HD For Indies

OK, let's talk workflow with Redcode RAW and Redcine.

Some background for those not up to speed:

Redcode RAW is the native compressed recording file format of Red, recorded as data to files in a folder structure on a Red Drive, Red Flash, or Red RAM. Redcode RAW is a 12 bit linear RAW (Bayer pattern, color filter array) wavelet based compression scheme.

All above recording media have about the same performance envelope - based on public statements, all can record the same frame sizes/rates as all the others - so long as you have a properly spec'd CF card, for instance, the only limit as compared to Red Drive is the recording capacity. Recording quality, frame rate/size, etc. all the same. Red gives you LOTS of recording options - single/dual link HD-SDI to deck or DDR/DFR, uncompressed 4.5K out the high speed link, or the more likely/useful Redcode RAW to one of two external recording modules (320GB, $900 Red Drive or 64GB, $4500 Red RAM), or to one of three $500 internal Flash RAM based adaptor modules that fit on side of camera body (CF, ExpressCard 34, or eSATA).

Anyway...after you record all this stuff, how do you use it? Redcode RAW is the native format, but it is also proprietary - nobody else's camera generates it, it is specific to the Red One at this time. How to edit it, do VFX work with it, etc.?

Redcine

If you hadn't heard, Redcine is the tool to convert Redcode RAW to...whatever you want (I'll skim over the basics previously covered and get to the juicy stuff here shortly). Standard image file format sequences or any "normal" codec you have installed on your Intel Mac (no PPC Mac support, drat) or Windows based system.

Click the pic above for a larger view of what Redcine looks like.

As you can see, there are four tabs, and I'l zing through what they are for:

Project

In the project tab, you set up your, well, project. What is a project in Redcine? If you're used to working with film and the telecine process, think of this as your telecine session, saveable to disk, same as you'd save your color grades for a given tape on your daVinci setup. If you're a software jockey, you can think of a project as being akin to an FCP timeline settings or an After Effects composition settings (not exactly for either of those, but that's the general idea).

From here you can load a shot or a full mag - one of the nice features of Red One is that on camera, during the shoot, you can do some digital slating - specifying shots, takes, etc. The files are filed in folders that fall to that order - takes inside shots inside scene folders, etc. Redcine understands this struture, so when you import, shots are stretched out horizontally, and multipe takes are stacked vertically - just like Scratch, which this owes a very obvious debt to. So much so that the UI (user interface) pretty much IS a very cut down version of Scratch's toolset with some modifications.

One of the coolest features of Redcode, which makes it more like anybody else's v3.0 software than a beta release, is the use of gestural controls - if you flick the mouse pointer (no clicking involved) towards a screen edge, controls and UI elements will appear or dissapear (or even build/reduce in terms of how many/how simple things are shown). Sounds a little complicated/scary at first, but once you start using it, is super fast and easy. It's the little touches - things like you can click and drag horizontally to control some things where they make sense, but in other areas you click-hold and twirl mouse clockwise or counter-clockwise to increase/decrease values...just like a knob or wheel. Very clever.

Anyway, in the project, you can set things like your format, your aspect ratio, your frame rate, etc. You can also control display reticles and masking areas (opaque or transparent, your color of choice), show timecode, all kinds of useful stuff and powerful stuff.

It is important to remember that Redcine is a prep/conversion tool, not intended to be an editor or full coloring tool. It is a pre-grading tool for one light type color corrections, and a prep tool to deliver assets in format of choice.

You can flip between Library View which shows all your shots (horizontally) and takes (stacked vertically atop each other) - is a pre-editorial organizer so you can get a sense of your shot coverage - instead of a long vertical text list for your to organize, is thumbnails in a timeline like interface. Fast and efficient.

Next up, you can proceed to the Shot portion of the application. In here you can see and edit the shots metadata, name, position and scale. Want to crop? Want to scootch it around in that cropped area? All doable, and those shot-by-shot decisions get saved in your project for later recall and usage (handy when it comes time to generate your online res copies). You can play back, even on a laptop. That's right - play back 4K footage without pre-rendering - it is extracting a fractional res version on the fly. You have pop-ups for playback quality at full/half/quarter res, in preview through high quality. Higher res, higher quality slower to process. Wanna see realtime playback as you adjust scale or whatever? Quarter res preview is your friend. Wanna zoom in on that blown highlight for subtle tweaks? Crank up the res to see all the detail. The wavelet nature of Redcode makes it cake to extract fractional resolutions on the fly, no problem. So scale and repo as it is playing back - nice! Can't keyframe though - for that kind of subtle work, just take it to Motion, After Effects, or tool of choice at full res and manipulate it there.

In the Color tab, you have control over a bunch of the color attributes of the shot - you've got three point curves (toe/gamma/shoulder), you've got tint, exposure (measured in stops, very nice), white point (measured in Kelvin and properly executed without just chopping channel data), color channels, a special highlight recovery tool that manipulates digital blowout (ever see a magenta highlight in an overexposed area? This tool can fix it!), and several other things I can't recall.

One major feature of this: the color controls on camera, and in Redcine, and in the FCP plug (more on that below), are all the same, on purpose...because you can save in any one of them and move them to the other. It takes a little time for the full meaning of that to soak in, but do so. Hypothetical: imagine shooting a few test frames, throwing on laptop, previewing the shot there. Tweak color until you like it using the convenient mouse/keyboard interface (could do all same stuff on camera UI, just harder, like iPod vs. iTunes playlist organization...in fact VERY much the same metaphor). Save those settings as a file, put on an SD card, and load back into camera. Bang! Your tweaked nondestructive look metadata now rides shotgun with all footage shot with those settings...and gets baked into the HDMI and HD-SDI outputs. Doing a live shoot? Save those settings and put it on all 8 (or however many) cameras used for them to match. Calibration issues in what I just suggested, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, as you tweak the color settings, you're working from the 12 bit RAW source, manipulating in a 32 bit floating point color space - very precise. And of course, GPU accelerated as well. You can adjust colors WHILE the footage is playing back - very handy.

Oh - you can also define the color space you're working in - be it Rec 709 for HD destined work, or Camera RGB for the native color space, Adobe 1998, etc. as desired.

When you're done there, you can go to Output. From the Output settings, you pick what size you want to generate, what file format, what bit depth (auto-governed by what's possible with the format, so you can't try to create something impossible), and what codec. Now, for everyone who's concerned about will their NLE be supported, the answer is pretty much yes. If you can write to the codec you want to edit with on an Intel Mac or a Windows box, you're in luck. If you need a high end image sequence like TIFF, DPX, OpenEXR, JPEG2000, etc., you're also in luck - as all those formats are already working in the build shown at NAB. As for codecs, here's the drill - if you have a codec installed on your box that you could "normally" use, such as with After Effects or similar programs...you can write to it from Redcine. Simple as that. If you're on a Mac running FCP 6, you could convert to the brand new ProRes422 codec. If you're on a Windows box running Avid, you could convert to DNxHD 36 for your offline, and then later DNxHD 220 for your online. Or the same from a Mac with Avid stuff installed. Just bought the Sheer codec from BitJazz.com, or any other third party codec? Install in on your box, and you write to it from Redcine, no new version of Redcine required. It is that simple.

I mentioned offline/online - if you aren't converting to your final format (and if you're doing an indie feature, you probably aren't, or shouldn't), then convert the first time to your offline codec, save your Redcine Project, and Red is working on something they'll call a Red Pull List to help with your conform - you kick an EDL or XML out of your NLE, then bring that back to Redcine which parses it for all the shots and selects you used - those selects can then be processed to your online format of choice (frame size/codec/etc.) Software conform (easy with FCP I know, I'd imagine so with Adobe, dunno enough about Avid to say), and you're in bidness. Redcine and Red Pull List don't DO the conform for you, they just HELP in the conform process.

Or, if that all seems to complicated, there's another option...read next article posted.

If you have workflow questions about how Redcode RAW will fold into your existing pipeline, be it editorial, VFX, offline, online, hardware, software, whatever, I do exactly that kind of consulting for a living - contact me at the email address at the top of this page in the header. I charge by the hour, rates are indie viable/affordable.

-mike

UPDATE - I'll keep adding extra bits of info to this post -

Q: What about subclips?

A: you can "dupe" the shot in Redcine (doesn't replicate any data on disc, just makes another instance of it in the timeline...like making a copy of a clip in your NLE - no new media generated). You can set separate ins and outs for that VERSION of that shot...this is a big deal for doc makers that roll for an hour and want to pre-slice into shots, but not have to process that one hour shot for the online if all they need is 5 second subclip.

Q: What about conversion times in Redcine?

A: They haven't released official stats, because it'll depend on a lot of things - what clock speed your CPU/s, how many cores, what GPU, what bus speed, what read/write storage & speed; then on top of that what size frame are you rendering to, what color/cropping/repo are you doing, what quality and scaling settings are you using....lotsa factors. What they want to avoid is posting a "it took my box x.y secs/frame" on some pimped out 8 core box doing draft quality SD to a RAID, and some Moe Ronn getting upset stating "Hey! It took WAY longer than that for me!" ....on his Core Solo Mini cooking 4K Hi-Q DPX files to a USB 1.0 drive or somesuch. So they need to get organized and test in an appropriate fashion, and then publish the results in a detailed, well documented and qualified fashion.

All that said...if they are managing to play back at 1K on a Macbook Pro and 2K on a Mac Pro in REAL TIME...I'm not too worried about how long conversion is going to take in Redcine. Rob's on the job.

-mike

Labels: Final Cut, post, post equipment, Red, Redcine, software