So, Red is making an affordable camera that produces great footage. What do you do with it? Well, it depends what platform you’re on, what sort of content you’re working with, and what your budget is.

Information is still a little hazy on some workflow issues, so this is the first post in a series that will continue as more information comes out.

Everyone is focused on using Red for digital cinema, and certainly that’s the most exciting application of the camera This blog is, nominally, about digital cinema, and I’ll get to that soon. Odds are a lot of people are also going to be shooting broadcast material with the camera, and this has gotten somewhat less attention. So, let’s start there.

First off, for broadcast delivery, you might not want to shoot 4K RAW. Why do I say this? The two standards for HD broadcast are 720p60 and 1080i60 (or PAL-country equivalents). Shooting REDCODE RAW on-board at 4K, you can only go up to 30 frames a second.

For some material, like narrative work, it’s possible you’ll still want to shoot at 24 fps and add appropriate pulldown to conform to these standards. In that case, you’ll probably want to shoot 4K RAW. But for other sorts of material, you’ll probably want to shoot in a format which captures 60 or 50 frames a second, which means shooting at 1080p or 2K.

If that’s the case, your workflow becomes:

1. Shoot 1080p60/1080p50 RGB (won’t be enabled when the camera first ships) or 2K RAW @ 60/50 fps.
2. Process footage into Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD 1080i or 720p through REDCINE. Or, if using Final Cut, through the new “Log & Transfer” interface. (The tapeless equivalent of “Log & Capture”.)
3. Edit material online in ProRes or DNxHD.
4. Go out through a Kona card or similar to the appropriate tape format, and hand that to your client.

If you’re going out to a tape format which uses a codec your editing environment has native support for (e.g. DVCPRO HD in Final Cut), you might want to change this a little, and convert directly to that format from REDCINE, and then output over FireWire. This results in a final product that has only been through two generations of compression (REDCODE and your delivery codec) rather than three (REDCODE, your editing codec, and your delivery codec).

What determines whether you should shoot 1080p RGB or 2K RAW? That’s a rather complicated subject that I’ll address in another post.

Up next: how do to a 2K (or possibly even 4K) DI on your desktop, and higher-end DI options.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 02:05 AM and is filed under Apple, Red, Software, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.