RED workflow (how we prepared the Red Footage for IBC)

Emery Wells said:
Well its nice to know the footage was indeed color corrected.

Sounds like the correction was on the light side but generally it would be preferable to see non color corrected images which is more typical of a camera screening.

Was the correction due to the fact that the team was working with a non characterized sensor?
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Color correction was used from the start while Jim was in the process of developing the color matrix. This was more for understanding where he needed to go rather than "fixing things"

At the end though, as a testament to Jim knowing what the hell he is doing, ended up with Lucas and co not needing to do anything more than add gamma to match the rec 709 colorspace... Jims matrix was almost dead on.
 
Your so right.. it kinda was cool to see Jim actually developing the color matrix himself.. its not something you can just pick up and do without an incredible understanding of colorspace.

Mostly though im just happy the images look so good.. it coulda gone the other way really quick that first time they turned on the sensor.. and we would of all been in trouble :)
 
WarrenS said:
I guess not!
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Well, hold on a sec...

Be real about pricing. First - Silicon Color. The price that everyone is familiar with is 5K for the HD version, and for HD color correction - Final Touch is a great deal and good software. But - the 2K version with all the rendering options is more than 20K. Add FCP, a G5, an XRAID capable of streaming realtime 2K, and a Kona card that can do the 2K work. Keep in mind that's not 4K - that's 2K. What's the price now? By the time all is said and done - it's 40K+.

There are SCRATCH customers like Fotokem and Digital Domain - huge facilities with big budgets. There are also SCRATCH customers like ICO Entertainment and FilmworksFX - small owner-operated shops with "indie" budgets.

Part of our mission at Assimilate is to enable the indie workflow at indie budgets - and we take that seriously.

Is SCRATCH in the same price ballpark as After Effects, Combustion, and FCP? No. Can you do realtime 2K and 4K color correction with those tools, with a hardware panel for instant feedback? Or conform a feature at 2K from DPX files with associated metadata? Not even close.

Horses for courses.

Anybody that's really serious about datacentric workflow at HD, 2K, and 4K and sees that as part of their future growth as an artist or at a facility... all my contact information is on the ASSIMILATE website, and I'm a nice guy. :)

Lucas
 
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Jarred Land said:
Color correction was used from the start while Jim was in the process of developing the color matrix. This was more for understanding where he needed to go rather than "fixing things"

At the end though, as a testament to Jim knowing what the hell he is doing, ended up with Lucas and co not needing to do anything more than add gamma to match the rec 709 colorspace... Jims matrix was almost dead on.
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Jarred is correct in that Jim's matrix was almost dead on...

But we did do a little more than just add gamma. Not much! But a little more...

Lucas
 
So Luke, is there some kind of educational discount (or any other discount for that matter). Perhaps there ought to be a stripped down version for the financially challenged...
 
mikkowilson said:
So are *you* able to post any screengrabs of the footage? Either complete or from various stages of the process?


- Mikko
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Sorry, Mikko - that would be a "no!"

I can't (and won't) show or release anything unless I have explicit permission from the RED team.

Would you post footage from one of your client's projects to an open website without their permission? :)

Lucas
 
Fugitive said:
Lucas, any word on that discount?
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You don't even know what the price is, and you're asking for a discount? Sheesh! :)

Yes, we do edu discounts, and generally work with people if they are really interested in SCRATCH.

Chapman University in Orange County recently bought 2 full-up SCRATCH stations with all the trimmings, plus 56 student seats for their labs. They intend on teaching color grading, data workflow, and DI using SCRATCH. So, yeah - we do edu. (say it out loud - it rhymes.)

This starts to cross the line into a sales pitch, which I don't think is cool on a public forum. For more specific info than that, please contact me offlist at lucas@assimilateinc.com.

Peace,

Lucas
 
Emery Wells said:
http://www.assimilateinc.com/

Im not sure what indie price range is but it costs the equivalent of a few REDS.
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Looks like I am not entirely clueless about the price either... :)

Avoiding the sales-pitch bias, let me ask a technical question. If SCRATCH is a software-only solution, how can we expect real-time 2k editing? Via a compression method like Cineform? Also, beside real-time 2k editing, what would be the real benefit of using SCRATCH over something like Combustion?
 
Chris Kenny said:
I believe SCRATCH retails for $45K, so it's not exactly a plausible solution for low-budget work.
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Why is it OK to discuss a $37,500 camera (body + zoom lens) here but not a $45K DI system?

I have to keep giving myself a reality check about Red's price. After lenses, matte box, follow focus, external recording system, and floor mats, it's not going to be anywhere close to "affordable" to the DV crowd. A killer deal? Hell yes. But so is Scratch.

-Stu
 
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scratch would be more toward the hi-end $$$$ ...

combustion or perhaps the synthethic aperature CC plug in ( AE, combustion,FCP etc) would be more affordable ... also it appears using RedCine -if you do have cineform codec in your system you could go out to it and then work in AE or premiere ( 10 bit prospect HD) and i believe cineform is about to do a QT ...
Vegas does have cineform and Vegas is 8 bit so even if you bought the 10 bit cineform Vegas is going to knock off 2 bits ..
 
Fugitive said:
Looks like I am not entirely clueless about the price either... :)

Avoiding the sales-pitch bias, let me ask a technical question. If SCRATCH is a software-only solution, how can we expect real-time 2k editing? Via a compression method like Cineform? Also, beside real-time 2k editing, what would be the real benefit of using SCRATCH over something like Combustion?
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Realtime 2K is all about two things: graphics performance and disk performance. 2K files are 2048x1556. In a 10-bit DPX world, that equals about 320MB/s. If you have a disk subsystem that can stream 320, then that's realtime 2K. There are SCSI, SATA, Fibre, and SAN solutions that our customers have that do realtime2k with no problem all day long.

So that's playback. Now for realtime color correction, pan/scan, editing, etc... that's all graphics. We are a 100% GPU-centric application. Everything we do for color is done in 32-bit float on the graphics engine. So, if you have a reasonably powerful workstation with an NVidia QuadroFX4500 with storage capable of 320, you've got SCRATCH hardware.

As to the "real benefit" over something like Combustion...

What's the "real benefit" of driving a Porsche over a Camry, or drinking a good IPA over PBR? It's hard to quantify until you drive the Porsche (or drink the IPA,) and then it smacks you over the head and you go, "ahhhh... I get it now..." Once you've been on a system that is a true realtime system, it's hard to go back.

The best way I can describe it is...

Creativity is fast and fluid. When you're in the flow, whether it's music, a painting, or an edit -- waiting for the tools slows you down and breaks your pace. The faster and more realtime that any piece of software is, the more it's capable of following a creative flow and the weird places your head takes you when you're on a roll.

Color is especially susceptible to that. Color memory is incredibly brief, and you need very fast, responsive tools to keep up.

I remember never seeing the problem with mouse-click color correction until the first daVinci session I stepped into. The light went on in my head, and I "got it." Could never go back after that...

SCRATCH brings that kind of capability to people that can't afford the "heavy iron."

Sorry for the mini-rant - but I'm passionate about this stuff and can go on for awhile if poked.... :)

[dismount soapbox]

Lucas
 
Thanks Lucas. One of the frustrations I have, apart from the cost of acquiring all the tools we need, is resources for learning this stuff. Are there resources available to really learn the art of grading? How do colorists learn their craft?
 
WarrenS said:
Thanks Lucas. One of the frustrations I have, apart from the cost of acquiring all the tools we need, is resources for learning this stuff. Are there resources available to really learn the art of grading? How do colorists learn their craft?
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not to attempt to answer the later part of this question, but for the first part, Lucas was very open with us (a potential customer) in teaching us the system.. he sat us all down and took us through a quick crash course on operation, then when we were ready for something new he was available to ask. I was able to operate scratch pretty comfortably on a surface level after about 30 minutes, but i didnt get into the complex operations that the system is capable of.

I understand what you are saying about learning new software, but for me Scratch was very intuitive. There are a couple language barriers (bins meaning trash for instance) but thats about it.
 
ProLost said:
Why is it OK to discuss a $37,500 camera (body + zoom lens) here but not a $45K DI system?

I have to keep giving myself a reality check about Red's price. After lenses, matte box, follow focus, external recording system, and floor mats, it's not going to be anywhere close to "affordable" to the DV crowd. A killer deal? Hell yes. But so is Scratch.

-Stu
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Well, keep in mind, $45K isn't the final price for SCRATCH either, unless you've already got a multi-terabyte RAID that can comfortably do over 300 MB/s and a $10K Windows workstation.

Plus, I think it'll probably be possible to get into RED for around $25K, if you're sufficiently determined and are willing to accept some tradeoffs. (Still lenses or used PL primes instead of new PL zooms, etc.)

And buying SCRATCH doesn't do you much good (if you're an indie shooter, rather than a post house) without RED (or, obviously, an even more expensive camera, or the budget for shooting and scanning film), which means the price of getting into SCRATCH is the price of RED plus the price of SCRATCH plus the added price of a more expensive workstation and storage array that most RED shooters wouldn't otherwise need... you're probably looking at $90K now. $25-35K for a camera that'll be useful for three or five times as long as an HVX200 is one thing for indie shooters... I mean, it barely ends up costing any more in the long run. It might even cost less. $90K is quite another thing.

But, of course, there's certainly nothing wrong with talking about a $45K DI system, particularly since it seems the SCRATCH folks might be willing to work to bring that down for customers who can't afford it. And one of the amazing things about RED is that it will probably have customers all the way from indie shooters who really have to stretch for the base price, up through major studios that wouldn't blink at 10 times the price, so there's very little in the world of film or video that isn't relevant in a forum about RED. (And hopefully if some of the indies make good use of their REDs, they'll have the budget for SCRATCH themselves in a couple of years.)
 
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