Splice Here Transcodes Down with Red Rushes, Reconforms to 2K

For the new Best Buy campaign that features real employees talking about their customer service stories, Minneapolis-based editorial/finishing house Splice Here turned to the Red camera to save time and money, while providing stellar image quality and flexibility in post. In a nutshell, Splice Here took the 4K r3d RAW files, transcoded them with Red Rushes to ProRes, then reconformed during color correction to the 2K RAW files, composited the greenscreen Red footage to the backgrounds, which were shot on film, and delivered an HD master. We spoke with Michael Sandness, colorist/finishing editor at Splice Here, on their Red Workflow for the campaign of eight spots.
I read that you as the post house recommended using the Red camera. How did that come about for a post house? And what made you opt for the Red camera?
MICHAEL SANDNESS: We’ve worked with Best Buy for years and have developed a relationship with them to the point where they come to us as a post house with production questions. That’s a best-case scenario for us as a post company. Their goal was trying to promote the customer relationship stories, where it is not all about the products but about making sure customers are taken care of. They were interviewing these real employees in the spots so they couldn’t shoot on film because they needed to record these interviews, which run a half hour to over an hour. The director needs to get the story out of the person and they can’t stop the camera to reload. Even with HD options you would have had to roll double system or have two decks in case the interview went over an hour so you could keep rolling. So the first requirement was: we can’t stop the interviews.

The holiday spots they shot before were in HD because they could record for long periods but the limitation of high-def was that they weren’t able to take advantage of any extra resolution to do any pushes or moves to make it look like there were multiple cameras shooting this, so those spots looked like there were a lot of jump cuts. Having the extra resolution really helped. On one of the shots the editor decide he wanted to zoom in on the shot 80 percent and he could do that with no problem.

When they came to us in the pre-production with their requirements we brought up shooting with the Red camera because you could shoot up to two hours to a single drive at 4K resolution. Plus the image quality, when done well, keyed beautifully. After a series of meetings we decided to shoot on Red.

What was your Red workflow once they gave you the drives?
We’d get drives a couple times a day from the shoot with the Red r3d files and copy those to our SAN. Before they shot any footage I went to the set and worked with the DP and the camera-tech to create a preset so that when we had the footage back on the SAN we could use Red Rushes to create 1080p offline files. Red Rushes is Red’s tool ,which is used to process Red RAW files into ProRes QuickTimes.

There’s a few questions in the industry about Red. When the camera records the Red RAW it also creates proxy files, which are pointers to the Red RAW files. You can use those proxies for editing. But in our experience we don’t feel that that is at all productive. Even the fastest Mac, you have to render it at some point. You cut something together and play it back. When you play it back you are basically playing back a proxy of the Red RAW. If you want to do any dissolves or anything, you have to render. We feel the best workflow for us is to run the Red footage through Red Rushes, which takes the preset camera file that we defined, and processes it to 1080p 23.098 ProRes for creative editorial. It’s just much more productive using a file that isn’t pointing to the Red RAW files for editorial.

The other reason we did 1080p is the interviews were shot against greenscreen. So rather than mock up an offline at a lower resolution than we were going to deliver, we were offlining at the resolution we were going to deliver. So they were able to cut in context of the final delivery format. Because of using Final Cut and our SAN, it was not a big deal at all. All of our edit suites are capable of doing high-def without a problem.

How long did it take to process the Red RAW files to 1080p with Red Rushes? And why did you choose Red Rushes over some of the other tools out there?
Essentially I was using anywhere from two to seven quad-core Intel Macs. They shot in excess of 10 hours of footage, which equated 1.2 TB of original material. They started shooting Tuesday and by Wednesday afternoon our editors were cutting. They shot for three days and by Friday morning all 10 hours had been processed.

I have four different tools that do the transcoding to ProRes, including RedAlert, but the only one I completely trust is Red Rushes because it’s the only one that I’ve been able to work consistently. I’m not saying they don’t work but I just would need to do some more investigating into working with it.

Were the backgrounds shot with the Red One camera?
The background footage was shot in film. When they did the holiday spots I don’t think any of the footage was shot on film. What we brought to the table was that you could get a really high quality with Red for your chroma-key and that allowed them to have the budget to shoot the background in 35mm film, Creatively their spots could become better because they could leverage all the advantages of shooting film for the backgrounds and the two images combined beautifully in post. We’re not saying shoot Red for everything but shooting the interviews in Red allowed them the budget to shoot the backgrounds with film.

Once the footage was processed, what was the workflow?
The editors spent a couple weeks cutting the spots and they were pulling some nice temp keys so we had dailies all comped together in the edit. Once the spots were approved I took the Red source track and would reconform it to Redcode in Final Cut. Instead of looking to the Prores for the source, it looks to the Red RAW footage that is now native to Final Cut Studio. I double checked the conform, which is a quick process because it’s all digital and there were only a couple places that didn’t match quite right.

I then took the greenscreen footage into Apple Color to color grade the Red RAW so I had access to everything the Red camera brings to the table – ISO, exposure, saturation Kelvin – anything the Red camera is using. I was able to see that metadata and adjust that if I needed. The big advantage is that I am color grading 12-bit RGB 4:4:4. From there I rendered out of Color to 2K and we combined that with the final transfer of the film footage. Final compositing was done in After Effects. We used Flame to pull final key and we onlined and finished in Final Cut Pro. Our onlined master was 1080p 23.98. For broadcast we delivered a 1080i master as well as a standard def master.