The Editblog

At this point in time in the life cycle of the RED ONE Digital Cinema camera, the real bottle neck in the post production workflow (at least for me) is the process, and even the ability, to conform an offline edit into an online edit for finishing. If you look at a basic workflow: shoot > offline edit > conform offline > online edit > color correction/grading it’s getting to that online that is causing the most pain. Now … we are living in a world where the offline to online conform is become more and more of a dinosaur. A Final Cut Pro workstation with an AJA Kona card or an Avid Adrenaline can mean that a program never has to go back to a finishing system because those machines have capable finishing tools built in. Codecs like Apple’s ProRes HQ and Avid’s DNxHD help make that possible as well. But for me and my facility, we send most of our projects to a true online. As a “creative offline editor,” I prefer to spend my time tackling the creative build from scratch and letting an experienced online guy worry about bringing the job home to make sure it meets all the broadcast standards as well as the final nit-picking of graphics and animations by the client.

But getting RED projects to that online step can grind the whole process to a screeching halt. Now many people are thinking, “hey, I finish RED jobs all the time.” From my understanding, observations and study, the best finishing currently available in mid-March 2008 is on an Assimilate Scratch system. Edit lists pulled from your offline can be brought into Scratch and then conformed from your original raw .R3D files generated by the RED camera. That’s as good as you could want. Unfortunately, if your market is anything like mine, there aren’t a lot of Scratch systems out there. Another solution, and probably the most popular at this point, is finishing right from Final Cut Pro. Maybe you edited right off of the Quicktime reference files created by the camera or Red Alert! or maybe you converted all of your footage to ProRes but either way once you have moved beyond the raw .R3D files then you never really go back to them except for the occasional reframe or tweak in RedCine. At this point you do have a lot of options. Out to tape with ProRes and color correction from that. Export uncompressed Quicktimes for finishing on another system. Export tiff or targa sequences for finishing on another system. Or maybe a trip into Apple’s Color (good luck with that one!). Oh, and there are a whole host of color grading options right inside FCP as well.

But still, getting back as close as you can to the .R3D files for the final finishing and, more importantly, color grading means there is that much more quality and latitude in the image to work with. If you can get your edit back to the .R3D files then you can generate DPX sequences of your edit that can go to any number of systems for the final finishing. Second to the .R3D files, DPXs are a great choice. RED provides a free tool in RedCine to allow the editor to take the .R3D files and generate DPXs (and many other file formats) from them.

But once you have all your edit decisions from the offline approved and ready to go, how do you get the edit decisions from the offline into RedCine to make files of only your offline edits? That’s where the bottle-neck hits. There currently doesn’t seem to be any easy, reliable and bullet-proof way to do this. RedCine can import an XML. Final Cut Pro can export an XML. This seems like a no-brainer but they are different flavors of XML so it’s not that simple. There is a utility floating around written by Ian Bloom called RedTrip that can convert the FCP flavor to the RedCine flavor. It works pretty well but it isn’t bullet proof. Depending on how your files are named, where they are on your hard drives, what kind of name and characters are in your directory names and what kind of things you might have done in your offline edit then RedCine might not be able to load a RedTrip generated XML. It should be noted that the RedTrip creator is a working Director of Photography and not a RED software engineer who wrote the RedTrip program for the good of the RED community so there’s probably only so much development and support he can do! Though he does a lot at the Reduser.net forums. Also, RedTrip is end-of-life as he works on a better, more intuitive product. I’ve seen a bit of what he is working on and it will be a lot better. This whole problem will get better as there are also several other developers out there working on tools to help with this very bottle-neck. (If you need a beta tester then please let me know). NAB 2008 is only a month away so I’m sure we will see solutions introduced there, if not sooner. The product is still new so some of these bottle-necks are understandable. But I know a lot of people who are holding off until this issue is solved.

So if you have to online a RED edit and you have to get back to the .R3D files in RedCine, at this point, the best and most reliable way seems to be a “by hand” method. Take your edit decisions and timecode numbers and clip names from the offline, load clips into RedCine and then export whatever format you need. Clip by clip or batch by batch. It won’t be fun as RedCine is quite a bear to work with but it might be the only choice. It might take a long while as RedCine is prone to crash and if you have a large edit then there will be a lot of back and forth between your offline tool, your media drives and RedCine. Of course how one might charge a client for this type of conform is another question indeed. I don’t even think I’d call this step a true “conform.” A RedCine-rebuild might be a better term. In fact, that’s the term I’m going to coin right now: the RedCine-rebuild! That might just become a new step in the RED camera workflow.

shoot > offline edit > RedCine-rebuild > conform offline > online edit > color correction/grading

If you’ve got a magic solution to this RED post-production bottle neck, hit the comments below and let the world know. You might just be a hero to many.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 5:17 am and is filed under Editing, RED. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.