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Best/Cost Efficient RED Workflow


Jamie Metzger

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I have a shoot coming up. Looking for options considering how many there are.

 

Plans are to shoot 4k RC 36.

 

I know a lot of how have shot and worked with this footage many different ways, and I'm hoping you can offer up an easy manageable way to work/color correct/ and deliver the project.

 

Thanks,

Jamie

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I have a shoot coming up. Looking for options considering how many there are.

 

Plans are to shoot 4k RC 36.

 

I know a lot of how have shot and worked with this footage many different ways, and I'm hoping you can offer up an easy manageable way to work/color correct/ and deliver the project.

 

What kind of project? A feature vs corporate video vs short film vs a commercial all have different ways to post. More details would help. Also, what system you are going to post on would help.

 

Matthew

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I have a shoot coming up. Looking for options considering how many there are.

 

Plans are to shoot 4k RC 36.

 

I know a lot of how have shot and worked with this footage many different ways, and I'm hoping you can offer up an easy manageable way to work/color correct/ and deliver the project.

 

Thanks,

Jamie

 

 

If this is for film out there is no cheap way of going about it. You'll almost certainly need to go to a DI facility because of color managament needs.

 

If this is for SD/HD video you could do it in FCP and Color. Some pitfalls of Color are documented at reduser.net.

 

If you don't care about offline/online approach you could work in either FCP or Media Composer by using either proxy files or encoding new Quicktime movies with REDrushes.

 

There are really many permutations depending on what you're intending to do with this material. It's hard to give you one-size-fits-all solution. A workflow that works for one production may make no sense to your set of circumstances. PM me if you want to discuss the specifics.

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For HD targeted projects, one very practical workflow is:

 

1) Shoot 4KHD

2) Throw a decent looking grade on everything in RedCine.

3) Export as "standard" quality (half-res debayer) to ProRes HQ at 1080p.

4) Edit in Final Cut.

5) Depending on project, maybe re-export some clips from a full quality debayer (this particularly helps with noisy low-light footage).

6) Color correct in FCP (with Colorista plug-in) or Color.

 

The half-res debayer is fairly quick -- 2-3 hours per hour of footage on an 8-core Mac Pro. And the rest of this workflow can be done on a MacBook Pro laptop (at least if you have a full-sized external FW800 hard drive; laptop hard drives aren't quite fast enough for 1080p ProRes). The quality is more than good enough for most HD deliverables.

 

If you need to deliver for a theatrical release of some sort, everything gets more complex an expensive, of course. Options at that point range from Final Cut + Glue Tools (which, particularly if you build your own RAIDs, can give you a pretty cheap DPX workflow) up through FCP/Scratch workflows... and of course you can just process everything to DPX and feed it into a typical high-end DI workflow. Apple is supposedly working on native R3D file support of some sort in Final Cut Pro and Color, which could open the door to inexpensive workflows where you work with compressed files right up until the final output, which clearly would have huge benefits for the budget-conscious. (Scratch supports compressed workflows now, but isn't particularly cheap by the standards of the desktop software + commodity hardware crowd.)

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Apple is supposedly working on native R3D file support of some sort in Final Cut Pro and Color, which could open the door to inexpensive workflows where you work with compressed files right up until the final output, which clearly would have huge benefits for the budget-conscious.

 

I thought this was suppose to happen two NAB's ago...

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I thought the simple way to do it was to take the r3d proxies run them through compressor (or log and transfer), edit those qts, send edl to one of those redthingy programmes (redalert? redcine?) export 2K dpx files, import those into color alongside a cut list from final cut. would this not work?

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Hey Jamie,

 

Not sure if you shot yet, but I'm sure you probably know by now that RED has released FCP native support (makes quicktime wrappers) but works really fast and you get full native color support in Color to where you can color there, or spit out DPX.

 

By the way, hope your doing well man :)

 

Cheers

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