avid mxf red workflow

[jamie parry]

www.jamieparry.demon.co.uk

any thoughts?
this is mac only but it does what i wanted metafuze to do on a mac!
i've got some work to do on it but it basically does what the editors wanted ie
mimic an offline-online workflow they already know
set and forget encoding for offline dnx36
metadata tracked in avid mxf (tape name= file name and clip timecode = original file timecode and project name is user definable)
online pull easy peasy from EDL of decomposed sequence and
re encode directly to higher res (DnxHD 185 in our case) of only bits required and handles
relink easy to higher res
done
any requests?
i'm working on doing a bit of a gui thing but dont know if its really necessary
and it now tidies up after itself (getting rid of mov files and raw dnx files) and will, if i can figure out a tiny bit more, copy/move the mxf files directly into the Avid Mediafiles/mxf/1 folder
cheers
jamie

[Chris Parker]

very cool. a couple of questions.

how is the color of the clips determined? can your 'app' access the rlx files for each clip?

also, how do you decide on framing of the transcoded mxf files? what if you wanted them to be 16:9 letterbox vs. 4:3 centre cut, etc. etc.?

[Jason Diamond]

really nice workflow, well done. question? why did you need to make a 2nd sequence in the decomposed bin? the decomposed clips are already attached to that. just curious. otherwise well done. any place to download those scripts? :)

[jamie parry]

-chris the colour is determined in a redline command ( i believe that can access the metadata in a file) not sure about rlx-i'll have to look it up (or someone can tell me!)
framing similar- i've just made it output 1920x1080 "fit height" because that's what we usually want.
Jason the 2nd sequence is just me doing as i'm told from the editors! apparently if you do mixes and such, the EDL you make from the original sequence confuses the issue whereas making it from the new sequence with decomposed clips in guarantees an easy EDL for parsing that will get you all the media you want transcoded.
the scripts may be available soon after i've done a bit more work but they're no good without the unix command line apps listed. one of which I've written with a friend so i need his permission to post it and the others are open source so i'm not sure where i stand about putting them all together.
My other thought was just to give all i've done to the "monkey extract" boys and get them to send me $1 for every sale!!
cheers
j

[Jason Diamond]

yeah that makes sense. since the media will relink to the "effected" sequence anyway. Fit width would be more what we work with, should be an editable line right?

[Chris Parker]

would be great to have complete control over this (and other parameters) in a GUI to meet demands of various jobs/clients.....

[Greg Huson]

It's definitely similar to doing the online using monkey extract, but I'm much more interested in the part where you created 'dailies' using... what was it ffmpeg? Huh? The problem with using redrushes, or compressor, or whatever, when generating DNX-codec inside a QT, is that you then have to import the QT into Avid, which converts it to mxf. Even if you get the 'fast import' to work, you're still making a second copy of the DNX material, which is only slightly faster than real time, so now you're up to about 5x realtime just to get dailies. That's where the advantage is with metafuze- (plus whatever they've added to it now) you don't have to import the dnx into avid.

Does this ffmpeg re-wrap the QT as MXF, or is it copying the media? Re-wrapping seems like it would be faster.

The EDL of the decomposed works really well - I can't imagine doing it the other way, even with a simple EDL.

[jamie parry]

Greg-there are 3 stages to the process
1 redline makes the quicktimes (dnxhd 36 in the offline stage).
2 ffmpeg unwraps the "essence" from the quicktime making a dnxhd file with no wrapper around it.
3 writeavidmxf wraps the dnxhd essence in an avid mxf container and inserts metadata.
The "ffmpeg" and "writeavidmxf" parts are "unwrap/rewrap" processes so they take hardly any time at all
and now the scripts tidy up after themselves by getting rid of the movs and dnxhd essence files so your storage requirements don't go crazy!

basically it means that as long as redline can write it and ffmpeg and writeavidmxf undestand it there are a few flavours to go back into the symphony/media composer with.
dvcproHD is one dnxhd is one and uncompressed is one.
There may be more combos that work but those 3 are the only ones my company would realistically be involved in.
Any 4K DPX style stuff and they'll have to buy me a resolve/baselight/nucoda which is about 50-100 times as expensive as a mac pro.....but that's another story

Chris -I agree it would be cool to have a GUI for it but you'll have to wait while i figure out how to do it!! (or persuade the monkey extract guys that what i have is of interest to them)
cheers
j

[Chris Parker]

hey.....monkey extract guys! give this guy something to make this part of your program......would be very cool.

there.....i tried.

seriously. the more options to get to native MXF files for AVID, the better. i would have to say i like how metafuze is coming along, but a Mac version of the same would be welcome of course.

monkey boyz??

[M Most]

hey.....monkey extract guys! give this guy something to make this part of your program......would be very cool.

While the way Jamie has done this is quite effective and clever, the fact is that ffmpeg and the libMXF library (which contains writeavidmxf) are both open source that is freely available to anyone who wants to use them under the GNU GPL. ffmpeg is used by a number of vendors (including SpectSoft and others) to read and write Quicktime files (and do numerous other file format conversion operations) on Linux systems, and libMXF was written by the folks at BBC Research specifically to do what Jamie is doing - create Avid compatible MXF OP-Atom files.

Along those lines, though, I would ask Jamie: What do you do with audio? Do you split it out of the Quicktime you created and separately wrap the tracks? I say this because Avid only accepts OP-Atom files, which can only contain one track at a time. As a result, when you import into an Avid, separate MXF files are written for the video track and each audio track. I didn't see anything in the video regarding audio...