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!

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