1920x1080 HD Broadcast workflow not quite there!

[twotallmen]

OK - I've just had some Red footage come in and I've had a chance to do some tests for those of us who work in Broadcast TV - ie those of us who have to work with 50 hours of footage going into on offline then being FCP/Media managed to Online for Grading in Color and output to HDCam SR. DPX and Raw files are not an option to go back to. We all work to tight turnaround

Question 1 is why doesn't the Red Camera generate a 1920 x1080 proxy? I understand there is some problem with shooting in 16x9 - is that the reason?

Question 2 - Can any one come up with a quick and easy way of generating 1080 quicktimes from the R3d files. I just put 12 minutes into Red Cine and it's taking 3 and a half hours. A days Shoot on a Discovery/Nat Geo style Documentary would normally generate 3x 40 minute tapes - Thats 35 hours processing per day!

I've tried using Compressor with the Hi Res Proxies - that seems to be much quicker but I'm getting dropped frames.

[Dj Joofa]

Question 2 - Can any one come up with a quick and easy way of generating 1080 quicktimes from the R3d files. I just put 12 minutes into Red Cine and it's taking 3 and a half hours. A days Shoot on a Discovery/Nat Geo style Documentary would normally generate 3x 40 minute tapes - Thats 35 hours processing per day!

I've tried using Compressor with the Hi Res Proxies - that seems to be much quicker but I'm getting dropped frames.

If Red One makes the format of R3D files open, it shouldn't be too difficult to write a Quicktime component or for that matter a standalone utility. I do not know if the format of R3D files is public, though.

[asheddrick]

Here's another question. When is red going to support TC when converting R3D to apples pro res, or introduce the HQ pro res transcoding feature in FCP.

Or are both of these fixes Apple needs to be making?

[Dj Joofa]

Here's another question. When is red going to support TC when converting R3D to apples pro res, or introduce the HQ pro res transcoding feature in FCP.

Or are both of these fixes Apple needs to be making?

If by TC you mean timecode, it is almost trivial to add / delete a timecode (track) to / from a QuickTime movie. Search on the Google for QTTimeCode.

[Chris Burket]

I believe Scratch can read R3D files and output them over HDSDI in 1920x1080 in real time. You could string together all your clips in scratch, play them out real time to your HDCam SR deck, then recapture it. This would also create an HDSR master of your raw footage. Wouldn't take as long as redalert.

[twotallmen]

If Red are hoping their products will be used in EFP type work (and I believe they are) some one is going to have to come up with a smoother workflow than this! No production will have the time (or the budget) to run all the shot footage through red cine. They need to pull it off the red drive straight into FCP where it plays realtime in the correct aspect ratio so the offline editor can start to cut the footage together.

Importing them into Scratch then laying off to HSCam SR then Recapturing them again is expensive and time consuming (though admittedly faster than the Red Cine option!)

[Paul Hazlett]

Gibby has been shooting lots of television with his Red. Maybe he could shed some light on this convo

[Harry Clark]

This is why many of us were sad when 1080p scaled was dropped...
Harry

[Michael Schrengohst]

It's one thing to be sad, but here we have real stories
on the front lines and no one has a decent solution.
Sorry but we all cannot buy a scratch system. Great camera
makes great images but I can't work with the render times either.

[Dj Joofa]

It's one thing to be sad, but here we have real stories
on the front lines and no one has a decent solution.
Sorry but we all cannot buy a scratch system. Great camera
makes great images but I can't work with the render times either.

I agree with you, the current work flow may be cumbersome and expensive for some people without a powerful off-line processing system.

May be that is the reason Red was able to keep its price down; they moved some upstream (in the camera) hardware-based processing including demosacing, scaling, color correction for white balance, RGB->YCbCr, etc. -- to software based solutions downstream (on a PC). Hence, moving many of these processes from RedCine / Scratch / etc., upstream shall naturally increase the price of the system, and the camera may begin to loose one of its strong selling point -- price.