REDCINE - Reframe, Pan & Zoom - but Vertical?

[Greg Voevodsky]

From what I've read so far:

1. Redcine should be able to do 4K to 1080p reframing.

2. How about pan and zoom from 4k to 1080p?

3. Now, how about vertical 4k to 1080p vertical??

There is a lot of commercial signage that is now done vertically with plasma TVs turned on their side. Since, Redcine should be able to do 1 and 2 above, I was hoping that it would be possible to take 4k RAW and find a nice 1080p vertical frame within that frame or even the max vertical size that can be downcoverted to 1080p vertical. Can and will this feature be added or done?

It should be a simple software solution. (I hope.) Comments?

[Gopher77]

no keyframe capability in Redcine, so no pan or zoom

[Chris Gearhart]

Yeah, panny and zoomy are too NLE for Redcine. Cropping in Redcine should be doable, though--unless it's set standard sizes. I almost did a commercial for one of those rotated plasmas in the mall nearby. Never thought of Red for that--another reason for 4K now.

[Lucas Wilson]

no keyframe capability in Redcine, so no pan or zoom

Keyframes imply moving from pointA to pointB. That doesn't mean REDCINE can't pan or zoom, just that it can't do a *keyframed* pan or zoom...

Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.

[Chris Gearhart]

But isn't a pan or a zoom a move? It's a move over time (within the frame of the shot), as opposed to a static re-framing.

[Jim Arthurs]

I think that REDCINE can't live up to the myth people are making around it, at least for the first release. This is not detracting from the hard work or coding going on, but think about it.

It debayers. It scales, crops and batch exports to installed codecs. Hopefully it does all of that with as much clever coding as possible in regards to quality and speed. There is some control over image processing and curves, and "something" (hopefully "something impressive") is going on with regards to EDL import/export from NLE's.

[Adrian T.]

REDCINE will most probably be able to scale and crop to any size you want, as long as the chosen export codec supports it.

[Lucas Wilson]

But isn't a pan or a zoom a move? It's a move over time (within the frame of the shot), as opposed to a static re-framing.

Perhaps... semantics at that point. In my world, pan and zoom is a reframing of any kind, whether animated or not. :)

Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

[Gavin Greenwalt]

If you wanted a vertical format project and you were shooting 4k, wouldn't you want to shoot it with the RED on its side?

(Just did a PS3 plasma TV thing for Sony and they only wanted an anamorphic SD master so it may not be a problem either way.)

I would assume full reframing capabilities would be within redcine including arbitrary crop sizes. I would expect what you'll do is

1) Set an output size.
2) Set an Aspect Ratio (Sometimes it'll be different from output... aka 2.35 HD)
3) Declare whether or not you're willing to drop below 1:1 pixel ratio. (aka smaller than your output size for the source material)
4) An interface that lets you move around and scale a box with a constrained aspect ratio.
5) Preview color
6) Output

[Greg Voevodsky]

Can someone from RED comment on this?

The real power would be NOT having to turn the camera on its side and shoot double the footage and double the time and money. Most Vertical shots are worthless, since it is a small market.

However, if it can be a byproduct of normal shooting, then I can go back later choose the best verticals and save them out at 1080p.

[Adrian T.]

I believe REDCINE won't be able to rotate your footage.

[Anders Holck]

Hmmm....Sounds to me like you'd be better off doing it in you NLE or compositing package. If you frame for a normal image, you'd definitely want to move your crop over time and refine your keyframes, something a dedicated package will be much better at.
Don't know what Greame/Rob is up to but I doubt the'll spend a lot of time in this area, at least for the first releases.

When the functionality is there in every almost every NLE/compositing package, it would seem a bit redundant to spend time on it, besides the basic crop.

In the future especially rotation would be a great feature, allowing you to straighten up horizons with no resolution degradation, when going from 4K to a lower resolution.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

If you wanted a vertical setup I would assume you could just:

1) Define your aspect ratio as 1:0.5625
2) Define your resolution as 1080x1920
3) Frame
4) Export

Even better than a "rotation" tool would be a horizon tool. declare two points on the horizon. And do a simple trig function to determine the necessary rotation.

Doing it in one operation would reduce the number of times the footage was processed and could result in a sharper final through concatenation.

[Thom Steinhoff]

I see your point on the lack of reuse on footage from a camera on it's side.

Sounds like the only thing that would stand in your way, is the rotate which can easily be done in any compositing software (shake, motion, After Affects) and may be a simple Rotate and Crop in RedCine.

It is actually far easier on the Red as (as I've read one or two times on this board) it is a square pixel and you don't have to do major reaspecting the pixel when you rotate it.

Oh, and at this point I wouldn't expect too much from the Red guys. Work, sleep, work, sleep, test, work, sleep... Screen, pinch themselves, work, sleep, work, sleep....

I would hope they are feature locked by now so if your feature is in there--it's news and won't be revealed until Nab. If it's not--It won't be in there until a future release and you can handle it yourself in a compositing package. Rather than answering your questions--I hope they are building my camera! :)

[Greg Voevodsky]

Well, I hope im.thaoneguy is right an its as simple at that. I would assume it would be simple. If not, that's what a software upgrade is... and since I am past the first 100, I hope they add the feature by then.

Though I do agree with Thom, that I could export 4k into After Effects. I could crop and downsize a 30 second clip. But... I bet that would take a while to render! If redcine can do it, that would be great!

[MikeCurtis]

I'm with Jim Arthurs on this one - pan and zoom, as opposed to crop & resize from a fixed box, are more NLE type tasks.

If you want to do that stuff and have good control over it, take it to Shake/After Effects/Motion at full size (or just big enough to cover the range of motion you want) and cook it out of there.

Featuritis can be a bad thing.

I recently read an article that quoted Steve Jobs responding to iTunes feature requests - sometimes saying "No!" to features is what lets a product be great - don't get spread out too thin, stay on target or what you want to do excellently, and be really good at that thing.

-mike

[Adrian T.]

1) Define your aspect ratio as 1:0.5625
2) Define your resolution as 1080x1920
3) Frame
4) Export.

If you don't rotate here you need to rotate the cam while shooting, right?

Be aware that you cannot use standard HD codecs for 1080x1920. They only work with their native output resolution of 1920x1080. And their actual native resolution is a different thing again.



Even better than a "rotation" tool would be a horizon tool. declare two points on the horizon. And do a simple trig function to determine the necessary rotation.

No arbitrary rotation in REDCODE please! That's not the tool to do such things.
But it would be cool and rather easy to implement if it could flip (horizontally and vertically) and rotate in 90 degree steps.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

True but I would guess you're going to do your 90degree rotation as the last step. 1) it should be a lossless, pixel accurate operation as long as it's just a 90degree rotation. 2) you don't want to have to edit with your head on its side.

Not to mention, like I mentioned earlier, everybody is still asking for anamorphic SD masters for plasma displays. No reason to pay an extra $600 for an HD-DVD player at this point when a $20 Walmart brand will play back progressively just fine. Considering the infrastructure people have invested into wiring the existing Kiosk/Onsite displays I doubt they'll be capable of displaying true HD for some time.

So you could either A) Shoot 4k on its side and rotate it 90 degrees to edit and then flip it back 90 degrees for export. or B) Shoot 4k normal, export a vertical 1920p crop and rotate on export.

There's really no way around it, you're eventually going to need to rotate your footage at least on a 90 degree increment Unless you edit on a really funky monitor yourself.

The real question is... who is doing vertical motion graphics work in an application which can't rotate?! If you were trying to shoot a feature that would be one thing, but vertical displays are exclusive to kiosks/museums/advertising and all of those fields rely heavily on motion graphics.

The real question is: will Red have arbitrary gate images. I'm desperately hoping we can pop in an 8 bit tif file and use it as our viewfinder's gate. I would love to be able to export an outline of a cg shot and shoot a green screen with a poor man's live preview. If only for the horizon line.