Working with RED proxies in After Effects

Chris Meyer has a new PVC article, Using RED Footage Proxies in After Effects, on using auto-generated lower res proxy files to speed up work before rendering. Here's the intro:

"Many people like to shoot RED source footage these days, even if the final destination is lower-resolution video. I agree, it’s nice to have all of those extra pixels to play with - except when you have to actually read them off disk and process them in order to see a frame in a program like Adobe After Effects. Well, After Effects has a little-known feature called footage proxies that can speed up your workflow up until it’s time to render."

For more, see Placeholders and proxies in AE Help and Proxies & Workflow Tips, a video tutorial by Andrew Kramer on proxies and output modules and templates.

SF Cutters @ Avid 12-1 + Avid/RED webinar

SF Cutters -- brought to you originally by the Option key in Final Cut -- is having a night hosted by Avid on Wednesday, December 01, 2010 from 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM.

Tickets are going fast. This meeting is at Avid (Digidesign), 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd in Daly City (not real far from BART). Here's the current agenda:

• Chris Nelson, editor of Lost and Mad Men
• Michael Krulik, Avid Sr. Applications Editor
• Jesse Spencer, expert sharing tricks
• drawing includes Avid Media Composer 5!

Update: see Scott Simmons on a free webinar with the experts on December 2, Avid and RED team up for a RED workflow webinar.

Update for CS5 RED plug-ins

CS5 includes built-in support for the RED camera format, and today there's an update to the RED camera import CS5 plug-ins for After Effects and Premiere Pro to include support for the new Mysterium-X sensor and the latest "Color Science."

Details are provided by Todd Kopriva in his post new RED color science, and how to make it all work with After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5.

Nvidia demos Mercury Playback Engine

Nvidia has some newer "real world use cases" of Adobe's future Mercury Playback Engine, with silent demos of keying, color correction, picture-in-picture, compositing, and encoding.

Any one needing power playback and encoding should consider supported cards GeForce GTX 285 (~ $300), the Quadro FX 4800, 5800, or the Quadro CX if they are upgrading machines now.

The Adobe Mercury Playback Engine

The Genesis Project, an Adobe blog, has details on the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, the GPU playback engine demoed at IBC in September and mentioned a few weeks ago on another Adobe blog which discussed Premiere Pro "Next".

Again, check out the details in the Q&A, but you won't find the phrase "After Effects"!

If you want After Effects to be a better finishing tool, then make a feature request at the Adobe website.

Update: Karl Soule has a coupla posts too, Three words you'll be hearing a lot of: Adobe Mercury Engine and More on the Mercury Engine...,

"we do have external people testing it out now, including some people posting over in the RED forum here. As soon as we have any information about availability, I will be the first one to post it here."

On the RED forum, Adobe's Simon Hayhurst says,

"On topics like TC, Grading Integration, RED Rocket™ --- all important stuff .... and we're continuing to knock these kinds of items down one by one. Prioritization of which order to do them in is the hard question ..... Mike Kanfer is our most active Red forum participant and your first port of call for prioritization opinions.
[...]
On the topic of AE and Mercury --- the engine in AE is very different to an NLE engine --- there is inevitably some tech cross-sharing that can be done, but the apps work in very different ways at their core, so much of the core rendering engine needs to be different"

Update: note that the RAM base of the approved graphics card will effect performance (how many clips at what sizes and number of filters applied), so if you're doing RED files you'll want the more expensive cards.

Adobe demos nVidia CUDA acceleration for compression and RED

fxguidetv #068 features part of an Adobe tech demo of nVidia acceleration of RED video files from an IBC 2009 recap from Amsterdam (along with news from davinci-Blackmagic, Eyeon, Avid, Nuke, etc).

The Adobe demos were at the nVidia booth showing technology using nVidia's CUDA architecture, and showed only what looked like filters in Premiere that accelerated playback of with multiple transform, blur, and color correction filters. Performance so far is playback up to 5 RED RAW clips with 8-12 filters.

We might be hearing more about this and more from nVidia's GPU Tecnology Conference starting today in San Jose. Among the interesting talks is a Keynote with Richard Kerris of Lucasfilm who is to "provide a glimpse of what’s on the horizon for GPU’s in future and how it will impact filmmaking."

Adam Wilt's FCP/Color workflow

When Adam Wilt talks, people listen...

For lessons learned in RED FCP/Color roundtripping, and a suggested FCP/Color workflow for RED clips, see RED+FCP+Color: Making It All Work.

RED Post – an Easy Way

In RED Post – the Easy Way Oliver Peters gives you an overview from the perspective of an editor on 2 recent commercials.

Oliver also links to the recent outline of RED post production paths by RED's Ted Schilowitz, Simple Post Production Options for RED ONE. Ted demonstrated Shooting with the RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera in a movie posted last October on MacVideo. For a bit of a reality check, see Matthew Jeppsen's On Set with Red: A Weary AC’s Rant.

Similar tips were by posted last week by Mark Christiansen in 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post; more RED info can be found through these posts.

Update: There's a thread on Oliver's article on FinalCutPro-L.

Update 2: Mark Christiansen has another tip, Apply Color Adjustments to RED QuickTimes, for when colors are not quite right working natively with QuickTime files linked to R3D files.

MC: 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post

Mark Christiansen, fresh off a preso on RED @ SFMOGRAPH, provides the latest intel on RED starting points in 5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post: Lose less life working with R3D source. Mark summarizes:

"If there’s one key take-away from this article, it’s this: for the vast majority of projects, preserving full 4K (or even 3K) data is not your main goal; you will find the greatest success by converting to a format that keeps only what you need."

If you have not been reading carefully, you may have missed that "the RED camera records 12-bit images, so a 16 bit linear TIFF or 10-bit log DPX has more than enough headroom to handle the image data at a fraction of the R3D size."

Note: Adam Wilt has some advice for using large files like RED format in Play Ping-Pong for Faster File Flipping: Separating source and destination disks can really speed thing up.

Previous RED news items and links are here.

RED @ SFMOGRAPH: Feb 26 at Adobe

It would be great if this was posted on Vimeo or PVC, like AENY's recent meeting...

SFMOGRAPH is having a meeting on February 26th at Adobe on Townsend Street in SF. You must pre-register for this event. Here's an almost verbatim description of the agenda:

'The February SFMOGRAPH meeting will revolve around Red Camera workflow in After Effects. Mark Christiansen [author of After Effects CS4 Visual Effects and Compositing Studio Techniques] will be kicking off the meeting with an in-depth look. Mark has worked extensively with .R3D files along with a long history working with film, so he has an in-depth knowledge of the "old" process compared to Red. Hopefully, Matt Silverman will chime in too.

Plug-in of the month is going to be comprised of numerous plug-ins that go hand in hand with the Red workflow. We'll take a look at the standard built-in color correction tools in AE, and explain where 3rd party color correctors like Color Finesse, Colorista, Frishcluft Curves, and Magic Bullet Looks fit into the picture.

Lastly we're hoping to see Red work done by anyone in the audience who can bring in clips to share. Please make sure these clips are in Quicktime format.'

Note: Mark's findings should help iron out any wrinkles of this ".01" update; for a prefiguring, see the post by Michael Coleman, After Effects product manager, Tips for Editing and Finishing RED Raw Files with Adobe CS4 Workflows on Studio Daily. To use the updates (from both Adobe and RED), you'd need to meet the hefty system requirements -- and don't forget to change AE’s “interpretation rules.txt” file. It seems that the only color space supported RED's CS4 importer software is Rec709.

There's more on Red Camera workflow from various other sources in previous posts; here's a video (loud to start) on using RED Camera RAW and CS4 by Dave Helmley, which can be viewed fullscreen at Adobe TV:



Update: Final Cut Pro-L has a nice thread on RED workflow. Also interesting is "The Truth About 2K, 4K and The Future of Pixels" by John Galt at Creative Cow, and the Red User Discussion in response. Jim Tierney at Digital Anarchy has additional thoughts and links to an article that explains the difference between sensors.

Michael Coleman on using RED files in CS4

Michael Coleman, After Effects product manager, has a Tips for Editing and Finishing RED Raw Files with Adobe CS4 Workflows on Studio Daily.

Fx Guide previews Adobe .r3d support

Fx Guide podcast red centre #024 talks about RED files in After Effects and Premiere for about 12 minutes starting at 22:30. John Montgomery likes the 1st step implementation and thinks it about comparable to using FCP proxies, and looks forward to improvements coming from Adobe's work with the RED gang and Assimilate.

REDCODE installer for CS4 available

Studio Daily posted REDCODE Installer for Adobe CS4 finally available from RED.

DAV's TechTable offers extended notes and illustrated help in Native Red Camera Files & CS4! Premiere Pro C4 and After Effects CS4 workflow using the NEW Native RED R3D plug-in, which supercedes his earlier post New Red Camera Adobe Support. Here's a small version of Dave Helmley's supporting video, which can be viewed fullscreen at Adobe TV:



Update: Curiosity seekers can find more details in a RED User thread, and The Edit Blog is already Kicking the tires on R3D editing in Premiere Pro.

Update 2: There's also an Adobe workflow paper available; one version was posted by Dave Helmley. For consistent color appearance of R3D files between After Effects and Premiere Pro, you must assign the HDTV (Rec. 709) color profile when enabling Color Management. The workflow paper tells you how to make the R3D interpretations permanent with a quick revision to AE’s “interpretation rules.txt” file.

Premiere CS 4.01 imports FCP projects & exports OMF, AAF

Besides directly editing RED files (or not), the new release of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 (version 4.0.1) enables users to import Final Cut Pro projects via XML interchange, export to Open Media Framework (OMF), and import and export projects in Advanced Authoring Format (AAF). To find out more check out Premiere Pro CS4 4.0.1 Help is live.

This is from From FCP to Premiere to ProTools to After Effects at Mikes Jones Digital Basin:
"...its the last of the triumvirate of exchange options this update delivers that really is a bit of a head turner... Adobe Premiere Pro now has the ability to import and open Final Cut Pro projects....!

Yep, that's right. A project cut in FCP can now be opened directly in Premiere Pro using FCP's XML format. Having just done the test myself I can attest to it working perfectly. In fact I took a 5 minute project with 4 streams of video and 6 streams of audio from FCP, exported an XML project file, took my hard drive over from my Mac to my Window's based workstation and imported that FCP project into Premiere and it opened in seconds flawlessly."

Update: I missed Scot Simmons' comments at Studio Daily, Adobe fires another shot across Apple’s bow. Unfortunately the shot fell a bit short since Apple shipped their RED solution (see FCP User's notes on the Pro Apps update) and Adobe didn'. Later at The Editblog, Scott was Kicking the tires on the “native” RED Quicktimes and Kicking the tires of the Premiere Pro CS4 XML import.

Update 2: Dav's Tech Table has more details and a YouTube overview of the CS4.01 update:

RED & prosumer end of the spectrum

Mark Christiansen, author of After Effects Studio Techniques (review), clarifies in 10 (+1) Reasons Revisited: is Scarlet Still Even a Prosumer Product?

More RED and DSLR updates are available from Prolost, Camera Log by Adam Wilt ("Right now, a RED ONE in the hand is worth two Epics/Scarlets rendered in a remote mountain stronghold"), and other resources through PVC and CrispyFeeds.

DAV's TechTable previews Adobe RED workflow

As everyone knows by now, RED support is coming to Adobe apps. DAV's TechTable has some real details on the not quite yet public beta and some preview movies that discuss workflow.

Update: Oliver Peters and others give up the goods in a nice thread on FCP-L.

Red R3D support soon in AE & Pr CS3

Yesterday's news... on the RED forum by Jim Jannard, founder and backer of the RED Digital Cinema:

"Within a week, RED R3D files will open natively in CS3 Premiere Pro and After Effects."

This effort is led by RED and it's not known how the current Premiere width limit of 4096 pixels will be handled before the next Adobe release. Some CS4 apps are already on Adobe Labs, so the next versions of AE & Pr are not that far off.

If you're in San Francisco on August 5, the Digital Cinema Society Northern California Chapter examines workflows for both the Sony XDCAM EX and RED One Cameras. Adobe will present their native XDCAM EX (and presumably RED) editing workflow using Production Premium software and give the latest details on their Cinema DNG initiative. Other featured presenters include Adam Wilt and Art Adams who will share some of their findings after rigorous tests of these cameras and workflows.

The group plans to meet at Adobe in San Francisco; send the required RSVP to Trudi@DigitalCinemaSociety.org.

RED ONE introductions

The RED ONE is finally a reality and popular for a high-end camera, so workflow information is starting to filter out for those not in the early adopter set like those on REDuser.net. If you've been avoiding the hype, fxguidetv has started a two-part series on the RED camera workflow in post. There's also introductory looks at RED Cine and the camera itself at WonderHowTo.

DV and Indie4K are posting approachable items. The Edit Blog is posting stories, and is especially concerned with conforming an offline edit into an online edit for finishing; Scott Simmons also posts at Studio Daily and notes The Great Red Hype from an Avid list. Prolost goes deep in several articles and gives you settings to match the RED Log transfer function using Cineon log/lin tools in common compositing applications.

Update: Adam Wilt engages in "an unfair comparison of three entirely different cameras" in Three three-letter cameras: EX1, F23, RED.

Update 2: More links from the AE-list (which isn't so impressed with the software), Hi Def Expo movies (also in iTunes) and The Editors' Lounge How to Post with the RED ONE™ Camera! (with PDF booklet).

Update 3: The Edit Blog mentions a new app, Crimson takes a stab at a real RED conform. Plus, HD for Indies is back with a variety of RED notices.

Update 4: Adam Wilt, Art Adams, Frank Capria, and other offer regular advice at PVC.

Update 5: The Edit Blog notes and adds commentary in fxguide tv posts episodes on RED.

Update 6: Self-Reliant Film has a log list of links to various RED resources. FxGuide likes RED so much it started a separate podcast series.

Prolost on Dynamic Range.

Stu Maschwitz "opens a little window into my current thoughts about digital cinema, dynamic range, and some recent and ongoing testing of the RED One camera." Put on your thinking cap -- because you'll need it to seriously consider the meaty post Digital Cinema Dynamic Range.

Update: You can also whet your appetite with Digital Cinema Dynamic Range, Short Version.