Adventures in RED© and Beyond

Lotaluv - Final Post Eve

Things are going well, finally! Well maybe not well, but I am near completion as I am typing this while rendering out the end credits (for the 5th time!), then all I have left is to jam it in and put some music under it. Then I have to get it on line for the concerned parties to sign off on it. Well it's kinda a formality cuz I ain't changing shit! I need my life back!! But if there are any concerns, I will politely inform them that the particular button I need to press in order to carry out said task is currently broken and they won't have anymore available for replacement till after the new year. Now that is tact ;)

             

Right so then what I have for you in the meantime is some final screen grabs of some of the final graded stuff and some shots of the in "process render" of the end credits. Red... lots of RED!!!

Here is the tally of my logged hours, I am no longer going to keep track after tonight. Hopefully by tomorrow this time, I will have a video for everyone to see....FINALLY!!!!!

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Lotaluv In Color

I decided to repost this after attempting to put this video up on Vimeo and realizing that it didn't do it justice cuz I guess after conversion the resolution was super ropey. I am using the free version of JW PLAYER using the new flash encoder which uses H264 (.f4v instead .flv) and it looks friggin' dope. If you can't see it, it could be cuz you need to update to flash 10. The post went as follows:

I finally decided to give it a go in Color. It took a little while to get the hang of things but the amount of control you have is amazing, and to be honest the render is much higher quality then rendering graded material in FCP. I guess I always knew this but it was nice to find myself in a situation that finally forced me to try something new.

I still have to hit this again with a few more grades but I am happy the way it is heading. More tomorrow.

What you see below is a screen cap of the entire layout, and then a video of some of the grading. I had to speed it up so you could see the process but I know it runs a bit long! Don't worry no one is obligated to watch the whole thing! (Aprox. running time 4:20)

time-lapse color grading in color

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The End is Near!

Hi all. I just wanted to get a quick post in before bed time rolls around. Things are looking good with Lotaluv, the edit is pretty much locked down. I'd say about 2/3 of the edit is color graded. That god forsaken rotoscope hell is over as well. It's amazing how 5 days of work flies by in a matter of seconds. In all honesty I don't think anyone will even pick up on the pain in the ass process that I went through for that ending, which is a good sign :) It means I did it right!!

Ok so more to come soon I hope, I am planning on hitting this final color grade towards of the end of this week and if all goes well there will be a completed piece ready to watch by Monday of next week!

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RotoFantazmigazmaScopic

I had some time to hit the luva again this morning for about 6 hours. I almost go through the frying pan chick. Have spent just on her alone, about 8 hours already plus my 6 today and another 4 or 5 tomorrow. Hoping to have her and her lovely spatula wrapped by then. I have included a little movie for your viewing pleasure. This is about 35 minutes (a fraction of the real time) worth of assorted rotoscoping of just one character from a group of 5. It has been sped up 1972% into a flurry of rotoscopin'lovin'. I only wish I could roto that fast in real life.

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Motion Tracking and Insertion

I just wanted to post this quick thing I have been working on. I know it's not RED related but I think its a cool process to see. I actually quite enjoy doing it as it's a subtle of adding elements to existing scenes. This is one of two projects I am currently working on for Elissa Rosati.  This particular piece is called "Half A Girl".  What you see in the frames below is my attempt to insert some artwork onto a moving wall from an existing shot. The shot was not originally shot with this in mind and if it was, I would have insisted on have some sort of tracking marks or dots on the wall, but in this instance, I had to wing it.

The first thing I did was to try and find a point of high contrast that I could attach a motion tracker to so I could get a the basic up, down, left and right movements from the onset camera. Once I accomplished this, I then assigned that spatial X & Y info to my layer containing the artwork to be inserted. When that was done, I made my artwork layer a 3d layer and inserted a camera into the scene. The only purpose of the camera was that I could assign a depth of field and lighting to the artwork which would allow for a more convincing insertion. I didn't have the camera lens info nor measurements on its placement and focal points so I had to eye it. The second to last frame you can see the artwork lined up and place ontop of where it is supposed to go. The very last frame shows the final composite with lighting and shading applied. This is a simplified version of how one might do this sort of thing, it is in no way the perfect or ideal method, to see perfect execution one need only watch the opening of each episode of heroes. They obviously have a better set up than me :P

Ok I need to get back to work and finish this so I can get back to Maitreya, which btw, is so close to being finished I can taste it!!!

           

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Rotoscopic Hell

This is a snap shot representing about 1.5 seconds of rotoscoping fun. I am not even close to finishing and what you see took me about 7 hours of work. When I grow up I want to be a rotoscoper. Now I have to take a break from this fun stuff to go to work. Will be back at it tonight when I get home. Really I will be running my ass off back tonight cuz it breaks my heart to be torn away from so much fun. It should be illegal.

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Seeing RED

Had a day to chip away at the enormous color correcting task at hand. Started playing around with some of the greenscreen shots and came up with something that seems a bit funky. It's growing on me, the big trick I still need to figure out is how to work this into the bigger picture and have it work with the entire edit instead of sticking out like a bunch of red people on a black and white background.

       

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Halloween In Hong Kong

                                                                           

 

 

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Up-Rezzing

This morning I finally finished the UP-REZ of all the footage. What that means is that all the footage I was previously working with was rendered out at MED-LOW resolution. I then went and re-rendered all the footage out at HI-REZ. I have decided to go into a little bit of an analysis as I managed to come up with some hard stats on the process. Most you will be saying/thinking, "who fucking cares!" and I would tend to agree with you. Except, that is, for the one fact that time is money. Not to mention time taking from my life spent watching the proverbial grass grow.

The figures below are based on the time it took to render out 28 clips shot at 3k (3072 pixels wide by 1728 pixels high). For a size reference go here.

28 clips @ med-low resolution output took 7 hours. So for every 60 sec of shot footage, it takes about 10.5 min to render.

28 clips @ high resolution output took 19 hours. So for every 60 sec of shot footage, it takes about 28 min to render.

So what that means is it takes a fucking long ass time. All these results where using Red Rushes on a Mac Pro with the following specs:

I dont think you will be able to see the difference between the med-low rez frame and the high rez frame but you can click on them to load them up at full size. I have included enlarged segments of the two for comparison. Keep in mind you are only looking at a single frame, 25 of these suckers go by a second so any grain is amplified through the motion of it all.

MED-LOW RESOLUTION

HIGH RESOLUTION

     

Well I guess you could say my whole point in showing you the difference is that, in and of itself, med-low resolution is still pretty good quality if you are finishing off to HD and if you are working with enormous amounts of footage (like for a documentary) and you don't have 2 months and a few Terrabytes of space in your budget, you could concievable do the whole thing in med-low rez. Of course I would never shoot with a RED Camera and not finish to HI-REZ, it would be kinda pointless don't you think?

(DISCLAIMER: I suck at math so if the figures are off a bit, I blame it on my schooling)

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Lotaluv - Offline 02

So I finally had a chance to get back to the "Lotaluv" edit. I am now done with the offline 02. Basically it's a complete edit in it's rough format. I was having a few problems with the end shot as on location we were under lots of pressure to get out before we got arrested. It's one of those "fix it in post" moments. I included some grabs below to show what i am working with. Of course it is a completely rough draft attempt, but as a proof of concept I think it shows that it is possible to pull it off. To make it work, I have to Rotoscope (manually outline frame by frame the characters) which allows me to extract them and place them in a different shot.

For the final version of course I will have to spend a lot more time doing it and make it as precise as possible, but for this test I did some power Rotoscoping.

           

Check out some behind the scenes action from the second location in Mong Kok.

I have been using this great little free app for Mac called Time Tracker to log the time spent on this project. Some may remember I first converted all the footage at medium resolution using RedRushes. The first round took me about 3 hours. Last night I started converting to Hi-Rez the same clips. Although I fell asleep and wasn't able to log the completion time, I predicted it was about a 4 to 1 ratio in terms of the time spent going to med-rez vs. hi-rez. I think I am pretty close to the mark as can see it took 13 hours about. Fun stuff really and no doubt all of you are titillated at this.

So then enough of this nerd talk, I grabbed a few untreated med-rez screen caps from the edit. What a bunch of characters!

           

This is where I am at with the edit at the end of the offline02.

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