Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterTrials of an Indie Red Post Workflow
Aug 12, 2008 9:58 AM, By Craig Erpelding
Director Chad Bonanno was recently called into action for an independent music video for the band Here Is Why for its latest release “The Getaway”—a project in which Bonanno was ready to have shot with the Panasonic AG-HVX200. But when John Lands and his newly acquired Red Digital Cinema Red One cameras stepped into the DP role, the workflow shifted with little revolt from Panasonic’s P2 to the unknown intricacies of Redcode RAW.
While many users have previously stated some issues with Red’s Mysterium 12-megapixel bayer-patterned CMOS sensor (which has nearly the same active area as a Super 35mm film frame shot as 16:9)—mainly rolling shutter artifacts or greatly overexposed highlights rendering purple or gray—Bonanno’s team found as first-time Red users their problems were to come not in production, but in post.
For “The Getaway” (the music video can be seen on Bonanno’s Reel-Exchange profile), they decided to capture footage at two different frame rates on separate solid-store magazines attached to the camera. One magazine housed the 24P 4K footage and the other 120fps 2K footage. During their cramped shoot schedule of two days in Louisiana (in which they amassed 400 clips), Bonanno would offload the magazines every 30 minutes, putting the footage onto a FireWire drive—including the three different proxy files of the Red footage: small, medium, and large QuickTime files (as of press, only compatible for viewing on Macs). These QuickTime proxies from the Red posed the first stumbling block for the production.
“Those proxies were originally what I was counting on to offline (edit) the video,” Bonanno says. “When I got to L.A. and started loading up the proxies, they wouldn’t play back in realtime. The main problem was it wouldn’t play back in Final Cut, so there was no way to offline the footage to get an idea of what shots we wanted to use. So that first issue forced me to convert all the footage—which means I had to do the first color correction on all the footage before we edited.”
Bonanno contacted Red who acknowledged the problem with QuickTime version 7.4 specifically—which they seem to have resolved. It should be noted that the Redcode RAW variable bitrate wavelet codec workflow does necessitate the footage go through a demosaic algorithm before it is viewable. On the higher-quality end, this can be achieved via the Red Cine or RedAlert software, but the company has also developed a QuickTime component allowing fast demosaic to occur in realtime—resulting in use in QuickTime-supported applications without the need for transcoding.
Because the post work for “The Getaway” occurred in May—during what Bonanno jokes as “a really bad month for QuickTime”—they decided to go forward with the first color correction before even seeing most of the footage. They also found that doing some small touches in Adobe After Effects caused for the 64-bit 8-core MacPro workstation to crash after the 10th second of a clip. At that point they converted all of the Red footage over to DVCPRO720—choosing that over the more-favored ProRes compression format, which was also churning up system issues.
“Once I made it to that conversion to DVCPRO everything was smooth sailing,” Bonanno says. “It was the Redcode codec that really screwed me up. It just did not play—it didn’t like other software. It crashed other software constantly. Since I was only using RedAlert, which is the clip-by-clip software—you can’t really do sequences. I was fairly limited. I couldn’t watch the footage full-frame realtime in that software either. So I just had to bite the bullet and just convert all the footage at the start and then kind of work backwards from there.”
As Bonanno got more familiar with RedAlert, his workflow became more efficient. “RedAlert is Red’s software for correcting individual clips. So you can only do one clip at a time, and you can only render out one clip at a time,” Bonanno says. “So in RedAlert I would correct my exposure and iso until the shot was consistent with the shot before it and I would take a screen capture of that shot, bring it into Photoshop (that’s where I would do my second pass color correction before the thing was even edited) and after I got the shot looking the way I wanted, I knew that the next 10-12 shots had generally the same tone so I’d address those 10-12 shots.
“Then I’d use RedLine—is built into RedAlert—and it runs through the terminal. Instead of rendering individual clips, you can make a text file of the render settings for each clip so I would process 12 to 15 clips, but I wouldn’t render them. Then I’d copy the code from each one, past them in a text file, then I’d launch the text file from the terminal and it’d process all 15 in a row—that way I could continue processing inside of RedAlert as clips were rendering.
“Once I started getting quick with that workflow, I started doing two, three, four text files with five to six clips with each and I was running them all at the same time because it was an 8-core processor. And then I was running single clips—it was even a little bit of processor resource that was being unused. So I started trying running eight terminals at once. It freaked out. I Ran five, six—it freaked out. I finally found that three was the best way to go.”
This non-traditional workflow suited Bonanno’s desired style for the project and allowed him to accomplish the look he was going for in a time reasonable to his expectations. He does confirm, however, that there is a more conventional way to work Red footage in post.
“A lot of the people are using the RedCine and Crimson, and there’s a few other new softwares,” Bonanno says, “and that stuff works with XML EDLs that you basically do your offline. You’re bringing the EDL into the software, and it actually calls up all the Red clips based on the proxy you edited with and then you can do your color correction at once. That’s probably the smartest way to work, but I just—I like the individual clip method and I couldn’t get RedCine to run on my machine at the time. You know it’s very new—pretty much still in beta.”
The editing on the project was done by Greg Reimink on a duo-core MacBook Pro running Apple Final Cut Pro 6.0. And while Bonanno continued to find issues even further down the post process—including certain filtering and resizing methods which use bicubic stretching, which when different filtered footage are combined later down the line, can result in Final Cut not recognizing the different filtered footage even though they’re the same framerate, length, etc.—Bonanno found that Red Digital Cinema’s Workflow Support guru Kevin Stanley was very accessible and helpful during the whole project. Thus, Bonanno is looking forward to his next project with the Red.
“I’m not so sure I’d do a music video with it again next,” Bonanno says, while noting his thoughts on the superiority of its depth and crisp footage. “But a commercial or something a little shorter—20 clips is a lot better than 400!”
