Best workflow for Editing/VFX/Grading

[Sebastian Cepeda]

Hi Guys,

My editor wants to know the best workflow to go from FCP to VFX in after effects and afterwards giving everything to me for being able to grade in Da Vinci RAW.

What would you recommend us? We thought of editing than going to Redcine x and then as apple pro 444 to After effects and then to Da vinci but then we would only have the Apple pro 444 instead of RAW.

The other thing we thought of was to go out of fcp and redcine as apple pro 444, make the VFX and send them as alpha channels out to put in top of the FCP edit and then from it send it out as XML/OMF or EDL to da vinci so that we can have the RAW possibilities.

What would you recommend or is there a better workflow? This is our first time working with a RED workflow and VFX.

Thanks a lot!

[Bob Gruen]

This is probably not the answer you want but...

I have gone through two projects now that have had to export the EDL from FCP and imported into Premiere. Once you are in Premiere you have to redo the transitions and some of the audio, but linking to Ae is a simple delivered process. I'd also suggest creating 5.1 audio channels for mastering in the Premiere project at this point (Red defaults to 2 channels).

While in Premiere and Ae you want to have a really good monitor (10 bit, calibrated). You want to get the source settings as close as possible to 'CC'ed / finished'. You can then export the project from Premiere in Tiff or DPX to Da vinci (assuming you are going to film). From the Premiere project you can also export your 5.1 audio to Surcode or send it out to have the Dolby encoding done. Finally import your audio and cc'ed video files into a new 'finished' Premiere project as a film sanity check and to down-convert to a DVD / BlueRay format. (If the project is going to be printed to 35mm film then the same TIFF / DPX files and encoded audio files go to the printer after the sanity check.)

Pretty sure there is really good EDL support from the Adobe products to open true RAW in Da Vinci, which would make cc'ing the transitions easier, the composits more difficult, and the really good monitor irrevelant.

Another way to go about it would be to use the Colorista plug-in within the Pr and Ae applications. Of course this is no where near as good as Da Vinci, but it is within the Adobe apps and can be easily applied to the various layers within Ae as well as easily covering the transitions within Pr. If you go this route then the Source Settings become your primary color correction while Colorista then serves as your second level tool. The drawback here is that the preview window for doing the source settings is a bit small.

Bob

[Eric Santiago]

Wow very helpful post :)
How does one deal with heavy VFX compositing?
DS/Smoke?
most of my VFX is done with Maya/AE but have no experience on working with R3D with AE to date :(
Is it possible to stay in the AE world for most compositing?

[Eric Santiago]

Wow very helpful post :)
How does one deal with heavy VFX compositing?
DS/Smoke?
most of my VFX is done with Maya/AE but have no experience on working with R3D with AE to date :(
Is it possible to stay in the AE world for most compositing?

[Sebastian Cepeda]

Aha so now I get it, we go with an EDL from FCP to Premiere then straight to After Effects so that we still can work with RAW and then make our VFX and afterwards go out from it with an EDL and go straight to Da Vinci, like this everything should stay RAW.

I will try this out with my editor and Vfx artist. Thanks a lot!

[Cüneyt Kaya]

just take the shots you intend to manipulate,
export dpx, tiff, open exr, UC QT from redcine-x (format depends on different things)
do whatever you want in ae, smoke whatever,export these shots
than fcp to davinci with the whole timeline,
than replace the shots in the timeline with your vfx shots inside davinci