Working on the Crimson Workflow
By S Simmons. Filed in Editing |
The lack of an easy way to conform your offline edit of RED footage via a simple, proven and error-proof method is what I see as the biggest hurdle in the who RED camera world. Converted ProRes HQ files are wonderful, look very good, have nice latitude for color grading and are easy to work with but for the absolute best quality that the RED camera can deliver you need to get back to the native .R3D files and do your final conform and color grading from them. It is this hurdle that Crimson Workflow is trying to jump.
Crimson Workflow looks to be the first real method for making this happen. I downloaded the demo version the day after the developer Ian Bloom posted it. Ian has been a fixture on the reduser.net forums and has been trying to work out this problem for many weeks. Just from the late hours he’s been online at Reduser one can see he’s put in a lot of time trying to fix a problem that the developers at RED don’t seem to be too interesting in fixing themselves. When Crimson Workflow went online it did so as a version 0 (zero) release. It’s not at version 1 yet so there are still bugs to work out. Should Ian be charging for the release? I’ve heard some debate both ways but Ian himself has said not to purchase the full version until the demo is working for you. Makes perfect sense. If the demo on any piece of software doesn’t work then why buy the full version? And like most software, as it gets into the hands of actual users and all the different configurations of systems then other bugs will crop up. It’s the nature of the business.
I think Crimson Workflow will work in time. I worked with Ian via iChat on both Friday and Saturday trying to pound out bugs. I would do stuff, it wouldn’t work, I’d report the problems and then send Ian files so he could see what was wrong. He would do some troubleshooting and coding and recompiling and send me a new build of the software. They we’d try the whole thing again. Try that with Microsoft or Apple or Avid! It’s that kind of dedication to a product and belief in something revolutionary like the RED camera that might make all this work in the end.
Tuesday, March 25th 2008 at 7:14 am
As someone coming from the open source world, this is a pretty funny post to me. Individual developer attention? Where I come from, using open source software, that’s the default mode of support. After working a while in the production business I’m getting more used to the mindset that every little utility and plugin costs money (even if it’s something that should have worked in the first place), but it still doesn’t feel right.
If Ian released the source code to his program, other developers could help him fix bugs, add features, make it easier to use, even translate it to other languages. A community of developers, all able to hack on the code, will be more productive than one over-worked forum member. For instance if he were to get a big project, development would languish and you’d have to wait until he has some free time again before progress could resume.
Sure he wouldn’t be making tons of money off the program, but it sounds like money is not really the motivating factor in the first place. This sounds like one case where the benefits of openness outweigh the dollars he’d be giving up. (And he could always solicit donations, that works too.)
Tuesday, March 25th 2008 at 8:52 am
whenever i hear crimson and flow in the same sentence…
Tuesday, March 25th 2008 at 10:01 am
Oooooo …. matt….. you didn’t go there!
Saturday, April 5th 2008 at 10:32 am
I think that people who suggest that a package should become “open-source” are selfish. The guy just put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into a product that solves a problem. And now people want him to give it away for free, source-code and all, because they are:
A) Too lazy to solve the problem themselves
and
B) Too cheap to support the development.
If this was an open source project from day 1, that would be a different story. But it isn’t. They guy is asking to be compensated for his work. But to demand that a product be open-sourced after it has been proven to be useful, is pretty lame. Especially when people plan on using this product to make money for themselves.
bob.