RED Camera & FCP Workflow
Posted by admin | Filed under Film, Production, Video
I cut my first project shot on RED recently. Undoubtedly, the footage looks great. But, the process isn’t without its drawbacks.
The main issue that we faced was processing the massive amount of data the you get with the native R3D video files that the RED camera produces. It didn’t help that we were editing on my Dual Core iMac! Ideally we’d be using an 8 Core PowerMac with 16GB RAM, 512mb of vRAM etc, etc. Even then you could do with more power and we didn’t even have that so processing the amount of information in the video files was the first hurdle.
The recommended Final Cut Studio workflow is to do an offline edit with 1) the Proxies that the RED camera creates (which is dead fast because you can just import the Proxies like any other video files) or 2) transcode to one of the Apple Pro Res codecs and offline that way. Once you have done your edit you then reconform to the native R3D files and grade in Color. Then output at Pro Res 4444 and go back to FCP for your final output.
Sounds simple enough…….or not. But, when we tried to use the Proxies I had to set the timeline playback quality to “Low” which didn’t give us enough quality to do the edit. When we upped the quality the playback stalled. So, instead we went for the transcode option. As the director had opted for shooting everything at 120 fps we had about 3.5 hours of footage. We tried Redrushes and an app called Clipfinder but for some reason the RED Space colour data was lost during transcode so the offline would’ve looked nothing like the the final edit. We tried loads of variations of the settings and still no proper colour! In the end we used Log & Transfer in FCP……and it took about 20 hours to convert the files to Pro Res 422 Proxy!! Lame.
Anyway, once we had the offline files the edit was easy. The playback quality was fine. As it was at 2k resolution the picture looked good even at the Pro Res 422 Proxy quality because the timeline viewer was never more than 50% frame size. The iMac didn’t stall at all and we could do as much time-remapping as we wanted without any trouble.
Offline complete we reconformed to R3D and exported to Color. The good thing about grading in Color with R3D files is that you can tweak the actual RED Space colour data that is saved in the files so you get loads more freedom to mess about. Grade done, we rendered as Pro Res 4444 and went back to FCP to add graphics done in After Effects and the score from Soundtrack Pro.
The workflow is logical when you get your head around it and grading is an absolute dream using the R3D files. But, the transcode process is way too long to make it feasible to do quick turnaround jobs on your average home system. I guess this is to be expected but when you can edit full HD 1080P without a problem you’d expect to be able to fly through 2k files easily enough – not the case. Should’ve gone for the Quad Core! I’ve got the footage to play with now so I’ll be doing more tests.
You can get all the codecs and plug-ins from the RED website. You also get detailed instructions on various workflows with those files.
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