The Editblog

 

Everyone knows that the RED cameras are finally shipping and seem to be arriving on a somewhat regular basis out in the world. It’s a pretty cool piece of technology. There have been lots and lots and lots of stuff written about it so there’s no sense in recapping anything about the camera itself here as we are concerned with the post production. And this is where things can come to a grinding halt. A REDache just might ensue if you expect buttery-smooth post production workflow that takes your raw RED files and gives you finished deliverables of your program. After a couple of weeks working with footage and trying to find a workflow and doing this and that …. it can be done but it’s not easy. Yet that is. There’s word and rumors that there are more tools on the horizon to make RED post flow more smoothly. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of the tools and I think they will make it easier. Until then we’re stuck with what we’ve got.

After you shoot your RED footage you’ve got native RED files identified by the .R3D suffix. There’s not that much out there that can read an .R3D file natively. Final Cut Pro has “RED support” but that comes in a Quicktime codec that allows any Quicktime application to see Quicktime reference movies (or proxies as they are called) created by the RED camera or a free piece of software called RedAlert. It’s important to understand these are Quicktime reference movies so it’s best to have the .R3D files in the same folder for best performance. With the ref movies you can pretty much do with them what you would with any Quicktime.

Edit in FCP, look at them in Quicktime player, whatever. There’s a small amount of .R3D files out on the Internet for anyone to download and play with. They are big files so an overnight download might be needed. In fact everything you might want to know about RED is available out on the net. From the Reduser.net community to video tutorials to the official RED support page. It’s all out there for those willing to take the time to soak it all in. Other workflows are being tested and RED even has their own workflow page up as well. I was fortunate enough to get some fresh footage from Bret and the folks at DR&A, the first rental house in Nashville to get cameras in hand. I found that the Quicktime proxies that came out of the camera had questionable performance and always had a long pause as I went to use them as they always had to relink themselves to the originals. Once I made new proxies with RedAlert then they worked fine.

The big question in my mind was what to do with that footage once you have edited. You need to conform that edit to get to a finished program. Currently, conforming is more of a by hand process. This is where the REDache might begin to develop. Don’t expect to quickly do a full offline edit in your NLE of choice and spit out a list for conforming in RedCine then output to tape. You could do a full hi-def edit in Final Cut Pro and finish there but you will need to export all of your footage from the .R3D files into a compatible hi-def Quicktime format like ProRes. If you want to offline with the proxies created then be prepared for some degree of performance hit based on the speed of your system or the complexity of the edit. To conform and online the edit it could be a matter of loading all of the original .R3D files into RedCine, doing any kind of color correction or grading that you want, exporting the pieces of each clip you used in your codec of choice and bringing those clips back into FCP for final finishing, including color grading in Apple’s Color. It’s a very “by hand” process at this point as the tools just don’t seem to really be there just yet to effectively communicate well between any of these applications and RedCine. Once in RedCine then you can export to a number of formats including DPX files or a TIFF sequence. With this you can take super high resolution files back to a large number of finishing options. Or you could find or buy an Assimilate Scratch system that can do a full conform on the .R3D files natively from what I understand. So you see, there really are a large number of options for post and finishing. There has to be as there are a lot of projects shooting on RED. You just might experience a REDache getting there. It seems to me that at this point the RED workflow isn’t for the faint of heart or the technically illiterate. It will take some work to get your program / film / video / whatever from concept to completion but it can be done. That’s what hiring the post production professionals are for!

If you are feeling adventuresome then there are some tools out there to help with the whole list / conform thing. I’ve had great success with RedTrip from Ian Bloom. It should be noted that Ian is a cinematographer, programmer and RED enthusiast (as opposed to a big software development company) who has written a script to convert an FCP XML into an XML that is essentially a pull list for RedCine that will only pull the footage you used in your edit. It’s this kind enthusiasm that is energizing to see with the community surrounding this camera. Ian has spent a lot of hours working on this script to help create what might soon be the best workflow. As much as we would like it to all to work perfectly we just can’t expect it to be bullet-proof right out of the box but Ian is constantly revising. The whole RED world is a work in progress so if your clients know this then that will make life easier for everyone. Less REDaches for all!

Is this all there is to say about post production with RED? Absolutely not. I’ve got a long list of different workflow methods to test and try (I didn’t even mention Avid!) and it’ll be a long road ahead as we work on current ideas and develop new ones. As new tools are released for RED post then many (if not all) of those ideas will change. The camera only began shipping in Fall 2007 and in “beta” form at that! And it’s now Winter 2008. It really hasn’t been out that long. NAB 2008 might bring about a while sea change of ideas in RED post production. But it looks to be for real and is creating some great images in the hands of talented artists. The hype may be right … the RED revolution has begun.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Editing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.