Conforming Pan'n Scan

[Seth Larney]

Hey all,

This is directly RED related, so I apologize if it's not appropriate here.

Does anybody know which is the best way to get pan'n scan info (not sure which effect was used yet but most shots are resized and or rotated/zoomed in a litte etc in the media composer offline) through a conform into Scratch (or anything really for that matter)?

We are using CMX 3600's and the conform is flawless, but just wondering if there's a way to get that info accross easily.. ALE/XML ..etc?

Just thought I'd ask the question before I dive in in case anyone has the info handy.

MichaelP, are you around here? :)

Cheers,
Seth.

[MichaelP]

Depends on what they used - if they use the resize, effect, the PIP, or the reformat tool (pan & scan). We are working on an XSL that would derive the pan & scan vectors based on a record side timecode/feet+frames/frames. But not quite ready yet. The only the other way right now would be via AAF or a DS conform when it is ready to the native R3D files... soon.

Michael

[wplate]

As far as I know the Avid effects aren't readable by non-Avid systems, even in the AAF file the effects are encoded as "dark metadata".

Our import plug-ins for FCP and After Effects are able to decode Resize and Picture and Picture, but it took a lot of work for us to be able to get the parameters out of the OMF and AAF exports.

[Seth Larney]

Depends on what they used - if they use the resize, effect, the PIP, or the reformat tool (pan & scan). We are working on an XSL that would derive the pan & scan vectors based on a record side timecode/feet+frames/frames. But not quite ready yet. The only the other way right now would be via AAF or a DS conform when it is ready to the native R3D files... soon.

Michael

Thanks Michael,

They've used the 'position' and 'scaling' attributes in the 'resize' effect.

Is there a way to use AAF to get this over to Scratch? We can't copy the attributes by eye because Avid uses a 'scale' (1-999) to set offset for position and Scratch uses Pixel values.. even if we could it would we extemely time consuming as there are lots of these shots.

Thanks!

[Seth Larney]

As far as I know the Avid effects aren't readable by non-Avid systems, even in the AAF file the effects are encoded as "dark metadata".

Our import plug-ins for FCP and After Effects are able to decode Resize and Picture and Picture, but it took a lot of work for us to be able to get the parameters out of the OMF and AAF exports.

Thanks for confirming, this is what I thought.

[Cail Young]

We can't copy the attributes by eye because Avid uses a 'scale' (1-999) to set offset for position and Scratch uses Pixel values.. even if we could it would we extemely time consuming as there are lots of these shots.

Spreadsheet?

[MichaelP]

Actually the metadata for the resize effects have been available in the optical lists for years with keyframe information. It can be set to work in traditional fields or in a virtual pixel resolution up to 10K by 10K. All of these parameters are set in the GRID settings. The optical list for the resize effects are then exposed on a per shot basis. Actually I remember designing that into the product in 1996... ;)

Pan & Scan metadata was never exposed in AAF, but the resize effect should be. Since Scratch does not support AAF, you will not get it that way. let me check the XML export today and perhaps that is something the Assimilate folks could apply as a layer of metadata to the shots. We are working to expose the metadata from the reformat pan & scan effect as XML.

Michael