John Tissavary

Happy New Year, all! I'm offering a 20% discount on my Scratch suite & freelance colorist rates for a limited time. Visit my website for more info and several 'before & after' demos. I work in SD, HD, 2k, 4k from film scans and digitally acquired footage. I have tons of experience with Red, and can simplify & speed up any Red production's post workflow. Cheers, John Tissavary TRAkTION* los angeles

After Effects and Shake can both handle DPX conversions to Quicktime. Those would be the tools of choice for me on a Mac. Shake would be my tool of choice for greenscreen work on the Mac, unless I had access to Nuke. After Effects is also an excellent package for greenscreen, but not my personal preference. I would handle your project as follows: 1) Complete scans of all your footage (it's short, and you're getting it free) to DPX. Hopefully your DPX files will contain keycode metadata. 2) Create prores hq copies of the footage using After Effects, Shake, or Nuke depending on what is available to you. 3) Edit in Final Cut or other NLE of choice. 4) From your editorial cut, note the in/out points of your visual effects plates (greenscreen, etc...). I almost always do a primary color correction on the plates before exporting them for vfx composite, but it's possible to avoid that step if the images are not to far off of where you want them to be after grading. 5) In Shake, After Effects, or Nuke, use the in/out frames from your notes to import the correct DPX sequences. You will have better results pulling keys from DPX than from Prores. Render the visual effects composites to prores hq. 6) Import prores vfx composites to Final Cut and drop them in place of the un-composited original clips. 7) Export to Color for final color correction. I'm a Scratch colorist and haven't used Color, so I'm not sure of the exact steps, but it should be relatively straightforward, and there are a lot of documents and tutuorials on the subject. 8) Render a final version to a file format of your choice. Many facilities can lay ProRes HQ to HD tape like HDCAM, HDCAM-SR or whatever HD format you decide on. cheers, John Tissavary producer / director / colorist TRAkTION* Los Angeles www.traktionfilms.com

Even a 2k finish benefits severely from a full 4k debayer. Do a test of each - full vs. standard processing (same in RedCine & Scratch) - the noise characteristics are superior in a full debayer, and that lowers the noise floor for more DR. With build 16 it's slightly less an issue, but it's still a very noticeable difference. I think most who are investing in Scratch see that at the typical $250/hr and up rates, if you have a steady stream of work that needs to be conformed, graded, and processed at a high level it's an investment that can definitely pay off. Add to that the benefit of rapid online conform and you're adding time savings right there. For some setups FCP/Crimson/RedCine is a better choice for financial reasons. But if you wish to have a complete set of grading tools, an efficient and simple (read fast) conform, and the ability to lay off up to 2k in real time to VTR (like HDCAM-SR, for instance), then Scratch is at this time the way to go. Obviously not every individual or production entity is going to benefit from dropping the $$$ - you have to do the math first. But I'd also like to think that most people ready to drop that much money are going to get their calculator finger dirty first. By the way, the system/software costs for Scratch are overestimated in this thread - I know 'cause I've bought the software and built the system. The only way to know how much Scratch really will cost in the end is to speak with a sales rep and put the system together for your needs (its modular). cheers, John T. TRAkTION* *commercials *music video *digital post Los Angeles http://www.traktionfilms.com

Rendering the 4k depends on the machine - cpu number / speed & disk subsystems make a huge difference for sure. My quad 3ghz machine w. a simple firewire 800 dual disk raid 0 (not sufficient for 4k dpx!!!!) renders @ 1 frame of 4k per second. I'd guess a large part of that is disk i/o. Put it on a san or local system that can do at least 1.3 GB per second so the disk writes are insignificant, and I'd guess under 1 second per frame. Add a skulltrail dual quad overclocked to 4.0 ghz and I'll bet it'll be faster :) I'm confident that soon we'll see blade render servers w. gpu/cpu combos that work for systems like Scratch and can perform a distributed render to be able to pump out footage in better-than-realtime. That, to me, is the only realy production answer to processing Red. Doing this stuff on single workstations is very inefficient from a lot of standpoints. And as far as the cost thing goes - you know the old truism: 'good, fast, cheap... pick any two.' cheers, jt

Frankly, all post production workflows are works in progress... but since Red is so new, there are definitely many questions to be answered about post production before any producer, DP, etc... can make an informed choice. That said, the answers are there, and they're far simpler than one might think. We use FCP for offline edit and Scratch for online conform and color finishing, plus other packages as needed for vfx and other types of processing. Currently the redcode component of quicktime is only available on OSX, but that will change at some point. So, it's possible to edit offlines instantly using the camera generated (or RedAlert generated) proxy wrappers. Finishing needs to be done in a system that can do a full debayer on the .r3d raw files, right now Scratch, RedAlert/Redline, and RedCine are your best (and only) tools. Our proven, end-to-end process is as follows: Footage from Red cameras is copied/backed up onto at least two hard drives and two LTO-3 tapes. We do this as the cards or hard drives filter in on set. LTO-3 tapes are saved in two locations for safety, and hd's go to editorial & finishing. One HD is mounted on the FCP workstation (macpro dual core) and the proxies are used to create a complete offline edit. Once finished a cmx3600 EDL is generated. This EDL is loaded into Scratch, where the second HD (with identical .r3d files and structure) is mounted, and the conform is processed very quickly. This is usually an automatic process, but there are times where manual intervention is required. Once conformed we go through the grading/finishing process, including generating plates for vfx and then bringing those composited vfx shots back into Scratch. Then Scratch is used to either playback in real time to a tape deck, or to render out to dpx, exr, quicktime, or whatever is needed at whatever resolution and bit-depth is appropriate for the final deliverables. Rendering in Scratch will yield superior results since at this time it is not possible to do a full resolution debayer in real-time, and only a very few systems will playback 2k full mode in realtime due to the heavy cpu load from debayering. As far as what systems are supported? For FCP, RedCine, RedAlert only intel macs, and I would suggest a quad or octo core. For Scratch you'll need something fast and reliable, I suggest you contact Assimilate to get some idea of the requirements. But since it's a software based system you can configure your own, depending on your needs. Scratch requires an Nvidia Quadro FX 3500 minimum, but 4700 is recommended. This software does just about everything in the GPU, so there's no getting around this hardware requirement. Add to that fast processors for debayer (I use quad 3ghz intel, but octocore / skull trail is the latest-greatest). For RedCine & RedAlert you can check the Reduser.net boards - there are a lot of discussions detailing what does and doesn't work. I don't use this software, so can't be all that helpful. Hope this helped. cheers, John T. Producer / Director / Colorist TRAkTION* *commercials *music video *digital post Los Angeles