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Workflow questions


Vincent Sweeney

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As I understand it, an editor must have (for $800-$1500) Cineform Prospect to practically work with the SI2K's data. The editor for this upcoming feature is in question as to whether the HD version will work practically or not, as some of the online information seems to contradict itself. He works in Premiere. The production doesn't want to pay for his upgrading to the 4K version since they will end up with an HD master anyway, so this started the questions. Has anyone used the HD version for post? Any other post advice?

 

He is also handling the FX work on this but said he's fine with HD's 10bit 422, for what he has to do.

 

If anyone has any other tips on SI issues they have run into, outside of post, I'd appreciate hearing them too.

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Having to buy the codec to edit SI-2K footage has been one of the big stumbling blocks for the camera - and will probably continue to be so.

As I understand it you can buy Neo4K for US$1,000 which will allow you to edit your 2K footage but doesn't have some of the effects, transitions and other extras of Prospect4K.

You could shoot in 1920x 1080 and use the HD version.

You could also used the two week trial version and transfer all you footage in after effects to another format but you loose all the advantage and ease of editing with the small RAW files with the colour metadata & .look files (& Cineform's new First Light for a pre grade)

 

The Cineform guys often hang out at http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-software-showcase/ it might be worth asking them direct.

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  • 1 month later...
To follow up-

 

I've learned that you must use either Neo4K or Prospect4K. The HD version of Prospect does not support SI's RAW.

 

From what I understand you can edit using the Quicktime files, it's for the finishing and if you want to get back to the RAW that you need Cineform stuff. Or did I miss something?

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From what I understand you can edit using the Quicktime files, it's for the finishing and if you want to get back to the RAW that you need Cineform stuff. Or did I miss something?

 

in my experience with using this camera system, and the images it produces, Cine Form products are not the best software to use for SI-2K raw data. The de-bayering leaves much noise and a softness to the images.

 

I have not seen an image completed to it's fullest capabilities when treated with Cine Form. I have even seen productions download the free Neo player software and use to de bayer then convert. The images produced are nowhere near where they could be.

 

Cine Form software also can not support 12-bit uncompressed. In

my experienced the best images produced from a SI-2K are from well exposed, well black balaned rushes, which have had a technical grade undertaken in Iridas software then rendered from here.

 

There are specialist rendering facilities about which specialise in this.

Edited by Stephen Price
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I've been boring people to death about this situation since Dalsa.

 

This is part of what we might call the New Incompatibility in digital cameras. Obviously, going forward, it's not going to be either desirable nor terribly practical for every camera system to require a specific suite of software; this is what we have standards for, but that's exactly the situation we're in right now. Post houses need to be specifically set up to work with camera X. If you want to include what was Dalsa, there's four major camera systems which produce bayer data and they all have a completely different post workflow - and that doesn't even take into account all the flash and disc formats that are being used which have other challenges all their own.

 

It would be easy to assume that the camera manufacturers are giving us half a camera in order to make the camera body cheaper and easier, which is exactly what they're doing with bayer designs that don't demosaic internally, but this is terribly lazy technically and causes problems exactly like this. If you're going to do this, manufacturers, please come to some sort of conclusion about a standard for it. They'll squeal, of course, that preexisting formats (such as the raw files produced by DSLRs) don't support their pet feature, but I'm afraid it's much more important to have something we can all read without going through all these expensive gymnastics beforehand.

 

Personally I feel strongly that cameras should debayer internally and produce RGB output, even at the expense of battery life, because it disarms the criticism that only proprietary algorithms can get the best out of a bayer sensor (though I'm suspicious about that, again, based on DSLR practice). In the meantime, though, charging a lot of money for the decoders just smacks of building half a camera and expecting us to pay for it twice, and provide our own decoding hardware into the bargain.

 

I'm sure we're at the stage film was in the late 1890s and early part of the 20th century, where there were lots of competing formats and chemistries, and it will self-correct in time. I'd just have hoped that we'd be able to preempt this situation happening again, but unfortunately it looks like, with crushing predictability, every camera company has decided that their format is going to be The One.

 

P

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