Color Troubleshooting

[donovangreene@mac.com]

I'm having an extremely difficult time color correcting RED R3D files in color. Originally I used redrushes to transcode everything to pro res 422hq. I did an offline edit in FCP.

When I tried to reconnect the proxies in clipfinder Color worked incredibly slowly. Additionally some of the clips displayed the incorrect portion of my shot. This was shot documentary style so many clips are 6 to 9 minutes long.

Finally I manually logged and transferred the quicktimes as native raw and manually connected them. Everything colored well in color, and I was definitely connected to the R3D files, as I had ISO control but when I rendered everything it looked grainy and aliased. I rendered everything out without any color correction and got the same result. The footage looks better in the original 422 transcode and much better in Red Alert.

Any ideas?

I've tried both 8 bit and floating point but neither make a difference. My only thought now is to retranscode everyclip at 4444 pro res, but that is almost five hours of footage, which could take two days to render.

[Uli Plank]

You forgot to use Colorfixer for files of that length.

Two important questions to be able to help you:

– At which resolution did you render?
– What's your final product?

[donovangreene@mac.com]

My end product is a 720p ProRes Output. I realize that for that quality coloring the Original ProRes422HQ is probably sufficient, but some of the files were shot under extremely low light, so I wanted to minimize noise by using the R3D files.

I used the "fix color looping" utility in Clipfinder at one point, is that what you meant by Color Fixer.

Also, as I manually reingested the ProRes Native R3D wrappers I no longer have a problem with my timeline in Color.

I'm just having problems with grain and aliasing. The aliasing is quite pronounced in one or two shots, which are well exposed.

[David Battistella]

This method has been perfect for all of my needs. Requires a step by step approach.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35308

David

[donovangreene@mac.com]

Thank you David. Before I posted my problem I searched the forums, and actually followed your approach step by step. Unfortunately it didn't work for me. What did work was rewrapping the footage with Log and Transfer and then manually relinking the media in FCP.

I'm not really concerned with the problems I had getting the project into color at this point. I'm just concerned with getting it to render properly.

I'm clearly working with the R3D files in Color, as I all the RED tab features are enabled. But for some reason I get heavy aliasing when I render. That is baffling to me.

Thanks again for your help.

[David Battistella]

Donovan,

Make sure you are rendering out to 720/24P. Color does not work well with interlaced renders.


Maybe double check your render output settings?

I'll try to help you out. If you want to chat on skype then PM me and I'll get in touch.

David

[Uli Plank]

Make sure your render settings are at full resolution. Do you happen to use 3K? It doesn't work very well in Color, I rather use transcoded ProRes with a full decode for that.

If your final product is 720p, rendering with a full debayer may help with noise, while for well lit footage a half-high debayer is plenty enough.

Regarding aliasing, you have more control when transcoding in Redrushes or Clipfinder by trying different filters for downscaling. These are not accessible in Color.

Using R3D doesn't help much with noise. The RED One isn't very strong in low light, you may need additional filtering like Neatvideo.

[Patrick Tresch]

This method has been perfect for all of my needs. Requires a step by step approach.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35308

David

Why do you do this step?

6. CHANGE floating point to 10-bit in COLOR

The "internal pixel for..." bit processing is adressing how the files should be processed and transferred from a room to another. Why lowering the quality to 10bit only?

Pat

[Patrick Tresch]

Donovan.

Just a thought... in geometry did you do any changes? Like changing size of the shots? It seems to me like a sizing problem... is your output render size ok?

As render is a GPU process in color and not CPU like for RRushes/redalert/FCP... is it a problem with your graphic card?

Have a nice week end!

Pat