Switching from Proxies to ProRes

[Chase Gordon]

When I started my shoot, my workflow plan was:

On set, bring all clips into FCP using 2K proxies for on-set playback, logging, and to have a full assembly to hand off to the editor at the end of shooting. We did that.

Then we were going to get a cut in FCP, export the EDL, take the REDCODE and EDL into Scratch, and finish in 2K or 4K DPX (color correcting on an Avid Nitris station) to get to a Digital Cinema Master. This was when I had free access to the Scratch system. Now, however, the Scratch setup has been replaced with Lustre setup, which doesn't do REDCODE (although I still have free access to it). Also, my footage is not so stunning it really deserves 4K; it would have been fine to shoot this on Super16mm film. I do, however, have some green screen VFX shots to composite.

So the new plan is to do one-light corrections in Red Cine, use Red Cine to export to 2K ProRes HQ (10-bit 4:2:2), and do all post in ProRes. This is based on the suggestions made in the other threads here as well as the experience of a major player in RED post-production here in Los Angeles.

So maybe this is more a question for the FCP community, but I'll ask here because having the on-set work with the proxies was SO valuable to me that I'd want to do that again: How do I reconform my FCP project to use the ProRes clips that come out of RedCine instead of the proxies? I'd hate to waste all that work that went into logging the clips, not to mention editing them.

And that taken care of, since I now can't use Scratch, does anyone see obvious improvements to the new workflow plan I described? I understand I'll have to get better transition plugins for FCP to keep a 10-bit path, but CoreMelt's package is only $99, so no problem.

I understand Compressor can also convert REDCODE to ProRes. Does it do it better or worse or just the same as Red Cine?

=Chase=

[I Bloom]

When I started my shoot, my workflow plan was:

On set, bring all clips into FCP using 2K proxies for on-set playback, logging, and to have a full assembly to hand off to the editor at the end of shooting. We did that.

Then we were going to get a cut in FCP, export the EDL, take the REDCODE and EDL into Scratch, and finish in 2K or 4K DPX (color correcting on an Avid Nitris station) to get to a Digital Cinema Master. This was when I had free access to the Scratch system. Now, however, the Scratch setup has been replaced with Lustre setup, which doesn't do REDCODE (although I still have free access to it). Also, my footage is not so stunning it really deserves 4K; it would have been fine to shoot this on Super16mm film. I do, however, have some green screen VFX shots to composite.

So the new plan is to do one-light corrections in Red Cine, use Red Cine to export to 2K ProRes HQ (10-bit 4:2:2), and do all post in ProRes. This is based on the suggestions made in the other threads here as well as the experience of a major player in RED post-production here in Los Angeles.

So maybe this is more a question for the FCP community, but I'll ask here because having the on-set work with the proxies was SO valuable to me that I'd want to do that again: How do I reconform my FCP project to use the ProRes clips that come out of RedCine instead of the proxies? I'd hate to waste all that work that went into logging the clips, not to mention editing them.

And that taken care of, since I now can't use Scratch, does anyone see obvious improvements to the new workflow plan I described? I understand I'll have to get better transition plugins for FCP to keep a 10-bit path, but CoreMelt's package is only $99, so no problem.

I understand Compressor can also convert REDCODE to ProRes. Does it do it better or worse or just the same as Red Cine?

=Chase=

I would recommend that your first step be to create a Compressor Droplet and convert all of your footage to ProRes from the _M or _H proxies. Use these ProRes offline clips to cut in FCP, but they are not the same quality as Redcine, by far.

Then once you finish a cut, you can pull select takes at high quality through Redcine. And yes, in response to your PM, RedTrip is one way to accomplish that task, though not terribly easy in its current incarnation.

IBloom

[Jack James]

If you're grading with Lustre, why aren't you going straight to DPX?

[Chase Gordon]

If you're grading with Lustre, why aren't you going straight to DPX?

DPX is not a viable format for editing and real-time playback on a regular Mac workstation. Just storage of all the footage in DPX is prohibitive. So I need and online/offline model, for which Scratch was the only option I knew of. Glad to see RedTrip is coming in to fill the void.

=Chase=

[Jack James]

DPX is not a viable format for editing and real-time playback on a regular Mac workstation.

Agreed but using ProRes for grading seems counter-productive. You'll lose a lot of colour information, introduce new artefacts, and reduce the dynamic range.

A much better option is to build a pull-list from the final cut and use redline to extract just the footage you need.

[Chase Gordon]

Agreed but using ProRes for grading seems counter-productive. You'll lose a lot of colour information, introduce new artefacts, and reduce the dynamic range.

A much better option is to build a pull-list from the final cut and use redline to extract just the footage you need.

Agreed, but I don't want to build or translate a pull manually and if I don't have access to Scratch, then what? Hopefully RedTrip (which I hadn't heard of when I posted this) will save the day and I can finish post in 2K DPX. How would I do it with Redline?

[Jack James]

Basically you need to process an EDL line by line such that
redline -i /path/to/redcode/{filename}.r3d -o /path/to/output/{reel number}/ -S {start timecode} -E {end timecode} -w 0 -V -1 {other options} This will give you DPX frames in the format /reel###/frame###.dpx which can be conformed using pretty much any grading system (including Lustre).

The tricky part is automatically getting the filename from the EDL. Depending on the workflow of the offline edit, it may be that the filename for each clip can be found in the comments. The way we're doing it at the moment is to log absolutely everything in a centralised database, independently from FCP etc, and then generate the processing scripts from that.

Of course, that's almost useless to everyone else (for now at least), so an alternative approach I'm playing around with is to dump all the r3d files into one folder, and extract all the metadata at the same time, and then cross-reference that against the EDL.

My Applescript abilities are not great at the moment, but perhaps I can put something together by the time you come to use it.

[Deanan]

You should be able to do what you want without moving all the r3d files to one folder. I posted a script to do that in another thread somewhere.

[Jack James]

this one? (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=8645&page=2)