Recently one of our clients brought us onto a project that was being shot on the Red One camera.  Since we had no existing workflow designed for Red, we had to come up with a solution.

Being this is largely uncharted territory for many people, we thought we should share our findings and, perhaps, get some feedback from other peoples’ experiences.

Narrow Focus

The goal was to develop a workflow using footage acquired by the Red One and edited on Avid Media Composer systems.  The workflow we designed is a very narrowly focused one.  It is important to note that we had a very specific starting point and ending point, and we were not attempting to create a catch all workflow.  This workflow will not work for every project and is not intended to do so.

Project Background

The client for the project was a cable network.  They were producing a number of on-air promotional spots and had decided on acquiring with the Red One camera.  The spots were to be mastered in HDCAM and Digital Beta.  The production company would be sending us hard drives with both the full resolution .r3d files and low-resolution quicktime proxies.

File Conversion

Obviously, the biggest hurdle to the project was that the Avid software could not natively utilize the Red .r3d file format, nor could it import the format.  So, the files needed to be converted into something Avid could either use or import.

We were aware of two methods of converting .r3d files into files Avid could use.  We knew that Avid’s MetaFuze could input .r3d files and output .mxf files that can be used in the Avid immediately.  Red’s Redcine program was another option.  However, since its output (in our case quicktime) was not Avid-ready and would require the additional step of importing, it seemed less likely Redcine would be the best solution.

While testing both programs, however, the choice of which to use became less clear.  Though Avid’s MetaFuze provided us with Avid-ready .mxf files, its ability to batch process multiple files was not even remotely user friendly.  It quickly became clear that MetaFuze was very labor intensive, as files had to be converted one at a time.

Redcine was also far from user friendly.  It was not very intuitive and the interface seemed overly complicated.  However, converting a number of clips in one job was fairly easy to initiate.  Unlike with MetaFuze, this meant that we could let a computer process clips in Redcine unsupervised.  Using Redcine the work could be assigned overnight to a computer system, not utilize the precious time of an editor.

The determining factor, however, was the image quality after conversion.  We converted some test .r3d files to quicktime using Redcine then imported those into Avid.  We converted the same test .r3d files to .mxf using MetaFuze.  In our opinion, the resulting footage from Redcine more accurately represented color.  Specifically, we thought the details the in the black and whites, as well as the overall gamma range looked better from Redcine.  This may be limitation of MetaFuze or could be strictly user error.  Either way, we chose to use a Redcine based workflow.

Here is a side-by-side comparison*:

(Click to enlarge image.)

The Edit Process

Our plan was to attempt mirroring, as closely as possible, the tape-based workflow that we normally utilized.  We used the low-resolution proxy quicktime files sent by the production company as our off-line media.

For online we converted the .r3d files to high-resolution quicktime files using Redcine.  The .r3d files and the quicktime proxies from the production company had identical file names (except for the .r3d and .mov extensions, of course).  During conversion in Redcine, we opted to name the resulting high-res quicktime files the same name as the .r3d files.  After conversion we had two sets of quicktime files-low-res and high-res-with identical file names.

After the off-line edit was finished, we then needed to create a high-resolution version of the spots.  Since our high-res quicktimes had identical files names as their low-res siblings we had used for the off-line, we could use the Avid’s batch import function and point to the high-res files instead of the low-res ones.  This yielded a high-resolution version of the spot that could then be finished with color correction and other processing.

Final Thoughts

The workflow we chose for this project worked very well with a minor amount of headache or frustration.  Given a similar project, we would probably stick to this workflow.  Given a different project, we might not.  Our workflow may or may not work for other projects, but we wanted to share it anyway.  What workflows have worked for other people?  What details did we omit or brush over that needs to be addressed?  We would appreciate any questions or comments.

[*This still image is from footage owned by Shawn Nelson from Nelson Entertainment.  Thanks for allowing me to post it here.]

Avid, MetaFuze, Red, RedCine