windows cut any damn thing and keep it 10 bit, though it can be done.

 

"Auto levels" tends to do a vaguely viewable job if you're just after an offline.

 

P

[Andrew McCarrick]

Oh you're in for some fun ;)

 

What're you cutting on? It can be fun to make software that's available on windows cut any damn thing and keep it 10 bit, though it can be done.

 

"Auto levels" tends to do a vaguely viewable job if you're just after an offline.

 

P

 

 

Avid Media Composer (DNxHD 220X) and Avid DS Nitris.

[Phil Rhodes]

I assume you're using the DNx as an offline. I'm trying to think of something you could write up as a scripted operation here so you'll have to bear with me if it sounds a bit tenuous.

 

You could in mount your Viper DPX in Blackmagic's Framelink software, which will turn it into an AVI. You could then pipe that into an AVIsynth script which colour-corrected it back to something vaguely sane, then use ffmpeg to turn the resulting frameserved AVI into a DNxHD quicktime, if Avid will read that, or convert it into something it will read. I have not used the ffmpeg DNx encoder but it was written by someone I vaguely know at the behest of BBC research, so it's worth a try. You will unavoidably end up with 8-bit offlines with this approach, since AVIsynth doesn't know about 10-bit, but that's probably acceptable - and this can be done for almost free.

 

I'm not sure there will be a way of automagically getting timecode through this system. You may end up having to get an intern to re-timecode all your imported clips (you could easily put it in the filename so it's at least viewable by eye). I'm not sure what formats a Media Composer would support for importing a text list of timecodes; you may be able to sort it out that way.

 

This presumes you are going to offline the DNx and then online in uncompressed DPX. If you want to make a high-bitrate DNx your online, you will need to find some other approach as this will not maintain your 10-bit image nor or do a good enough un-viperisation. Getting this sort of thing to work out is likely to involve doing it as a rather hairy collection of big iron devices - you could mount the DPX on a clipster and have it VTR emulate while your Avid does a batch capture. This will cost a lot of money.

 

P