The Pro Applications Update 2008-004 (run Software Update) and the Red Final Cut Studio 2 Installer provide access to two new major features.

The first is rewrapping R3D data into QuickTime files that Final Cut can work with natively, though Final Cut’s Log & Transfer interface. There’s some debate about this, but as far as I can tell it appears to simply create QuickTime movies that are the equivalent of the existing QT proxy files, but self contained. This isn’t actually all that useful. (Why not just use the proxies? Rewrapping all the same data is just going double the amount of disk space your project uses for no good reason.)

The second feature is far more significant. Previously if you did a ‘Send to Color’ in on a Final Cut sequence containing containing Red proxies, you got… nothing. You got a bunch of clips on a timeline in Color that Color couldn’t do anything with. After installing this update, not only do proxies (and the new QT-wrapped files) show up in Color, but Color has access to the full raw data.

This workflow lets you edit immediately without any up-front transcoding, only requires you to transcode the exact frames you use in your final edit (they get transcoded as the footage gets rendered out of Color), allows you to create anything up to a DPX or uncompressed HD final deliverable without any previous step requiring you to work with uncompressed data, and provides access to the full range of the raw image capture by the camera in a grading environment significantly more powerful than RedCine.

While other workflows have offered some of these benefits, this is the first workflow which offers all of them at commodity prices. (Previously only SCRATCH offered all of this, and not at commodity prices.)

Now, there are a few caveats:

• As is fairly typical for this kind of dual-app edit/conform workflow, Color doesn’t render Final Cut video generators, filters, motion tab settings, or transitions other than dissolves. This isn’t as bad as it might sound, because these things aren’t typically used on feature film projects, and if you’re not editing a feature that’s being rendered to DPX, you can round-trip through Final Cut (do a ‘Send to Final Cut Pro’ in Color) and handle all of this back in Final Cut.

• Color only supports up to 2K. No 4K finishing from this workflow. 2K comes in as 2K. 3K, rather awkwardly, comes in as 1.5K, which I think Final Cut’s real-time engine has some issues with.

• I believe 4K footage through this workflow is rendered at the equivalent of the “half high” setting in Red’s other apps. It would be nice to have the option to have 2K scaled from a full 4K debayer as well.

• This new software hasn’t yet been tested extensively with Build 18 footage, or formats other than 4K 2:1 and 2K 2:1. I’ll be doing some tests with 4KHD this week. 4KHD is going to be important to this workflow because 4K footage comes in at half its native resolution (see above), so if you want to finish in 1080p, shooting 4K HD will make your life easier.

The Red Final Cut Studio 2 Installer linked above comes with a 24 page whitepaper on Red FCS workflow that lays all of this out in much more detail, if you’re interested.

Red makes many workflows possible, but as of right now, the most clearly defined one is the one that will be made possible by the REDCODE support in Final Cut Pro 6. This post will lay out how that’s going to work, to the best of my understanding. Like the post on REDCODE QuickTime support (which you should read before reading this post), this information was pieced together from many sources, and as a result some things are still unclear and others might not be completely accurate.

First off, it’s useful to be a bit more precise about exactly what level of support exists for REDCODE in Final Cut Pro.

All versions of Final Cut Pro will see REDCODE footage through QuickTime reference files (see QuickTime link above). You should be able to cut footage at 1K and 2K (more on 4K later) even in FCP 5.x. So, what’s the big deal with FCP 6? An updated version of FCP 6 (note: not 6.0, but an update that will come later) will add two important things to the mix.

The first of those is RT support. As folks familiar with FCP know, in order to get real-time features, a timeline has to be using a “blessed” codec — one which Apple explicitly supports for RT. In this FCP 6 update, REDCODE will be such a codec. Until that update ships, you’ll be able to play back and make straight-cut edits in FCP on a timeline that uses REDCODE, but anything more than than (transitions, filters, etc.) will require rendering.

The second big thing that will come in that FCP update is an FxPlug plug-in that brings many of the features of REDCINE right into Final Cut Pro. (For those unfamiliar with FxPlug, it’s Apple’s newish plug-in architecture for Final Cut Pro and Motion, which opens up many more possibilities than the previous plug-in mechanisms for FCP and allows for vastly higher performance.) This plug-in will allow for fine control over the “development” of RAW footage, and can actually share look files with both REDCINE and the camera (more on that in another post).

It’s unclear exactly what the implications of not having Red’s FxPlug will be. This is an important question for people looking to cut Red footage in FCP prior to the release of the update that adds explicit support. FCP will certainly still be useful for an offline edit (it was used like this on the Peter Jackson short, Crossing the Line), but will it be possible to get decent results for your final conform? Since the REDCODE codec will apparently be giving data in a full float color space to FCP, the data you’ll need to get your image to look the way you want it to should be in the image data presented to FCP, but will you be able to massage it to look the way it should without a tool designed for this task?

Another thing that’s presently unclear is whether Apple’s new Color app (previously Silicon Color’s Final Touch) will be able to work with footage directly from a REDCODE timeline. My guess is that it will, but that you’ll have to render a clip that has had its look tweaked with Red’s FxPlug (or probably any clip that has had any FCP filters applied to it), since Color doesn’t, as far as I’m aware, have support for FCP plug-ins.

What about 4K? Well, that’s a mixed bag. Some apps in Apple’s toolset support it with no problem, like Shake. FCP doesn’t officially support it, but can be coaxed into doing it. Color only supports 2K. Motion, I believe, technically supports 4K, but you have to have the right video card. As of right now, plan on finishing at 2K with this workflow. This is not, mind you, a major problem, as there’s almost no venue where 4K is actually beneficial at present (more on that in a future post).

Ultimately, based on the information I’m familiar with and a bit of speculation, here’s how I expect a typical Mac-based workflow for a Red feature to go, once the FCP 6 update with additional REDCODE support hits the streets:

1. Shoot 4K REDCODE RAW.
2. Download to a RAID attached to your editing system. (See many previous posts on storage.)
3. Bring preview-quality footage at 1K or 2K into FCP via appropriate reference movies. (See previous post on QuickTime REDCODE support.)
4. “Develop” as desired using Red’s FxPlug.
5. Render VFX or CG shots out of Shake, Maya, etc. as REDCODE RGB at 2K and bring them into FCP timeline.
6. Edit, with full RT support, etc.
7. Re-link FCP project so it points to reference movies that specify full quality 2K footage. Change timeline resolution if it was previously 1K.
8. Open clips from the timeline in Color, grade them, and render back to the FCP timeline.
9. Output to desired format via Compressor or QuickTime conversion (much more on creating appropriate deliverables in future posts).

If this is accurate, it’s a fairly straightforward workflow, that should allow for 2K deliverables to be produced with a reasonably priced workstation and a fairly moderate amount of storage. That’s pretty impressive, given the speed of Red’s development program and the fact that they were also working on some other stuff (like, you know, the camera) at the same time. It’s interesting to see an upstart like Red coming out of the gate with a better post workflow than most major vendors do. (I didn’t see Sony shipping an HDV QuickTime component the day its first HDV cameras shipped.)

Anyway, this is basically the workflow we plan to use, so expect lots more details about it in the future.