RED Workflows Powered by Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects

[David Dessel - Director/Cameraman Editor After Effects] Hey guys. How are you today? My name is Dave Dessel. I have a small production company in New York called Metaphor Pictures. I'm one of these wacky dudes who's a DP, editor, after effects guy, and like basically a technology, software, camera geek kind of guy. Let me ask you guys a question. How many guys here shoot with a RED camera often? Please raise your hands. All right. Thank you. And how many guys here have actually never worked with any RED footage? Please raise your hand. All right. Good. Have people here worked with REDCINE-X? Raise your hand. All right. Well, let me tell you what we're going to do here. [Premiere Pro CS5.5 REDCINE-X -Workflow] I'm going to teach you guys a very cool workflow that utilizes two pieces of software. The first pieces of software is REDCINE-X. RECINE-X is software that you can get for free, and it is really cool. What it does is it lets you take a RED raw file, load it into the program, and apply a color correction to it. Then what you can do is you can render that file out as a QuickTime movie with specifications that you would want. The other program we're going to use is Premiere Pro CS5. Now, what I figured is a way to use both of these programs without doing any rendering whatsoever. Here's an example--what I've been doing lately is I've been getting some gigs where I will shoot with my RED, and the next day, edit all of the footage. It could be a voluminous amount of footage, and I have not rendered a single thing until the piece is cut and edited. So this is like a stratospheric leap in RED workflow processing. I could not have done this if it wasn't for CS5. CS5 has actually changed my life with regard to all of my work, because everything is now 3-4 times faster since I've stopped using Final Cut Pro of Avid or any other editing product. What I'm going to show you first, is we're going to work in REDCINE-X, and I'm going to show you basically how you can grade footage in REDCINE-X. [Color Correct Edit - No Rendering] [RED Raw File = Digital Negative - Image characteristics are not baked in.] No, something that you need to know about raw files-- and this is for the folks who don't work with raw files on a daily basis-- and that is that the image characteristics of the file are not baked in. That means that you can change the white balance. You can change the exposure to a shot--this is after it's been shot, and it's in the can. Most importantly, you could take that raw file and sculpt it out like a digital negative, basically. Think of it like a negative on a on a telecine. You can alter the look, change the look, make a grade or a color correction, and apply it to this in a nondestructive manner. And so as an example, if you wanted to edit a program together and you felt that the material didn't look the way you wanted it to, you could go back and completely change the look and feel of the piece. What's really cool about CS5 is that you can do this in real time without having to re-render anything. If you were editing a commercial with agency clients, which is what I do a lot, and the client didn't like the way the images looked, You could literally just go in and change it instantly. [Don't wing it.] When I first got my RED camera, which is about 3 years ago, and I started to actually generate files, I would have to admit here that I was "chroma-illiterate." What does that mean? That means I knew nothing about color correction at all. I mean, I've been an editor for years but I would sort of wing it on occasion. I never had to deal with the color corrections aspects of projects. But now with these cameras that are shooting raw files, the RED cameras and whatever else is going to come down the pike, you really have to know something about color correction. You cannot be chroma-illiterate. So I became chroma-literate through a 12-step program, [Educate Yourself] This is what my stuff kind of used to look like, and now this is more like what my material looks like right out of the can. How do you become chroma-literate? It's very, very simple. Start reading some books. What I would say to anybody who is going to use or work with raw files, you have to do some homework. You're just not going to be able to work with this material until you know something about the basics of color correction. I'm constantly learning new things all the time. They way I'm doing it is I'm reading books. Both of these books are great. I'm currently reading this one by a really cool guy named Alexis Van Hurkman, and Steve Hullfish is a great author. I started off with the book on the left, and it completely changed the way I was working with the files. [Use a tangent wave for precise control.] When I work with REDCINE-X, I'm using a control surface, and I own a Tangent Wave. It's about $1500. If you start working with RED files on a consistent basis, there's going to come a point where you're really going to want to get a control surface, because it's just like night and day. It's like the difference between trying to drive a car with a mouse or trying to drive a car with a steering wheel. So I have one up here, and I'm going to be using it here to demonstrate what I'm going to do. [This is your image.] Now, as I grade these shots, I want you to think of your shot as a rubber band. What do I mean by that? Think of all of the tonality in an image, the highlights, the midtones, and the blacks as a rubber band. As we manipulate these files in REDCINE-X, what we're going to do is we're going to stretch that rubber band out. The first thing I usually do is work on the blacks, and I'm going to pull the blacks down and stretch those out. Then the next thing I'm going to do is work with my highlights, and I'm going to pull my highlights up. Then I'll work with my midtones once those two are stretched out, because the midtones really affect the look and feel of an image once you've set those two base points. You really start to affect the mood when you adjust the midtones. Now, I'm going to be using a histogram as opposed to a waveform monitor, because REDCINE-X is a histogram. That's going to tell me if I'm crushing an image or if I'm pushing things past where the highlights actually are digitally recorded. What I want you to do as I'm doing this, I want you to think that I've taken the rubber band and turned it horizontally. So for the shadows, I'll be pulling shadows in this direction and the highlights in this direction. Okay. So here's REDCINE-X, and we can scroll down on a shot here. If you look over here, here is your histogram. Here is your rubber band. Here is how I'm going to grade this first shot. I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to pull down the blacks. I'm going to just pull down the blacks here, and there comes a certain point where you're going to see this little white line coming up. That means I've crushed the blacks, and I've taken them down so low that I'm actually removing information from the shot. Now, I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to adjust the highlights a bit. I'm going to just pull things up here to about here. Now, I'm going to adjust my midtones. I'm going to just experiment with this. As you can see, you can really change and manipulate a RED image quite significantly by just adjusting all these parameters. So here, as opposed to any other kind of camera-- any camera that's recording in an HD, a high-end HD codec, a low-end HD codec-- you cannot do this except with a camera that uses a raw file. You're not going to have all this information to work with. This is why I love working with a RED camera. Now, we have a lot of different parameters here that we can work with. Hopefully I can access them here. You've got control over your white balance. I've going to change the white balance on the shot to 3200 kelvin. There. Everybody see that? Now I'm going to actually add some saturation to the shot. As you can see, if I drag this up, you can really start to push the saturation up quite a bit. Now, here's something that's cool. With RED you can actually apply different gamma spaces. I'm actually going to reset the shot one more time to the default setting. This puts my white balance back at 5600. I'm going to change that again to 3200. I'm going to now change my gamma space to something called REDlog film. If you notice now, everything is very, very flat. If you look at this histogram here, there is very little information in the blacks, and there's very, very little information in the highlights, and this looks obviously very, very flat. Now, why is that? That's because what I've told this software to do is to interpret all of the black tones and the highlight tones as gray tones. That's why it looks gray. As I stretch that rubber band back out again, what I'm going to be doing is telling the software to interpret the tonal information in a different manner--to interpret the blacks and blacks and the highlights as highlights. Here we go again. I'm going to dial this down and pull our highlights back up here. As you're stretching this rubber band, what starts to happen is as you pull your highlights up your blacks will kind of kick up a little bit, so you kind of have to manipulate these knobs here so that you start getting somewhere where you want. Now, RED has this very cool midtone adjustment called "FLUT." To define it, I think it's kind of a shadow detail midtone adjustment. It's sort of a midtone adjustment but more, and I'm going to use the FLUT now to take the midtone feel down of this image and just start to give it some mood. Now I'm going to change the white balance to 3200 again. Now we're starting to get a bit of a kind of cinematic mood to this piece, which is what I want to do. I'm going to bring this up here now, put a little saturation in it. I'm going to push the saturation more than I usually would, because I think on the projector it might be a little hard to see. So I'm going to really saturate this quite a bit. There we go. Here's a grade on our first shot. I'm going to move on to another shot here now. On this shot what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this grade from this shot. If you notice, I'm now going to paste it onto this shot here. Now, she looks a little dark to me, so I'm going to adjust my FLUT. The other thing that's gone on--because every shot is different-- is if I look over here to my left my shadows have been crushed, so I'm going to dial up my shadows. If you notice, the detail in her hair is now starting to come back up. Now I'm going to adjust my midtones a little bit, just to give this a little punch, and maybe turn the contrast up a bit. That's going to be it for this shot. Just for the sake of time, because I've got a lot to show you, I'm going to now copy this grade--a grade is basically a color setting-- and I'm going to paste it on all these other shots and just tweak it a bit here. I would probably under normal circumstances spend a lot more time going through these shots individually, but for time's sake here we're going to skip that. So just bear with me here for a minute. Is everybody seeign how amazingly flexible the RED footage is as far as being able to change it and manipulate it? To me it's just not the resolution of the RED that's a big deal, and it's just not the depth of field characteristics, which is more like 35 mm film or what everybody is shooting for. To me it's this ability to go in and manipulate your tonal palate and your color palate. It's just freaking wonderful. I'm going to just paste my grade on onto a few more shots here. Here's another one. I have just a few more here to do. Okay, here's our last one. Now here we look--there's that indicator again that this scene is crushed. I'm going to bring this one down a bit, and it just looks a little too bright to me. So I'm going to use my FLUT adjustment, and just take it down and make it a little more cinematic. All right. Now here is something really, really important with regard to making this render-free workflow happen. There is a preference setting in REDCINE-X. It's something that you need to check. There is a preference setting here that says automatically save RMD files. What's an RMD file? An RMD file is a description file of each individual shot. So as I'm color correcting and grading these shots, an RMD file is being automatically generated by REDCINE-X. It basically tells software how to interpret the tonality, how to interpret the color. If you don't have that checked, you can't really do this next step, which is what I'm going to show you next. So for every individual shot that I have graded, there is an RMD file. I'm actually going to now leave REDCINE-X. I'm going to actually quit it. I'm going to go back to Premiere. And here is my timeline. I cut this into like a little fake movie scene. If I scroll through it, you'll see that none of the grades that I created --like you could look at this shot here-- none of the grades that I created have transferred over to this scene. But I'm now going to do that instantaneously. If I go over here to my source material, and I highlight all of it, and I right-click on the top file or any file. There is a setting here called "source settings." What this is is something that's extremely cool that Adobe has created for editing RED material. Many of the same settings that I just applied in REDCINE-X can be done individually to each file or on a global basis. I could change the white balance, the exposure, the color settings. REDCINE-X in my opinion just has some better precision right now than the Adobe interface, and it also lets you use the Tangent Wave panel, which is why I prefer to use REDCINE-X, but if you wanted to you could do everything that I just did right here. Here is a histogram that you could work with the same way, but here's the cool thing. I'm now going to take that grade and apply it to all of the footage. Over here is a button that says "reload from RMD." What that's going to do is it's going to take that RMD description file and now apply it to all the footage. What I'd like you to do is--hold on one second-- I'm going to move the cursor over here to this shot so you can kind of watch the shot on the right and watch how the image changes as I reload the RMD. Here we go. I'm going to press it, and I'm going to hit "okay," and there we go. The grade has been applied to the entire piece. I'm going to play this little video now. There's some sound on this, guys, in the back there if you want to put the sound on if you heard me. If not, I'm just going to play it. So now what's going on right now is this is the Mercury Playback Engine. The Mercury Playback Engine is playing back a RED raw file. This is a 4k file. It's playing it back in real time. I have not rendered this file. This is not a ProRes file. This is a RED raw file. And this is just fantastic, because you do not have to render anything. You can import these files right into Premiere Pro and just start working immediately. That to me is just why I love this particular piece of software with regard to having a workable desktop process to work and edit with RED files. Any questions so far about anything? Okay. I'm going to show you a couple of additional cool tricks here. In addition to just having this really cool Mercury Playback Engine, which just lets you edit and manipulate these files, you could go in here and color correct these files by applying color correction filters that are going to work in real time, and I'll show you what I mean. What I'm going to do first is I'm going to take this shot, and I'm going to right-click on it, and I'm going to look for a menu selection here called "reveal in project." What that's going to do is show me where that source footage is in my project window. I'm now going to right-click on "source settings" and here we go. We can see right now the grade that I created in REDCINE-X as applied to this file. For demonstration purposes, what I'm going to do is I'm going to reset everything on this file. So here is the original metadata that was used when the camera recorded this file. But it's not destructive information. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go over here, and I'm going to reset my white balance again to 3200. Whoop--Let me go back. I'm sorry about that. I'm going to reset--there it is. I reset my white balance to 3200. I'm going to change the gamma space that I'm working in, and that's over here. I'm going to go to REDlog film, and I'm going to adjust some of my darks again and do another grade here. I'm going to do this pretty fast. I'm going to actually change my color on this. I'm going to make this warmer for demonstration purposes. I'm going to make this a warmer shot. I'm going to put up the saturation just a little bit. Here we go--I just created a completely different grade instantaneously right within Premiere. You could see. There is it. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the "effects" panel, and I'm going to go and apply a color correction filter that's going to operate in this file in real time and 4k. I'm going to take a 3-way color corrector, drop it on this file, and right here--see it's showing up-- and I'm going to take my midtones, and I'm going to pull them to the blue end of the spectrum here and give this kind of a blue mood. As you can see, this is happening to a 4k file in real time. This is just frigging cool. Next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to just change the tonality of the shot a little more. I'm going to crush the blacks a bit by going over here and adjust this a bit more here. There we go. Over here now when I play this, here's a 4k file being played back in real time. Completely different grade. I just did that now. Actually, that's pretty well-matched to the other material. I'm just showing you this so that you can see how much power is in Premiere CS5 and the power of the real time capabilities. I mean, it's totally frigging amazing to me after having worked with other editing products that I can scroll through this timeline like this with a 4k file and just mess around with it like it's ProRes or anything else. This is six times the resolution of HD. Okay, so now I'm going to show you another little trick I came up with to basically create some power windows and create some vignettes and maybe you have an image or a shot where you want to darken the corners a little bit or make a face pop out more. This is my wacky solution to do that. Over here on the top track is a CG image. I want you to watch this area over here and this area over here as I toggle through this. I'm going to basically turn that file off. Here we go. Now it's off and now it's back on. You can see what it's doing. It's a very subtle thing, but it's really significant as far as the grading is concerned. So how did I do that? Basically, I used the character generator. Within the character generator, you can make shapes. You can make triangles, circles--things of that nature. All I did was I made two triangles, which I placed on the left and right-hand sides of the image. Then what I did was I applied a blur filter to this. If you look over here, here's my effect. I applied a Gaussian blur at 250%. What that does, actually--I'm going to adjust the opacity on this shot-- is that creates this dark blurred matte that's around the image, and I can now just dial in the opacity setting. I can just go to this opacity setting and dial this down until it's very, very, very subtle, and it's hardly there and create a real time instant matte on this 4k footage. If I just toggle that through, you can see what's going on. Once again, I'm going to just let you see the difference here. If I un-enable the shot and enable the shot, you can see what's going on. If you need to work fast, and you don't want to go to a grading program or another program, this is a great way to just make--you can make as many of these as you want, and you can stack them. I mean, I've put five or six of these on top of one shot in a timeline, and it just plays back in real time. If you're under the gun, and you've got a client sitting behind you, and it's someone from an agency, like an art director, and they want to start making adjustments, here's a great way to just do it really, really quick. You don't even have to flip out of another program. I'm going to show you one other cool thing here. I'm going to show you a secondary color correction technique where you can go in and use the technical term called "qualify." It's kind of like chromaking, where you can take an eyedropper and pick something like, say, the yellow in this taxicab shot and just isolate that specific color. Let's say we want to make that saturation lower, but leave everything else in the shot the way it is. I'm going to show you how to do that. I've already applied--I've just dragged from my window over here-- I've previously applied another 3-way color correction filter and already dragged it on top of this shot. If you go down here to the bottom, there's a little window called "secondary color correction." I just toggled it off. I'm going to toggle it back on. It's right over here. Secondary color correction. I'm going to show you how this works. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to actually completely reset this. So now I'm going to go to this eyedropper here. I'm going to click on it. I'm going to just pick some of this yellow. I'm going to go over here and pick it. If you push this up, there's a way of seeing what you just selected. There's an output menu. If you click on this output menu and go to mask, you can actually see that this is the yellow that I've identified. I'm going to toggle that back off, and I'm going to go to this eyedropper here. There's a plus eyedropper, which lets you add more of a selection to what you previously selected. I'm going to go over here to this darker yellow and pick that. I'm going to go over here and maybe grab some yellow over here, and I'm going to grab one more bit of yellow over here. If I go back to my mask selection here, you can see I've gotten some more of it. You also have the ability to go over here and adjust these so that if you wanted to get more of the luma area of that yellow, you could grab it here. If you really wanted to smooth this selection out, you can soften your selection. As you apply this qualifying selection to the image, it has a little bit of an organic feel to it. I'm going to go back up here now. I'm going to go back to my composite view. Now if I go over here and I go to my master saturation control, I can start to lower this yellow down a bit to taste, so that it's just not so prominent. I'm pulling it down more and more and more and more. To my eye, that kind of looks better. It's a little more balanced. Here I'm going to toggle it on and off. Now, this might be a little too subtle for you guys to see, but now it's off and now it's on. Can everybody see that? Okay. Basically, to put simply, this is pretty much the entire way I've been working with this RED footage. Grading in REDCINE-X, setting my preferences in REDCINE-X, so that the RMD file will be generated as you're doing the grade, importing all of your footage into Premiere Pro CS5.5, selecting all the footage, right clicking on the footage, going to source settings, applying the RMD button, and then I'll start editing, and if I need to start tweaking things, I'll go into the real-time color correction filters, and I'll start applying filters to the shots. If I want to create vignettes or darken areas, I'll use the title tools and make shapes and blur the shapes and adjust the opacity. I've been basically, by doing this process, saving myself days and days of time. The only other thing I wanted to tell you about CS5 is that I was an Avid editor and Final Cut Pro editor for many, many years, and the Mercury Playback Engine has actually changed my life. Why? Because I'm now having a better relationship with my wife. How many people here who are men who are married have to call your wife at the end of the day and go, "Hi, honey. I'm sorry. I still have to render something. The client just made a change"? Please raise your hand and join my special group. Well, I've got to tell you guys, this has totally changed my life, because I am just rendering less, because everything is happening in real time. So if a client wants to make a change, I don't have to sit there and go through this whole wacky process to do it. The other thing that this system does is when you're rendering your final file, it actually uses the Mercury Playback Engine, which is a 64-bit engine, which means it's using both of your processors. It's using a ton of the RAM that you have in your computer, and it's leveraging the Nvidia card, so all of my renders are really, really fast. Like, on my system at home in New York or in my studio-- I have a 3-year-old Mac with an Nvidia card-- and this timeline will render out to like a 1280 x 640 file in like 1-1/2 minutes to an uncompressed file. I mean, this is like life-changing for me, and that's why I've started using this program and have switched to it. Does anybody have any questions? Okay. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it.