RED: Does everyone have to grade?

[Matt Redmond]

Does everyone have to touch a grading suite when using RED to get good results?

Just how light in post-production can the RED be? Is it possible to shoot for the final product - especially if going out straight to something like HDCAM-SR? Does it have to pass through REDCINE (or other) to alter the gamma curve, or can you tune the pictures to look good right out of the camera?

I know that the RED is all about data and getting the maximum from your footage with the creative power of post production - but if you have a quick turn around "no time to touch a grading suite" job then what is possible?

*edit* Post production is where a huge chunk of the money goes in a production - the less you have to grade the better the bank balance.

[Corrado Silveri]

You can arrange curve tone/overall look in REDCINE.
I'm waiting (gzzzzzz....) to see the Gui/Workflow/Usability...

In my thoughs, Redcine is quite similar to this app:

http://pomfort.com/silverstack/

Graeme, I'm completely crazy?

[J. Bernard Vallon]

I've been waiting for a DSLR that has software that will let you set a custom curve, contrast, WB, saturation, etc, based on some test shots, then upload that transformation back to the camera to apply it to everything you shoot in camera. This way you could shoot JPEG and save time in post, but still use your custom curve.

It would be like, "i'm shooting this wedding, but i want all the shots to look like color reversal, but i dont want to have to RAW edit all of them."

Maybe one day RED will have something like that. If you were shooting a series that all has the same look, once you have your REDCine curves figured out, you could upload them to the camera and you wouldnt have to shoot RAW...the footage would just come out of the camera looking like...i donno, 50 year old hi contrast news footage from saving private ryan..or whatever.

[Rob Lohman]

You can simply load the footage in probably any supporting QuickTime application without ever touching REDCINE. That includes playback in the QuickTime player application (or probably any player that supports QuickTime).

This will no doubt be especially handy for 720 & 1080. For 2K & 4K this in theory will work as well but the question then becomes more of whether the application loading the QuickTime files can (easily) handle such things.

REDCINE is strong support for a "high-end" workflow with file sequences and high resolutions that a lot of film shoots are used to working with.

Both paths (and others) can be used whenever you want / need. RED is all about giving you choices and upgrade options. If it isn't there now it might be there in the near future!

I am a bit careful here with what I promise. We are hard at work delivering everything and more detailed workflows and demos will be available at NAB (and of course on this forum and the RED website around that time!).


Elcurado: it is a RAW conversion tool for moving images. So it will have familiar features. You will see what it looks like soon enough!


John (PerfectOptics): makes sense and is on our list (not saying it will be there from day 1, we're working on a lot of stuff, but this is high on the list). We have a flexible platform that will get update and improved on further!

[Matt Redmond]

Most DP's at the moment have no problems lighting a scene and recording in camera exactly what they want. When budget dictates that not all (if any) of your shots will be touched by a grader then this is vital.

So long as the colours coming out of the RED are accurate (and it appears that they are) then the biggest issue is going to be sorting out the gamma levels of the pictures coming out of the camera.

If there is no way for the camera to adjust the gamma curves (at 1080 or 720 RGB) then I would hope that REDCINE would be bloody fast at applying curves at 1080 or 720 frame sizes so as to avoid hefty costs in computer usage at the post-house, which is what a lot of people are trying to avoid.

I suppose I'm asking this:
1080 and 720 - WYSIWYG?

;)

[Dominic Jones]

We have a flexible platform that will get update and improved on further!
That sounds like great news - are we talking firmware updates here?

That would be fantastic...

[Karl H]

The only bit I dont really get with RedCine is the RAW CC workflow.

I'm gathering this is not a CC tool, but a device to get a 'basic' look before applying grading later. But wouldnt it be much better to grade the RAW footage rather than pre-grading in Redcine, export to an inferior codec, and then grade this on the timeline.

If, and it's and if, Apple integrate 'final touch' into the next FCP release then it seems like we'd be losing quality if we could not grade the RAW file directly with this. I'm assuming you can with 2K Raw....

Maybe this is an intended 4K workflow when things come up to speed, is Redcine just a temporary step until we can slap 4K on the timeline?
Also will the Redcine CC interface be similar to the Adobe Raw plugin in Photoshop?

[Rob Lohman]

Keep in mind that the high-end workflows typically use full resolution / uncompressed 2K/4K TIFF or DPX exports for the final grading & online. This work is also not done in an NLE like Final Cut Pro.

It's possible to emulate such a flow without spending as much money by doing your final work in something like After Effects.

If you want to do everything inside the NLE then we'll have to see what works best. You can load your footage directly into the NLE and skip REDCINE. Obviously not all the NLE's support 4K yet.

This is bleeding edge stuff and we're working hard on making sure you can use your favorite tools. But, it will (in some cases) require changes to the tools as well.

REDCINE is not a temporary step. It's a different way of doing things that is more in line with what the big guys are doing on their film and high-end workflows. With this method you could export DPX/TIFF without ever touching any of the REDCINE color controls (except perhaps white balance) and do all your grading on a DaVinci etc.

Let's pick this up again after NAB. Everything will be much clearer by then!

[tj williams]

ROB QUOTE: "REDCINE is not a temporary step. It's a different way of doing things that is more in line with what the big guys are doing on their film and high-end workflows. With this method you could export DPX/TIFF without ever touching any of the REDCINE color controls (except perhaps white balance) and do all your grading on a DaVinci etc."

1. Won't we have more correction range in raw than dpx etc. Putting these other formats into the davinci room seems like a one light transfer of film to HD then making the davinci matching process in a tape to tape?

2. Many times in the Davinci room with film orig. we reposition since the superior image rez. of film lets us get a cu fm a mid shot etc. without appreciable loss of quality in the HD output. Will this be possible from the RED RAW negative?

[Rob Lohman]

1. why? The raw can be 12-bit linear, if you want you can output that after RGB conversion to DPX / TIFF. No change, no loss. Or you could output at 10-bit log or 8-bit if you want to. Your choice.

2. same thing, if the input is 4096 x 2304 then you output 4096 x 2304 if you want the full resolution to play with

[tj williams]

Thanks for the clarification Rob!

[J. Bernard Vallon]

If Redcine works the way I think it will, I would plan on doing all or most of my color work in it. While the footage is as raw as possible is the best time to make adjustments. 12 bit linear is better than 10 bit log, simply because there are more numbers to describe each color.

I'm getting the feeling from the way the workflow is set up that it would work like a DSLR raw processor. I may be wrong of course, cuz none of us has seen it run yet.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Any grading solution, whether in RedCine or not, is highly dependent on the accuracy of your reference display.

Using anything but CRT for critical color evaluation is heresy in many quarters and for good reason, the eye is so influenced by the relationship of everything to black - and there is nothing like a CRT black. I even read that a CRT can create a negative black value, in essence blacker than black - I must have missed that in physics class ;) .

In any case, I am willing to compromise a tiny bit and select a more user friendly tech like LCD. I have been quite disappointed by most of the offerings to date but the eCinema DCM23 is the best tweak of existing non-CRT tech I have seen. That said, in less then 3 years I expect to see some impressive professional flat panel displays from several vendors that equal or surpass Martin's amazing kludge of what was around in 2005. New backlighting tech, better dynamic irising, substrates with less dead area, etc will eventually change the equation but until then...

I am just trying to fulfill the promise of the power of DCN (digital cinema negative) origination as the foundation of a next generation motion imaging system that is accessible even at the indie budget level. I do not believe I can pull that trick off without a legitimate reference monitoring solution.

Bottom line - a lot of us are going to try and use RedCine as a color grading app whether it was designed for that or not. The tools may be blunter but the direct access to the RAW files just might make up for it. Oh yeah, and its included the package :D

[Ace]

Any grading solution, whether in RedCine or not, is highly dependent on the accuracy of your reference display.

Using anything but CRT for critical color evaluation is heresy in many quarters and for good reason, the eye is so influenced by the relationship of everything to black - and there is nothing like a CRT black. I even read that a CRT can create a negative black value, in essence blacker than black - I must have missed that in physics class ;) .

In any case, I am willing to compromise a tiny bit and select a more user friendly tech like LCD. I have been quite disappointed by most of the offerings to date but the eCinema DCM23 is the best tweak of existing non-CRT tech I have seen. That said, in less then 3 years I expect to see some impressive professional flat panel displays from several vendors that equal or surpass Martin's amazing kludge of what was around in 2005. New backlighting tech, better dynamic irising, substrates with less dead area, etc will eventually change the equation but until then...

I am just trying to fulfill the promise of the power of DCN (digital cinema negative) origination as the foundation of a next generation motion imaging system that is accessible even at the indie budget level. I do not believe I can pull that trick off without a legitimate reference monitoring solution.

Bottom line - a lot of us are going to try and use RedCine as a color grading app whether it was designed for that or not. The tools may be blunter but the direct access to the RAW files just might make up for it. Oh yeah, and its included the package :D


OLED is changing all of that.

When I first bought my OLED display mobile phone, I was completely taken back by the fact that the blacks on the display were actually pitch black. And the white pixel just next to it was white as hell. Id love to see this technology in actual displays. Its like having a flat CRT.

[Clayton Harper]

One very important consideration here is that in effect, what is currently onset DIT (digital imaging technician) work for an HD shoot is being moved to post with REDCINE.

One of the greatest values a DIT provides is to save color grading time in post. In episodic television this can be a big cost. On a multicamera shoot, you want to dial in all the cameras to a single chroma chart and get your color targets lined up in the appropriate boxes on the vectorscope. This task alone saves a ton of post CC time. Of course, we're not baking in a look onset with raw, so this job gets saved for later.

The way I see it, if a producer is going to pay for transcoding from REDCINE to another format, why not optimize the value of that task and dial in a majority of the color correction in REDCINE?

In order to do this we need calibrated monitoring on export. We need to do this because a single Mac Pro with a broadcast video card costs a lot less to use and operate than a divinci suite.

Let me pose again a question I asked on its own thread without an answer:

Will Redcine provide 3rd party display support? How do I look at my Raw adjustments on a calibrated monitor or a vectorscope?

[GlennChan]

Using anything but CRT for critical color evaluation is heresy in many quarters and for good reason, the eye is so influenced by the relationship of everything to black - and there is nothing like a CRT black.
Yes low black level is nice... but this is not always the practice. Some telecine facilities light the surround (area surrounding the monitor) from the front; you can get lower black level if you light the surround from behind the face of the monitor.


I even read that a CRT can create a negative black value, in essence blacker than black - I must have missed that in physics class .
I don't believe CRTs can produce negative black.

2- They actually have some flaring problems that limits the blackest black that can be achieved. The amount of flaring depends on the luminance of the image (remember to account for gamma correction; checkerboard contrast tests don't do this!).