Offline to online with 4K

digitalfilms by Oliver Peters

The 4K buzz seems to be steam-rolling the industry just like stereo3D before it. It’s too early to tell whether it will be an immediate issue for editors or not, since 4K delivery requirements are few and far between. Nevertheless, camera and TV-set manufacturers are building important parts of the pipeline. RED Digital Cinema is leading the way with a post workflow that’s both proven and relatively accessible on any budget. A number of NLEs support editing and effects in 4K, including Avid DS, Autodesk Smoke, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro X, Grass Valley EDIUS and Sony Vegas Pro.

Although many of these support native cutting with RED 4K media, I’m still a strong believer in the traditional offline-to-online editing workflow. In this post I will briefly outline how to use Avid Media Composer and Apple FCP X for a cost-effective 4K post pipeline. One can certainly start and finish a RED-originated project in FCP X or Premiere Pro for that matter, but Media Composer is still the preferred creative tool for many editing pros. Likewise, FCP X is a viable finishing tool. I realize that statement will raise a few eyebrows, but hear me out. Video passing through Final Cut is very pristine, it supports the various flavors of 2K and 4K formats and there’s a huge and developing ecosystem of highly-inventive effects and transitions. This combination is a great opportunity to think outside of the box.

Offline editing with Avid Media Composer

Avid has supported native RED files for several versions, but Media Composer is not resolution independent. This means RED’s 4K (or 5K) images are downsampled to 1080p and reformatted (cropped or letterboxed) to fit into the 16:9 frame. When you shoot with a RED camera, you should ideally record in one of their 4K 16:9 sizes. The native .r3d files can be brought into Media Composer using the “Link to AMA File(s)” function. Although you can edit directly with AMA-linked files, the preferred method is to use this as a “first step”. That means, you should use AMA to cull your footage down to the selected takes and then transcode the remainder when you start to fine tune your cut. read more...

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