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 RED Camera |
RED Dawn
ACE Event Points the Way to New Workflows
By Michael Kunkes
In mid-May, a post-production facility in Hollywood played host to a presentation of general and specific shoot-to-nuts RED camera workflows for members of the American Cinema Editors (ACE). It was apparent that industry people, who once questioned the sanity of RED enthusiasts in their zeal to leave HD in the dust in favor of up to 5K resolution for shooting and finishing, aren’t laughing anymore. The event, attended by more than 30 editors, assistants, teachers and directors, was presented in part by RED evangelist Ted Schilowitz and organized by picture editor Harry Miller, A.C.E. (Women’s Murder Club, Bones, Drive)
 Harry B. Miller, A.C.E. |
Miller has been intrigued by RED (full name: Red Digital Cinema Camera Company) for some time and, after attending a recent American Society of Cinematography (ASC)-sponsored RED event, set up this evening for A.C.E. members. “I am currently working with a TV director who recently used a Thomson Viper camera, but he felt that it was constrictive and heavy, with way too many wires and video and audio taps,” Miller explains. “RED One, the company’s first camera, is small, light [10 lb. aluminum body only, around 30 lbs. on a basic rig] and can carry an onboard 320 GB RAID drive that can record 2.5 to three hours of REDCODE™ (.R3D] 4K ‘visually lossless’ media files. You can also use an 8 GB compact flash card that is the equivalent of a standard 400-foot load of 35mm film, providing a familiar environment for film crews used to working in that style.” RED will become even lighter next year with the introduction of the six-pound 5K RED Epic and the 3K “entry level” Scarlet camera, which RED will price at under $3,000.
The presentation featured a RED drive attached to a laptop on stage, on which presenters dragged and dropped media into an FCP timeline. “The coolest thing about the emerging RED Digital Cinema culture is that it imagined the entire workflow––from shooting through color correction to final output,” says Miller. “Other cameras, such as Viper and Panasonic’s Genesis, stop at shooting and leave it to others to come up with individual solutions for recording and post.” However, he adds, ”Because editors are going to be looking at RED through their own particular lens of their own needs, facilities who have made a commitment to this technology are able to optimize these workflows into specific customer-centric processes, such as the three we saw demonstrated at the ACE presentation: broadcast television/music video/commercials, offline feature film editing/low cost 2K or 4K mastering, and cost-effective DI finishing for 35mm or DCP output. Any way you look at it, this is a process that brings editors closer to the set than they’ve ever been before.”
Simplified, the Final Cut Pro Native RED workflow goes essentially like this: RED automatically generates QuickTime reference movies that point back to the captured 4K (or 2K) full resolution REDCODE RAW files, giving the editor the ability to begin cutting camera source footage immediately, without the necessity of transcoding or rendering. A pair of new, still-in-Beta downloadable programs––RedAlert and RedCine––allow users to read REDCODE RAW files; perform white balance, contrast and one-light color correction; crop or re-size files; and then export them back to RAID storage or FCP Studio 2 (FCP 6.0.2) as DPX, TIFF or QuickTime reference movies. After offline, an EDL is exported into Assimilate Scratch (www.assimilate.com), a third-party real-time Digital Intermediate process that became part of the native RED workflow last year. Scratch auto-assembles and conforms the EDL to the original 2K or 4K REDCODE media, then generates .dpx files for DI filmout in a number of formats.
For Avid, the process requires some extra steps. RedCine is used to generate DNX HD QuickTime movies that can be imported into systems that support the various DNX HD codecs and generate the MXF wrapped media needed for Avid editorial. Scratch (in a PC with an NVIDIA Graphics card with HD-SDI output, or an Apple computer with FCP 6.0.2, REDCODE RAW codec and an AJA Kona 3 card) will create a high-quality proxy layoff to HD videotape at either 1080p or 720p. The footage is then traditionally imported into Avid for offline editing. By using an Avid ALE (Avid Log Exchange) file, you can track and link the tape time code to the camera’s original time code of the REDCODE RAW files. The same process roughly applies for Adobe Premiere as well.
A powerful tool for editors is RED’s ability to staple and track metadata throughout the entire post process, taking much of the guesswork out of color correction and script notes. Miller recalls a practical lesson from his own career: “I was working on a movie where the DP created a beautiful book of color-timed still frames in which he gave each setup a look, a guide to the entire movie, so that he could show post what the final was to look like. For whatever reason, it never got to post, I never saw it, and no one will ever know what the DP intended. With RED, the DP on the set can plug in the hard drive to a laptop, apply some color correction to what he has just shot, apply those changes to everything he’s shot that day, and the editor will be able to immediately see what the DP intended. The editor will also have the original uncorrected raw dailies and can apply his own color correction if he needs to. Script supervisors also can put notes directly into the camera. The potential is pretty amazing.”
 Howard Smith |
Also at the event was Howard Smith, A.C.E. (The Abyss, Dante’s Peak, The Weight of Water), who recently worked on a low-budget feature using RED workflow for Final Cut Pro. He said he experienced constant crashes on Mac’s Leopard operating system, a problem that had only recently become clear to RED as well (which may be why the company told the group to work on OS 10.4 Tiger––at least until the bug is fixed). The workaround used was to transcode the RED media files into Apple ProRes 422, which took a lot of extra time, but worked out extremely well. “The good news is that things have progressed a lot since that experience,” reports Smith. “RED engineers are coming up with a lot of viable solutions for Avid, which is good because Avid does not at present read QuickTime and metadata off the camera.”
Two solutions for that are coming, according to Smith. One actually is here now, a free utility called Metacheater (www.staticpictures.com/metacheater) that extracts very basic metadata (reel ID and time code only) from QuickTime movies and then saves out an ALE file which allows that basic metadata to be imported into Media Composer. A new technology on the way from Avid itself is MetaFuze™, a far more advanced way of extracting metadata from a whole variety of codecs, which will make dealing with metadata in RED files a lot easier for Avid editors. With MetaFuze, it will be easier to create Avid DnxHD proxy files with MXF metadata wrappers, as well as to bridge the gap between the offline conform check and online proxy processes of the 2K DI scan.
RED post workflow completely removes the wet lab and telecine chain from the equation, providing a mixed blessing. Producers save a lot of money by going from the set to the cutting room; but in effect, the editor and assistants have now become the film lab. “We are always reinventing how we work in post, and this is an opportunity for editors to have more control over dailies,” Miller opines. “Personally, I find it an interesting challenge––and one that may actually create the need for more assistants and apprentices who, while having less physical work, would be pretty busy synching dailies and doing other tasks that were previously the province of the lab.”
Miller concludes, “What the people at RED have done is really smart and different. They’ve created tools that allow post to import media, change it, resize it, color-correct it, and make it very easy for digital video to talk to QuickTime, as well as Avid DNX HD and Apple ProRes codecs. Personally, if I didn’t have a lab creating QuickTime files for me, I would have a ton of uncompressed film stream dailies that I would have no idea what to do with––so I’m definitely looking forward to working with RED.”
Adds Smith, a huge fan of RED, “These guys took a genius approach. DPs and editors now have a digital camera that is designed like a film camera. Not only that, the costs are extraordinarily low compared to other 2K/4K systems––which gives it enormous appeal to budget-conscious filmmakers.”
For more information, visit www.red.com.
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.