Cut to the Chase

As a bit of an update seeing that I haven’t written a post in a while, I thought I would simply say I’m currently working on a workflow to round trip a project from FCP to Color. This isn’t a new or earth-shaking idea, I know - but in working as a freelancer for the past 8 months, I’m finding certain commonalities in my workflow with Color.

I had the pleasure of having lunch with the writer of the Color user manual last week and was able to pick his brain on many of my questions. He has also blogged about this same roundtrip, and I have adapted my workflow to mimic his. After all…. he did write the book!

I hope to post that workflow and process for round tripping to Color in the next month. Stay tuned!

So… I’ve had a change of heart… HDV has managed to wooo it’s way into my heart. Now, I know you are asking… “how much did you have to drink to get to this point….” my answer, “not enough!” So after starting at PostWorks and watching them begin to capture an HDV tape… I started asking a lot of questions. Here is a summery of my findings:

So you shoot HDV… great, you now have a hard archival copy of your footage (got to love tape). The major question up until now (for me) has been, how do you deal with this less than amazing codec in post. While I have presented the ProRes 4:2:2 option, there is another way which makes things even more brilliant, than before: HD-SDI. Holy smokes why didn’t I know about this before now! I knew of SDI… great way to playback video with minimal quality loss. HD-SDI is that and a bag of chips. The SDI signal carries pure digital audio with it and through the wonders of BlackMagic, can be captured into FCP. Yes, this has probably been around a while, but you have to understand… as I have just learned about it - I’m a kid in the freaking candy shop!

In the past, I have questioned why you would spend an extra $3,000 on a camera with a “jack-pack” which includes HD/SD-SDI… but it is all clear to me now. Here’s the post system setup: One badass MacPro, with one Blackmagic DeckLink HD Extreme card (http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/hd/), your new HDV jack-pack cam…. and… and… oh wait.. THAT’S IT! No more… through the HD-SDI out of the camera, and the HD-SDI in on the DeckLink card, you are able to tell FCP to capture your HDV as full blown 1080i or 720p HD - through hardware, not software. No transcoding to anything once the media is capture… just you and your newly found HD files, loving each other in all the ways a person can love a set of binary.

Now also consider this: Sony also makes a sweet HDV deck that sells for about as much as an HDV camera… however, the deck makes things even nicer. Because you have the DeckLink card, you are able to control the HDV deck video RS-422 controller built into the card! Other bonuses… add a HD-SDI monitor or an HDMI monitor to the system, and you can run your video to it video the DeckLink card. There are many other small upsides to this DeckLink card - visit their site for all of them.

Now why am I all gitty about HDV now? I mean, if you could shoot tapeless and not have to log and capture all that tape, why would you? With the cost of the card, and the camera, you could easily get a HVX200 or a Sony EX-1. Why would you put your self in the HDV world when you could have “much more?” I would go HDV over tapeless HD because I don’t have to archive everything I shoot on to a hard drive and worry about that hard drive dying on me… I start a tape library with a good (am I mean good) logging/cataloging system for the tapes, I find a self, and stash them for the rest of my life! I could go on, and on - but I think I have finally found my answer to this question of, “What do I buy and invest in for a professional home/freelancing system” Answer: HDV.

Additional Links:
My (current) “dream” setup:
The Camera: Canon XH-A1 (or jack-pack XH-G1)
The Deck: Sony HVR-1500
Card: BlackMagic, DeckLink HD Extreme
Approx. Total Cost: $10,000
OR
Approx. Total Cost: $7,500 (no deck - camera with jack-pack)

About a month ago I entered OpenCut 1.0, a short film (appox. 10min) competition where the organizers provide you with the script, storyboard and footage. Pretty interesting idea really. I entered this competition more the access to full blown RED footage then I did for the prizes (which are sweet by the way).

I sent a 750GB HD off to L.A. about a week ago ready to be loaded with 170GB of RED RAW footage. I’m talking the copied the entire contents of the cards (or RAID) they shot on, on to the Hard Drive. The files are like nothing I’ve seen before. Audio and video are separate, and there are about 30 folders (reals) with footage in them. About 170 clips all together.

Before I could even look at the footage, I had to go to RED’s web site and download the necessary plug-ins for FCP.
After doing that, Quick Time was able to open the RAW files and…. and…. Oh my God… they were HUGE and AMAZING! Like no other piece of “video” I’ve seen before. At 100% it didn’t fit on my 22″ monitor running at 1680 wide. I checked… yep, the clips are 1920×1080. Oh and did I mention all 4k.

After I calmed down a bit, I realized editing these files Real Time in FCP would be a joke. I read some RED forums online and found another plug in that transforms the Log & Transfer window in Final Cut into a media transcoder for RED footage. Basically you get 1920×1080 Apple ProRess 4:2:2 (HQ) clips out of the RED footage. Much more manageable for FCP.

As we speak the 170 clips are ingesting at the studio; I chose to do it over night! Hopefully in the morning I will have something to start working with.

As a closing note: There is still a lot for me to uncover when it comes to work with this footage. It took me about two hours to get the point where I knew what I needed to do with the RAW footage to work with it in FCP. I could choose to finish the project in the ProRes, but seriously… I have RED RAW 4k files here… I want to finish in 4k! I’m still reading up on the workflow for that…. it doesn’t sound easy. Check back - I’ll keep posting on my progress and be sure to post a summary of my findings and workflow!

For now,
S

PS - I will post a link to a RED RAW file for you to download. Its HUGE and will take a while, but at least you can see the quality!

Last week I started reading Alexis Van Hurkman’s book on Color Correction. I do plan on post a review in a couple weeks once I finish enough of it to provide good feed back. But so far, I’m 100+ pages deep and loving the inside he give into the reasons why colorists do what they do. Stay tuned for a bit more on the Encyclopedia of Color Correction.

It took me FOREVER to find what IRE stood for. I could not remember for the life of me. I knew it had something to do with Radio Engineers, but the “I”… After Google failed miserably, I turned to the FCP manual. And there it was:

IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers)  - Also refers to an analog video signal unit of
measurement for luma, established by the Institute of Radio Engineers.

The IRE level is indicated on the waveform monitor.