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FCP-Color workflow for RED
- introduction
- How can one judge what a shot looks like
- Not in Quicktime Player : only in Final Cut Pro or Color, using an hd video card (Blackmagic, Aja, Matrox…) and an hd monitor.
- Quicktime Player often shifts gamma impredictebly, even more so with a monitor calibrated with a 2.2 gamma rather than 1.8
- Transcoding solutions
- R3d directly in Color vs.Transcoding in FCP to Prores
- An r3d media in Color is slightly lighter than the same media transcoded to prores from Final Cut Pro
- Transcoding in FCP to ‘native’ vs. to ‘prores’
- Seen in Quicktime Player : the native transcoding is much darker
- Seen in FCP : exactly the same
- Seen in Color : the native transcoding is slightly lighter : we have exactly the same difference as in .1
- R3d in Color vs. ‘native’ fcp transcoding
- In Color : exactly the same
- --> the FCP ‘native’ transcoding truly is native and the redcode plugin behaves the same way with it than with r3d files. Absolutely no loss of quality
- RedAlert/RedRushes transcoding, vs. r3d in Color
- In Color : almost the same, the transcoded media does have a little less contrast
- --> the FCP transcoding is not as good as the RedAlert/RedRushes transcoding, because transcoded media with RedAlert/RedRushes looks almost the same as r3d, and not transcoded media from FCP
- in pictures
- r3d, no transcoding
- transcoded to proresHQ with FCP, plus color-correction to match the exposure
- r3d, no transcoding
- transcoded to proresHQ with FCP, plus color-correction to match the exposure
- conclusion
- we know that to edit in FCP one has to transcode…
- transcoding alters the shot
- transcoding in FCP alters the shot more than transcoding in RedRushes/RedCine/RedAlert
- --> the color-grading should be using native files
- --> one should edit offline and conform
- --> or at least transcode outside of Final Cut Pro
- --> r3d files or ‘native’ transcoded quicktimes are exactly the same for Color
- which workflow?
- which tool for transcoding ?
- transcoding with FCP
- to Prores : ok if hd monitoring and powerful computer : FCP will do 2K, no resize is possible
- to ‘native’ : cumbersome for editing
- RedAlert orRedCine
- One can conform to Color, do a pre-grading pass so as not to burn the whites or crash the blacks, render to linear DPXToo slow : 1 second per image = 1 day for 1 hour
- RedRushes
- pros
- can be very fast (more than FCP) : depends on the Debayer Quality used
- can resize (to hd or sd)
- why resize ?
- the files are much lighter for the computer ; no need to have 2K files to work on if monitoring in SD ! And anyway one will have to conform in the end to get the absolute max quality
- how to conform
- with an edl
- export an edl from FCP, import it in Color
- Color finds automatically the r3d files and work with them
- Tested, works
- From FCP
- Once editing is over, hide the low-resolution media
- Setup List and Transfer to transcode to ‘native’
- Launch “batch capture” of the media
- Note : it is absolutely necessary that the names of the low-resolution media match the names of the r3d files
- This is automatic with FCP and RedRushes
- RedCine should be setup to use ‘#C’ as the file name
- Tested, works
- Conform for other systems (Baselight, Lustre…)
- One can conform to Color, do a pre-grading pass so as not to burn the whites or crash the blacks, render to linear DPX