The Apple Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro workflows function well on the Mac platform, but for Avid I recommend going with a Windows machine. Media Composer is cross-platform, but MetaFuze and DS, which are central to the process, are Windows-only. You can run them in Windows virtualization on a Mac via Boot Camp or VMware’s Fusion (www.vmware.com), but you’ll face potential performance and disk-formatting issues. If you’ve ever exchanged media projects between Mac and Windows, you know this can be a real pain.

To begin a project, first organize your RED media files under a single main project folder. This is not essential—and may not even be practical if you have a huge project or if you’re ingesting footage on a daily basis—but it will make your work go faster. You can rerun the MetaFuze transcoding process as needed while you continue to edit. For each directory, simply point MetaFuze to the top level containing your RDM folders, and it will scan for all available R3D files (Figure 12.1). (Make sure to include subfolders in the scan.) You can also choose the destination media folder for completed transcodes.

Figure 12.1. MetaFuze set up to scan a directory for R3D files.

Once the R3D files are all loaded, you can set the transcoding format options and which level of DNxHD compression you want to use (Figure 12.2). The higher the number after DNx, the better the image quality. DNx 36 is suitable for offline editing with minimum hard drive space requirements. DNx 175 is of sufficient visual quality to potentially be usable as a finishing format. You’ll want to evaluate for yourself whether the image quality is truly acceptable for online at 175 or whether you want to continue into an R3D native finish in DS. For example, the postproduction team on ER determined that DNx 175 wasn’t working for certain shots, so they re-exported to DPX files for their final color correction outputs (though at the time they were using a version of DNx 175 that had not been fully optimized for the RED).

Figure 12.2. Choosing transcoding options in MetaFuze.

In addition to standard formatting options, RED-specific transcoding options in MetaFuze can help determine the visual quality of your transcoded files (Figure 12.3). You can adjust the debayer quality, ISO, optical low-pass filter (OLPF) compensation (which helps determine the transcoded image’s sharpness), and decoding resolution (full, half, quarter, or eighth).

Figure 12.3. Choosing RED-specific image quality options in MetaFuze.

Each of these selections determines how the resulting transcodes look, but the higher the quality, the longer the transcodes will take. Experiment to determine the best trade-off of time versus quality for your own process. If you’ve done any preliminary color correction in RED Alert!, you can also import the resulting RLX file and apply it to the transcode.

An option that will be familiar to Avid veterans is the ability to set a timecode burn-in, which appears as visible metadata directly overlaid onto the transcoded footage (Figure 12.4 and Figure 12.5). Burn-ins can be very helpful to verify timecode across departments, help assure audio sync, and give precise frame counts to visual effects and animation crews. In addition to standard edge code and time-of-day timecode, you can also burn in a wide variety of other metadata from the original R3D files, such as ISO, debayer mode, camera clip name, and so on.

Figure 12.4. Setting the burn-in options in MetaFuze.

Figure 12.5. Burn-in option results on RED footage in MetaFuze.

Once you’ve set everything the way you want, click the Transcode button at the bottom of the MetaFuze window and wait. The files will be transcoded and will begin appearing in the destination media folder. When the process is complete, the final step in MetaFuze is to create an Avid Log Exchange (ALE) file. This file is a record of all the files you transcoded in this session, along with their settings, and will assist the import process in Media Composer. To create the ALE file, click the Export ALE button at the bottom of the application window, and save the file with the name of your project (Figure 12.6).

Figure 12.6. Saving an ALE file out of MetaFuze.

The next phase is editing with Media Composer. As I mentioned at the start of this chapter, Avid’s approach calls for doing creative editing work in Media Composer, with final color correction and high-quality format output in Avid DS. The image quality in Media Composer can be very high, depending on the DNxHD compression settings you chose in MetaFuze. But keep in mind that footage will look even better once you get to the last steps in DS, working directly from the R3D files. (Finishing from the R3D files should be considered essential for film outputs and 2K or higher, while HD and SD work can be finished in Media Composer from DNx 175 files.)

To begin editing your RED footage in Avid Media Composer, create a new project in Media Composer using the same frame rate of the R3D files (such as 23.98 or 25) and the resolution of the MetaFuze DNxHD transcodes (typically 720p or 1080p). Then follow these steps:

Once you have all of your DNxHD transcoded footage loaded properly into Media Composer, you can edit as you would any high-definition project (Figure 12.9). One consideration is where you intend to finish. The nice aspect of finishing in Avid DS is that it’s a very simple process to get from a Media Composer edit; additionally, all the filters and effects you apply in Media Composer are automatically translated into your DS project. I will assume that’s your intended workflow as this chapter continues.

Figure 12.9. Working with RED-originated DNxHD files in a Media Composer project.

When you have completed your editing work in Media Composer and are ready to move onto finishing in DS, you need to export an Avid File Exchange (AFE) file. AFE is a special format designed to facilitate project sharing between Avid applications. To create the AFE file, simply select the current sequence, and choose File > Export (Figure 12.10). Select AFE as the Export setting, and click the Save button.

Figure 12.10. Exporting an AFE file from Media Composer.

Conforming is the process of taking the offline edit you made in Media Composer and correlating it to the original R3D files using Avid DS. This gives you the maximum possible image quality and resolution to derive your final outputs such as HD and film. To begin the conform process in Avid DS, follow these steps:

Now that you have a conformed project in Avid DS referencing the native R3D files, your options are wide open. You can easily create an HD or SD down-conversion to a variety of formats, either compressed with the codec of your choice or uncompressed. You can also export to DPX image sequence files if, for example, your final destination is a film print.

To create a DPX output, follow these steps:

You can also create a custom color lookup table (LUT) to go with your DPX files (Figure 12.18). This is a key step because you can load LUTs in most color correction suites (such as a da Vinci), and it will go a long way in assuring that the look of footage you’re seeing in DS is the same as in the color correction suite.

Figure 12.18. Creating a custom LUT for DPX files in DS.

Avid’s approach has evolved significantly since the RED camera first came out and may have changed even more by the time you read this chapter. For the latest techniques and updates, visit the book’s companion Web site at www.peachpit.com/red or Avid’s RED support page at www.avid.com/RED.

Michael Phillips working with RED on a project he produced and edited. (Photo by Howard A. Phillips.)

PRINCIPAL PRODUCT DESIGNER, AVID TECHNOLOGY

As principal product designer for nonlinear editing pioneer Avid, Michael Phillips has observed multiple digital revolutions in the movie business. One revolution happened in 1992 when Avid (www.avid.com) introduced Film Composer, the first native 24 fps digital nonlinear editing platform, enabling moviemakers to edit projects on a computer rather than directly slicing pieces of film. Over the years, Avid’s software has evolved to support many different cameras and resolutions from standard-definition videotape all the way up to 2K/4K file-based finishing and beyond. With the RED ONE, Phillips is watching another digital revolution change the movie world.

Avid’s interest in RED began as soon as the camera was unveiled in April 2006. “We saw the camera at NAB when it first came out,” recalls Phillips. “Within three months we visited RED at their offices at Oakley and said, ‘Whenever you have something available to test, please let us know.’ They went through many development phases, which took about a year. Then it became a real workflow solution project for us, learning what the camera could do.”

While analyzing the camera and its file-based methodology, Phillips took note of how working methods were evolving over time. “It’s interesting to see how much postproduction is moving onto the set,” he notes. “As a camera operator, assistant, or DIT, you need to be aware of post more than ever. It’s not as easy as the good old days when you handed over a roll of film or a tape and said good-bye. There’s a real convergence of post and camera coming to a head right now. RED is leading the charge on that because of its immediate accessibility.

“Anything that’s a disruptive technology is very interesting to watch,” Phillips adds. “When Film Composer came out in 1992 as a true 24-frame digital editing system, you saw a very quick adoption rate. Panasonic’s DVX100 was another disruptive technology. As the first 24p DV camera, it was outselling every other DV camera at the time 10 to 1 in the filmmaking market. RED has a fantastic marketing strategy that keeps interest at an all-time high. They also maintain good customer interactions, with Jim Jannard directly engaging customers on REDuser (www.reduser.net). You couldn’t do all of that as a public company, but a private company has that ability.”

Avid uses RED’s software development kit (SDK) to be able to read RED’s native R3D files and access their metadata in order to facilitate ingest into its products like Avid DS and Avid Media Composer. A special Avid-designed utility called Avid MetaFuze handles the conversion from R3D to Avid’s MXF-wrapped DNxHD codec.

“I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to transcode back to R3D right now,” Phillips says. “At some point they will need some sort of encoder, especially when they release the RED-RAY [RED’s proposed player device for R3D files encoded on disc]. It will also help in other places to do native R3D encoding. If you look at Adobe doing native, unless you’re doing a bunch of straight cuts, you’re going to have to render at some point, whether it’s color correction or effects. That’s going to be some other format that isn’t R3D. You can’t stay fully native throughout the production process.”

Phillips continues, “The workflow doesn’t lend itself to native all the time either. The bonding company wants to know where those R3D files are going and who really owns them. The turnaround deliverables on a production also remain the same, regardless of the acquisition format. On TV and features, the next morning after a shoot, they want to start editing and need viewing DVDs and H.264s for producers to review on a Web site. People are looking for pipelines that allow them to maintain all those expectations.”

Turning to the world of independent production, Phillips observes that time is often more available than money. “There’s still going to be a performance benefit to transcoding to DNxHD or ProRes, and if it takes you an extra day, that’s what you’ll do,” he says. “Editors have a certain expectation as to what they can do in real time, like eight streams of DNx36 on multicam shows, and so on. I don’t think you’ll get that with native RAW files for a while because the decoding is a computationally expensive process.”

For Phillips, the question is whether the transcoding will be done by the editors themselves or farmed out to post-production facilities. “The issue is scaling for many different deliverables versus one tape,” he observes. “If you have one system that can churn out dailies at something less than real time and you have just one project, you can turn it around within 24 hours. But if you have 20 projects, that’s a different story. Solutions like ASSIMILATE’s SCRATCH CINE or Baselight Transfer (BLT) become interesting because they can play RED footage in real time with color correction. Then one post room can handle multiple projects in a more streamlined manner. That’s where you have to decide whether you’re going to do a tape-based workflow or a transcode/file workflow. In the end you’re still getting the same edit from the same media—it’s just how fast you get it that’s driving decisions.”

Asked about Avid’s long-term goals for working with cameras like RED, Phillips envisions a further expansion of support. “There are lots of cameras out there, and RED is certainly a priority right now,” he says. “But what’s even more important is the infrastructure we’re putting in place to allow camera manufacturers to come into the Avid world themselves. We want to place an open, native wrapper around incoming camera formats that goes directly into the editorial environment without Avid adding support directly for every model. AMA (Avid Media Access) was released with version 3.5 of Media Composer. That initiative’s acceptance is based on priorities and engineering resources at each company.”

As someone who’s seen many new technologies alter the movie industry, Phillips expects a continued evolution for the foreseeable future. “It’s just human nature that bigger and better formats mean bigger and better quality,” he says. “Now all the tent-pole directors like Spielberg want to shoot IMAX for certain scenes because The Dark Knight did it. IMAX looks better, and it’s a creative challenge for them. You’ll see that in file-based cameras that will go to 2K, 4K, 6K, 8K, and just on and on. You’ll probably always be editing with a proxy while the CPUs catch up to the playback speed of newer formats. We’re all just chasing the technology.”

Avid’s Web site is www.avid.com.