Compositing with RED One Footage

Been working with the Sensored Footage for the OpenCut3 competition.

Learning lots.

Unfortunately one of the discs were faulty and I am still waiting for the replacement disc that was shipped more than a week again. But it is only one disc of 25 so it is not stopping me – although I doubt I can finish in time for the competition deadline – pity.

One of the major issues is the establishment of a workflow. The other is computer performance but I cannot do anything about that for a while.

What I am using:

• Red Alert 3.50Beta
• Final Cut Pro 6.0.5
• Shake 4.1.1
• Photoshop CS2

Note: I am messing around with Red Alert because I believe that it is better to do the primary colour corrections at the highest resolution; 4K. Color, Final Cut Pro and Shake will only be working with the 2K Pro Res 422 encoded footage. Only problem is that I am far more comfortable working in Color or FCP than RED Alert and to render out from RED Alert takes a seriously long time. So I am only experimenting with RED Alert at the moment – it is just not viable unless I have a beefy Mac Pro to do the crunching.

My Steps

Log and Transfer

First I need to wrap the R3D files so that FCP etc can work with the footage. Scott Simmons over at The Edit Blog has a great article on just this.

This does not take that much time since it is only a process that wraps the R3D files into QT files. However there is a greater demand on your Mac when it come to editing and compositing. Transferring directly to ProRes is another option which I have not tried but it will also result in a greater requirement for storage. Also I think that there will still be a lot of strain on a typical Mac esp. MBPs.

Edit

With the OpenCut3  competition I was give the Final Cut Pro project files that pointed to the lower resolution proxy files that were already encoded to ProRes HQ 422 but for some reason did not display correctly. This was most likely because of the missing files due to the faulty disc. The Sequences were ProRes 1024 x 512 with the REDCODE as the compressor:

Ok maybe this is the best way for lower spec’ed machines, not really sure, but then you are working with the lowest proxy version of the 4K files. 

I chose to use the 2K version using the QuickTime wrapping introduced in FCP 6.0.5:

These are most likely best described as “Offline” versions of the actual 4K 4:4:4 footage. What I do not understand is how does one eventually go Online with so many renders occurring in the workflow. Also the only open I know of for working with 4K footage is Assimilate’s Scratch.

Keying in Shake

I needed to key, track and compose the clips. So I exported the clips out to Shake from FCP, but since they were ProRes 422 I did not get any benifit from RED’s 4:4:4 even if Shake only deals with RGB and it was Pro Res HQ. So I still had to do some colour blurring of the uv channels in you colour space.

I was quite impressed with the first key I was able to extract using KeyLight, but there was still much work to be done. in the end I had to use Primatte as my core matte, KeyLight as a procedural  garbage matte and another KeyLight as an Edge matte. With a special Holdout matte using RotoShape for some minor issues and another Rotoshape for a semi-transparent bottle (top) that all had to be tracked using tracker and stabilize. The background I used was just an arb graphic I put together while trying for a surrealist look.

The problem I have with this workflow is that I cannot switch between FCP and Shake seamlessly. Once I have sent a clip to Shake and rendered, I then have to make sure that FCP is closed (or at least the sequence) if I intend to re-render the same file from Shake.

Please note that the footage is copyrighted (although I have only included stills) and cannot be used for commercial purposes – see here.

The footage and hence the stills extracted from the footage I am currently editing was supplied to me by Silverado through the OpenCut competition for use in the competition. The footage comes from the movie “Sensored” directed by Ryan Todd.