Recently finished on set and post work(flow) involving RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera based project in Chennai, India.
Client : Later
Location: Chennai
Director: Naga
DOP: Fawzia Fatima
DAS / DAM : Gopal Balaji (me)
Shot on: RED ONE Camera at 3K 2:1 @ 50 fps and speed up to 25 fps in post (director’s choice)
Tools Used: RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera, Ultra Prime Lens, MacBook Pro, MacBook, Mac Pro, R3D Data Manager, FCP 6.0.3, Red Alert, Crimson and RedCine.
Its a 7 days work completed in 4 days including rehearsal in blue screen. Its signature for a channel. Tight schedule we had backing up the data on set (multiple copies) using R3D Data Manager Software and creating Apple ProRES 422 quicktime movies as SD with “Fit to Height” options (framing based on SD as final delivery) for offline edit using Red Alert as editing started next day after the shoot. Interesting enough we made a complete log of backups to multiple hard-disk transfered using R3D Data manager software.
Issues we faced when exporting files for offline are 25 clips out of 276 clips have wrong time-code as TOD instead of SMPTE Time Code. I don’t figure out yet how it happened, Since we used RED ALERT to create offline dailies shot by shot manually. At the end of completion of offline dailies, RED released REDRushes, which would of great use to us if released days earlier.
Final edited version came to us in 21 layers as an FCP Sequence. 95% of shot was speed up to 25 fps from original 50 fps shoot and also involved Basic Motion and Opacity effect in Final Cut Pro. 21 layers of an FCP sequence is bad project management from editing team, which they have already given offline TGA sequence of edit to CG team for reference, which leads no choice for us to adjust and limit the layers in FCP sequence.
I separated each layer as a separate sequence and created a duplicate copies of the entire 21 FCP sequence and removed all the effects. Exported XML from 21 FCP sequences which are conformed to RedCine XML using Crimson and exported as 16-bit Tiff for CG & DI team from RedCine. Thanks to RED Team and Ian Bloom’s Crimson for conforming the project of this scale in no time.
Things learned:
- Never ever do “Fit To Height” based on framing guide used on Shoot as reference for Offline Dailies creation. I was asked by Director to give “Fit To Width” option which leads to continue the whole offline process. We had 276 Clips running around 2 hours roughly.
- File based workflow needs proper media management for both offline and online workflow and DAS / DAM needs to instruct this to editing team at the beginning.
- For Blue / Green Screen shoot additional care needs to be taken and Meta Cheater would be of great help for tracking entire file management.
- When using Crimson, Intermediate plays a major role and acts as a Pull list which limit the RedCine crash.
- CG team prefers TGA. It would be better if RedCine as this option in Output section (Am I Missing something ?).
