editing 4K at home...

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sean90291

Veteran
Okay, I understand this is speculation until more details of REDCINE are released etc. But there was a bunch of discussion round these parts about requiring a big post-house to online 4K footage. And then Graeme piped in saying the goal is to hopefully allow 4K editing at home (which to me is the whole point).

Wondering if some of you tech gods can speculate on what would be required in a home editing system. Just wing it. A projected MINIMAL system configuration would be most interesting to me but... (because I'm sure a $15K system will do it). How about a $5K system? Possible?
 
One of the big things needed will be a fast raid to allow all that data to transfer. You can probably cut down the data stream significantly by doing an offline edit of 4k 4:4:4 with a 4k codec that doesn''t sample color as well therby reducing the size or even using the red codec (but who knows what NLEs will support it). The processor is a whole other story. if you are editing with a codec that doesn't have a lot of compression than perhaps dual core duo extremes will handle the job but it is hard to tell at this point. Also youar eoging to need a way to display that 4k (beats me)
 
I really doubt that anyone will be editing 4k online anytime soon and with a $5k hardware budget, its not even close to possible. The workflow for this type of footage (think of it just like a 4k film scan) is off line with a lower res proxy and then after its done, online at full resolution.

Not sure what anyone would do with 4k content anyway. Unless your going film out, how could you put it to use?
 
Hm. Okay, say you're not going to put 4K to use. So what practically speaking is everyone doing at home? 2K? I'm a child of the digital SD world. I capture and do all my effects on my own computer. No offline ever. So I'm hoping that no matter what resolution I'm using at home, the final product, if it ever goes to a film out, would not have to have new effects and transitions and stuff. I'm hoping that the post-house then just replaces the underlying footage?

And I guess the point of shooting 4K is that you at least HAVE it in the can at the highest resolution...just in case. So you always have that option of taking advantage of the highest resolution possible (rare film-out scenarios for example). And the rest of the time, your final product (for broadcast or DVD or what have you) is lower res. This is starting to make sense to me.

After all, nobody's doing film-outs "at home"! ;-)
 
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Even 2k at home is way beyond what most will be doing. You mention SD, thats a 480 line resolution (at best) or about 1/8 of a 4k or 1/4 of a 2k project.

Having a higher resolution version "in the can" (or on the HD in this case) is a great backup and gives a lot of options for the future, but for broadcast or DVD (even the higher resolution new formats) will be 1k or less.
 
4K editing

4K editing

Your most likely workflow for 4K is going to be -

Shoot REDCODE RAW at 4K

Playback this footage in REDCINE. A dual core Intel based Mac with OSX will be sufficient to perform conversion to color balanced RGB footage.

At that point there is a decision to make regarding editorial. How much resolution do you need? 4K / 2K / 1K ?

I'm personally not an advocate of dropping the "off-line" editorial stage, and I'd suggest that 1K resolution material (which is just shy of 720p in terms of image size) is fine for editorial.

Once the edit list is created, re-export the 4K RAW footage from REDCINE at the final project size - be that 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 2K or 4K RGB for DCI / film out; and conform.

Depending on the resolution of the conform, it could be done on your own system - real time or non real time rendered - or you will need to book time at a DI equipped post house.

No advice on what it would take to do a pure 4K edit / conform at this time. I'm sure it will be possible on a top end desktop system, but I'd rather not give advice on what hardware would be required until we have completed more tests.
 
Stuart English said:
Your most likely workflow for 4K is going to be -

Once the edit list is created, re-export the 4K RAW footage from REDCINE at the final project size - be that 720p, 1080i, 1080p, 2K or 4K RGB for DCI / film out; and conform.
Click to expand...

So does REDCINE understand EDLs? I wouldn't expect it to be able to actually do the conform on its own, but it would be really useful if it could read in the EDL for the purpose of automatically exporting only the clips needed for the conform.

As has been noted elsewhere, Final Cut can be tricked into working with 4K footage. It's probably way too slow at this for online editing, but it could provide a cheap and convenient way to do your 4K conform. You wouldn't want to do your color grading in FCP, though.

So, I guess the big question is, will REDCODE RAW footage, or some other REDCODE format that can be exported from REDCINE at a similar bit rate, be directly usable in QuickTime apps? It wouldn't need to work in real-time at 4K. I'm just hoping that getting 4K footage usable in QuickTime won't require converting to something with a bit rate significantly higher than REDCODE RAW's 28 MB/s, because that would obviously drive storage costs way up.

I guess CineForm (with the new QuickTime support) might work here if REDCODE doesn't, but I'm not too familiar with it.

It would be amazing if there were some way to generate a DCI master directly from QuickTime. You'd literally have a way to go all the way to your final digital master using only commodity hardware. That's not necessarily something for RED to solve, of course; you guys can't be expected to do everything.
 
My understanding from what Stuart or Graeme posted somewhere else (sorry, can't remember the thread) is that Redcine will do the conform for you.

Which would be fantastic!

Seems to be a bit more than just a Telecine equivalent.
 
I'm assuming that REDCINE will be a universal binary? The number of PowerPC Macs out there is still immense.

Assuming it is, from everything I've heard... I imagine my quad G5 should deal with REDCODE 4K quite handily? At least to the point that I can pop 2K out the other end and use FCP?

Is there any discussion between RED and Apple for 4K and/or REDCODE support in FCP? Obviously if there is you couldn't tell us... but I have to ask anyway.
 
khmuse said:
I really doubt that anyone will be editing 4k online anytime soon and with a $5k hardware budget, its not even close to possible.
Click to expand...

We just demonstrated real-time online 4K RAW editing (dual stream dissolve with Dalsa Origin footage) to Adobe management under Premiere Pro 2.0 running on a Dual core dual proc Xeon Woodcrest system (about $3K PC with two drives in RAID-0.) So it can be done today, although we aren't shipping this technology yet, but we intend this be available for Red customers as the alternative workflow (for those who can't stand offline workflows.) This a simple extension of the now shipping CineForm RAW workflow. So even with the purchase of our software the system costs will be doable at $5k for a Red online.
 
Great news David, so how much raid 0 would I need to handle 7 hours of footage to cut to 2 and output a feature on a 4k workflow. I'm liking the 5k package computer, I'm wondering what the storage will run, and how much memory would be recomemded?

Vladimir
Red #87
 
What I still think is the tough part is archiving the 4K media files. It's one thing to let them sit in your HD array while you edit an offline version, but when we're done, we will have to get it somewhere else... LTO seems like a nice choice... But still pretty expensive... How are the HVX guys doing with it is what I'm curious about...
 
Vladimir,

Based on Red announcements, CineForm RAW has a similar bit-rate to REDCODE RAW (both 10-bit wavelet), so if you use an average of 27MBytes/s for 24p, RAID-0 with two 500GB drives will hold 10 hours of 4k RAW.
 
David Newman said:
We just demonstrated real-time online 4K RAW editing (dual stream dissolve with Dalsa Origin footage) to Adobe management under Premiere Pro 2.0 running on a Dual core dual proc Xeon Woodcrest system (about $3K PC with two drives in RAID-0.) So it can be done today, although we aren't shipping this technology yet, but we intend this be available for Red customers as the alternative workflow (for those who can't stand offline workflows.) This a simple extension of the now shipping CineForm RAW workflow. So even with the purchase of our software the system costs will be doable at $5k for a Red online.
Click to expand...

What software do you colour correct the 4K with ? What reference grade monitor do you cc it on ? Client previews ? And what is the final render time (at home) with all the effects, transitions, and colour correction can we expect with 4K size files ?

I was told that finishing 2K at a home studio would be expensive, let alone 4K finishing, but maybe I was misinformed.

I hope to do 2K, at a small indie shop( my own) , but I would love to know the possibilities :beer:

RED #[size=-2] 000 rebel [/size]
 
REDCINE a conform tool?

REDCINE a conform tool?

Well, as you are witnessing with this project it is dangerous to say never.... but the purpose of REDCINE is to translate between 2K or 4K uncompressed RAW or REDCODE RAW data and whatever formats you are using for offline editorial and conform passes.

As to the question can REDCINE just select the clips that need to be exported for the conform, the answer to that is sure - we only need to understand the EDL to the extent that we know the Digital Magazine I.D and the timecode.
 
Can't external harddrives be used for storage? They only cost about $120 - £80 for 250gb... obviously not to edit from, I just mean as a means of backup or even handing the data to a client?
 
D_and_G said:
What software do you colour correct the 4K with ? What reference grade monitor do you cc it on ? Client previews ? And what is the final render time (at home) with all the effects, transitions, and colour correction can we expect with 4K size files ?

I was told that finishing 2K at a home studio would be expensive, let alone 4K finishing, but maybe I was misinformed.
Click to expand...

Well you are not mis-informed, as "traditional" workflows for 4k would be very expensive. As there is nothing tradition about the camera, there is no harm in overhauling the post workflow as well.

Today you can colour correct with anything that uses After Effects API (within Premiere Pro or After Effects.) This means Premiere's our tools which now is pretty decent with it our 32-bit float secondary color corrector, Color Finnese from Synthetic Aperature, and others (the AE API is the most common.) Grading would still be best over HDSDI to a referrence monitor, although a calibrated LCD can be used (LCD's are getter better.) Render times for 4K, that will depend on your PC, number of filters and the type of demosaicing algorithm used (guess 10+ times playlength for 4K.)
 
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