I’ve work on various RED projects, but a recent interesting example is My Fair Lidy, an independent film produced through the Valencia College Film Production Technology program. This was a full-blown feature shot entirely with RED One cameras. In this program, professional filmmakers with real projects in hand partner with a class of eager students seeking to learn the craft of film production. I’ve edited two of these films produced through the program and assisted in various aspects of post on many others. My Fair Lidy – a quirky comedy directed by program director Ralph Clemente – was shot in 17 days this summer at various central Florida locations. Two RED Ones were used – one handled by director of photography Ricardo Galé and the second by student cinematographers. My Fair Lidy was produced by SandWoman Films and stars Christopher Backus and Leigh Shannon.
There are many ways to handle the post production of native RED media and I’ve covered a number of them in these earlier posts. There is no single “best way” to handle these files, because each production is often best-served by a custom solution. Originally, I felt the way to tackle the dailies was to convert the .r3d camera files into ProRes 4444 files using the RedLogFilm profile. This gives you a very flat look, and a starting point very similar to ARRI ALEXA files shot with the Log-C profile. My intension would have been to finish and grade straight from the QuickTimes and never return to the .r3d files, unless I needed to fix some problems. Neutral images with a RedLogFilm gamma setting are very easy to grade and they let the colorist swing the image for different looks with ease. However, after my initial discussions with Ricardo, it was decided to do the final grade from the native camera raw files, so that we had the most control over the image, plus the ability to zoom in and reframe using the native 4K files as a source.
The dailies and editorial flow
My Fair Lidy was lensed with a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, with the REDs set to record 4096 x 2304 (at 23.98fps). In addition to a RED One and a healthy complement of grip, lighting and electrical gear, Valencia College owns several Final Cut Pro post systems and a Red Rocket accelerator card. With two REDs rolling most of the time, the latter was a godsend on this production. We had two workstations set up – one as the editor’s station with a large Maxx Digital storage array and the other as the assistant’s station. That system housed the Red Rocket card. My two assistants (Kyle Prince and Frank Gould) handled all data back-up and conversion of 4K RED files to 1920 x 1080 ProResHQ for editorial media. Using ProResHQ was probably overkill for cutting the film (any of the lower ProRes codecs would have been fine for editorial decisions) but this gave us the best possible image for an potential screenings, trailers, etc.
Redcine-X was our tool for .r3d media organization and conversion. All in-camera settings were left alone, except the gamma adjustment. The Red Rocket card handles the full-resolution debayering of the raw files, so conversion time is close to real time. The two stations were networked via AFP (Apple’s file-sharing protocol), which permitted the assistant to handle his tasks without slowing down the editor. In addition, the assistant would sync and merge audio from the double-system sound, multi-track audio recordings and enter basic scene/take descriptions. Each shoot day had its own FCP project, so when done, project files and media (.r3d, ProRes and audio) were copied over to the editor’s Maxx array. Master clips from these daily FCP projects were then copied-and-pasted (and media relinked) into a single “master edit” FCP project.
For reasons of schedule and availability, I split the editing responsibilities with a second film editor, Patrick Tyler. My initial role was to bring the film to its first cut and then Patrick handled revisions with the producer and director. Once the picture was locked, I rejoined the project to cover final finishing and color grading. My Fair Lidy was on a very accelerated schedule, with sound design and music scoring running on a parallel track. In total, post took about 15 weeks from start to finish.
Finishing and grading
Since we didn’t use FCP’s Log and Transfer function nor the in-camera QuickTime reference files as edit proxies, there was no easy way to get Apple Color to automatically relink clips to the original .r3d files. You can manually redirect Color to link to RED files, but this must be done one shot at a time – not exactly desirable for the 1300 or so shots in the film.
The recommended workflow is to export an XML from FCP 7, which is then opened in Redcine-X. It will correctly reconnect to the .r3d files in place of the QuickTime movies. From there you export a new XML, which can be imported into Color. Voila! A Color timeline that matches the edit using the native camera files. Unfortunately for us, this is where reality came crashing in – literally. No matter what we did, using both XMLs and EDLs, everything that we attempted to import into Color crashed the application. We also tried ClipFinder, another free application designed for RED media. It didn’t crash Color, but a significant number of shots were incorrectly linked. I suspect some internal confusion because of the A and B camera situation.
On to Plan B. Since Redcine-X correctly links to the media and includes not only controls for the raw settings, but also a healthy toolset for primary color correction, then why not use it for part of the grading process? Follow that up with a pass through Color to establish the stylistic “look”. This ended up working extremely well for us. Here are the basic steps I followed.
Step 1. We broke the film into ten reels and exported an XML file for each reel from FCP 7.
Step 2. Each reel’s XML was imported into Redcine-X as a timeline. I changed all the camera color metadata for each shot to create a neutral look and to match shots to each other. I used RedColor (slightly more saturated than RedColor2) and RedGamma2 (not quite as flat as RedLogFilm), plus adjusted the color temp, tint and ISO values to get a neutral white balance and match the A and B camera angles. The intent was to bring the image “within the goalposts” of the histogram. Occasionally I would make minor exposure and contrast adjustments, but for the most part, I didn’t touch any of the other color controls.
My objective was to end up with a timeline that looked consistent but preserved dynamic range. Essentially that’s the same thing I would do as the first step using the primary tab within Color. The nice part about this is that once I matched the settings of the shots, the A and B cameras looked very consistent.
Step 3. Each timeline was exported from Redcine-X as a single ProResHQ file with these new settings baked in. We had moved the Red Rocket card into the primary workstation, so these 1920 x 1080 clips were rendered with full resolution debayering. As with the dailies, rendering time was largely real-time or somewhat slower. In this case, approximately 10-20 minutes per reel.
Step 4. I imported each rendered clip back into FCP and placed it onto video track two over the corresponding clips for that reel to check the conforming accuracy and sync. Using the “next edit” keystroke, I quickly stepped through the timeline and “razored” each edit point on the clip from Redcine-X. This may sound cumbersome, but only took a couple of minutes for each reel. Now I had an FCP sequence from a single media clip, but with each cut split as an edit point. Doing this creates “notches” that are used by the color correction software for cuts between corrections. That’s been the basis for all “tape-to-tape” color correction since DaVinci started doing it and the new Resolve software still includes a similar automatic scene detection function today.
Step 5. I sent my newly “notched” timeline to Color and graded as I normally would. By using the Redcine-X step as a “pre-grade”, I had done the same thing to the image as I would have done using the RED tab within Color, thus keeping with the plan to grade from the native camera raw files. I do believe the approach I took was faster and better than trying to do it all inside Color, because of the inefficiency of bouncing in and out of the RED tab in Color for each clip. Not to mention that Color really bogs down when working with 4K files, even with a Red Rocket card in place.
Step 6. The exception to this process was any shot that required a blow-up or repositioning. For these, I sent the ProRes file from dailies in place of the rendered shot from Redcine-X. In Color, I would then manually reconnect to the .r3d file and resize the shot in Color’s geometry room, thus using the file’s full 4K size to preserve resolution at 1080 for the blow-up.
Step 7. The last step was to render in Color and then “Send to FCP” to complete the roundtrip. In FCP, the reel were assembled for the full movie and then married to the mixed soundtrack for a finished film.
© 2011 Oliver Peters
Timing is often everything when it comes to indie filmmaking. That’s certainly the case with 
Higher Ground editor 
Newmark explained, “I was concerned about whether I’d need to take the existing dailies and convert them again to DNxHD media for Colleen. I talked it over with a friend at PostWorks in New York and it seemed like using AMA would be viable. We proceeded down the road of using the ProRes files in the Avid and Colleen was able to cut the film entirely using linked AMA files. We never transcoded them into DNxHD and it worked well. Of course, at the beginning I still had the Plan B of converting everything again if the AMA idea didn’t work; but, I wanted to avoid this as it would have cost us extra time. Even though we own a Red Rocket card for fast transcoding, the crew was using two cameras the entire time and often recording very long performance takes. So, in two-and-a-half weeks, they’d already accumulated quite a large amount of footage.”
In the end, it worked better than expected for what was at that time a new software release. Higher Ground is likely the first feature film edited using strictly AMA-linked ProRes files. Thanks in part to the weak economy, the film company was able to secure off-hours packages for DI finishing in Los Angeles and sound editing and mixing at Sound One in New York. Newmark continued, “I was able to send the colorist [Adam Hawkey] an EDL and the trimmed .r3d RED camera files, as well as the looks that I’d established with the DoP. These were imported into a Nucoda system, which read the files perfectly, including the looks presets. Adam told us this worked seamlessly and gave him a great starting point to work from in grading the film. Michael [McDonough] supervised the grading over a five-day stretch.”
I asked Colleen Sharp about editing challenges on the film. She replied, “The biggest challenge I’d anticipated turned out not to be an issue at all. That was working with a first-time director, who was also the lead actor. Vera was great to work with. She was new to the entire editing process and very intrigued by the possibilities. She was hands-on during the edit and very helpful. I normally work on a film during the shooting and complete an editor’s cut before I start working with the director. In this case, I wasn’t completely done with my cut before the production wrapped, so the last portion of this first cut was worked out with Vera’s involvement. They finished shooting just after the 4th of July weekend, but I didn’t have my first cut together until the third week in July. It was just under three hours long! We continued working at it until mid-October and ended up at the final length of 107 minutes. Naturally, with that much trimming, you have to lose some scenes that are painful to cut, but that’s all part of the process.”
In the end, the post production workflow proved to be very viable. Newmark said, “When we started this, a lot of the advice we received ended with ‘good luck – no one has ever done this before.’ I was impressed with the stability of the Avid system, compared with the Final Cut system that was being used at the same time on the other film going through BCDF.” In the future, BCDF intends to handle more films on the Avid system. Newmark continued, “We always want to let the decision be made by the cinematographers and editors whenever possible. We own RED camera packages, but we’ve also shot films with ARRI ALEXA and 35mm film depending on what’s the right approach for that film. I really think Avid is the best tool for feature film editing and I’m glad this experience worked so well. Of course, now when we have a RED show that we know will be cut on Media Composer, we transcode the RED media to DNxHD. Nevertheless, going ProRes on Higher Ground proved to be far more seamless than I would have expected.”
The camera “look” that seems most conducive to a workflow where you grade after raw conversion is to use a flat setting that can easily be manipulated. In the newest Premiere Pro RED Importer source settings pane, this means using Color Version 2, a Color Space of REDcolor2 (or REDcolor – slightly more saturated) and a Gamma Curve of REDlogFilm. ISO, Kelvin and Tint should be adjusted to taste, but basically Kelvin/Tint should be set to a neutral white balance. An ISO value of 800 will tend to place the signal in the middle to middle-lower part of the histogram; however, experiment with the ISO setting for an optimal value. Now leave the other color controls alone.
By doing this you have effectively created an image that is very similar to the Log-C profile of an ARRI ALEXA or a scanned 35mm film negative. It provides a good neutral starting point for grading, which can be readily moved into a wide range of creative looks. In fact, this setting responds well to the built-in Cineon Converter, with a few tweaks.
I’ve become particularly found of using the Sapphire plug-ins. Now that they work rather well inside Premiere Pro, you can quickly develop “looks” by building up a stack of filters. For instance, in one of these examples, the combination of HueSatBright, Gamma, FilmEffect, BleachBypass and GlowDarks filters result in a very rich grade. Likewise, the Epic files respond nicely to Colorista II and Magic Bullet Looks.
I spoke with Dermot Shane, a Vancouver-based VFX/DI supervisor who specializes in using Avid DS. Shane was working with 10.3.1 (in beta) when he got the call to handle finishing for “All Yours” (directed by Brantley Gutierrez). According to Shane, “The schedule on this was very tight and changes were being made up until the last minute. That’s because the video integrates clips from the movie and there had been a few last minute changes to the cut. In fact, we ended up getting one of these clips FTP’ed to us just in time for the deadline!” The production company for Metric shot the music video scenes using a RED One with the updated Mysterium-X sensor, which offers improved dynamic range. The newest RED software also improves how the camera raw files are converted into color information. These latest RED software updates have been integrated into the RED SDK used in Avid DS 10.3.1.
Step 2. If you want to change the levels/gamma/exposure/balance of the file by altering the camera raw data, then open the Source Settings for each clip and adjust the video.
Step 5. Transcode all source clips. This process runs at close to real-time on a fast machine. When transcoding is done, close all AMA bins and do not use them during the edit. You’ll edit with the transcoded media only.
Step 8. Open the AMA bins (with the .R3D files) and relink the edited sequence to the AMA clips. Make sure the “Allow relinking of imported/AMA clips by Source File name” is NOT checked in the Relink dialogue window. When relinking is completed, the sequence will be repopulated with AMA media, which will be the native, camera raw .R3D files. If you want to change the raw color data at this point, you will need to change each source clip and then refresh the sequence to update the color for clips that appear within the timeline.
You might be asking, why not just edit in Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro? The hitch is that Final Cut doesn’t support 4K files and Premiere Pro has a good native, but not a good offline-online workflow for RED files. FCP users clearly outnumber Premiere Pro users among professional film and video editors, however, both After Effects and Premiere Pro offer some interesting finishing options. In fact, a number of feature films have used both for all or part of the finishing process. A combination of Apple and Adobe tools creates some interesting scenarios for RED post. (Note: Automatic Duck Pro Import AE 5.0 is required.)
Step 6. Launch a new Premiere Pro CS5 project and select a new sequence setting from one of the RED presets, such as a 4K timeline.
