Designing round trip

Matthew Kane · May 5, 2013

I'm a DP and lighting tech by trade, so forgive me for what seems to me like kind of a noob question.

I'm trying to rough out a round trip (shot-edit-vfx-color) for a short trailer with some significant CGI work--basically trying to knit together the resources of 2-3 freelancers, keeping image integrity, maintaining a reasonable turnaround time, and all the while keeping us from pulling our hair out.

We'd be shooting Epic raw. I will have a post supervisor/coeditor, but I want to make sure I have a little more background before we sit down to do this for real.

The post sup/editor is on Mac, and I'd likely be doing the rough assemble in an offline edit--on my not-yet-built windows machine with Adobe premiere (or maybe even lightworks--not that I need to make this more difficult by learning new software).

I suppose the picture edit goes back to the post sup's machine to conform, and then from him, to the animator for compositing. Or does it?

Our animator is in Windows 7. She models in Maya, and composites in AE. While we'll be delivering in 1080P, I'm really pushing for an all 4k workflow if possible.

Then (I think) it has to go back to the post supervisor's Mac pro for final color, and for the deliverables (a youtube video, and cDNG).

--after speaking to the animator, I realized I don't know how to deliver footage to her for compositing. The post sup is pretty much a one man editorial department for a small ad company, so he doesn't have to bridge a bunch of contractors with different filesystems or codecs in his day to day.

A simple flowchart or list with the important bulletpoints would help, and I'll reveal my ignorance through follow up questions as necessary. Sorry again if this is nonsense, I'm a lot better with things that have three wires and a halogen bulb.

Best,

Matt

Brian Drysdale · May 5, 2013

What program is the post supervisor using?

Edited May 5, 2013 by Brian Drysdale

Matthew Kane · May 5, 2013

I believe he'd be using RedcineX for pretty much everything. Really, jumping between filesystems (MacOS extended journaled and NTFS) seems to be the big obstacle... which seems ridiculous, but I just haven't had to do it before.

Brian Drysdale · May 6, 2013

I can't see the differing operating systems being a problem, I'd have thought it's more a matter of ensuring your programs can exchange files, since all the programs you mention can be used on either mac or PC (Lightworks is a work in progress in that regard.

Is your post guy going to be editing on RedcineX? I assume you personally are only editing proxies. You exporting Prores could be an issue on a PC.

Edited May 6, 2013 by Brian Drysdale

Matthew Kane · May 12, 2013

Right, it seems like we just need to agree on a lossless intermediate format. I'll see if I can get the animator and post sup together with me and we'll hash it out.

RedcineX pro, yep.

Thanks for the reply Brian!