First Scarlett Shoot and editing in FCPX

Just finished shooting a short monologue piece on the RED Scarlett. Pretty impressive camera. Even though I know Premiere might be the better option for working with RED footage, I'm determined to edit this in FCPX and wanted to toss out the idea and solicit any opinions for workflow.

We shot at 4K, 24fps.

What would your workflow be. I have some ideas, but wanted to see what other people are thinking before I dive in too deep.

Edit with Proxies, keep original clips in tact for output.

Or edit with Optimized media period.

Depends on what your hardware can handle.

I've made ProRes 4K files in RCX. I wanted the flattest image possible, so I set the gamma to RedLog Film and made sure each shot was white balanced and exposed for correctly before outputting.

I've imported the files into FCPX and generated proxys. I'll edit that, color, then online and output. We'll see.

Overall, yes using R3D files would be easier, but this works fairly well and is less of a burden on my system.

Anybody doing anything different?

I wouldn't color with proxies at all.

Hey Matt,

I would love to see how this video came out. I figure my workflow would be the same, but like Ben said I wouldn't use Proxies to color.

I might do my first Grade in proxies, just to get a first past, but all Secondaries and Color Masks, I would online first then finish the grade.

Yeah I hear you on coloring proxies, but at 4k with my FW800 drive, playing back the footage is not super fantastic, even with ProRes files.

So I'll probably do my grading with Proxies and then fine tune with the final files.

Your hard drive definitely is a bottleneck in this workflow. For 2K and 4K work you will greatly benefit from putting your media on a decent RAID system. If you have a Thunderbolt computer a TB Raid would even be better. I'm editing full quality 4K ProRes without any hickups on a beefy iMac 27" i7 with 16GB RAM, a 2GB VRAM version of the ATI card and a Promise 12TB Thunderbolt RAID striped to RAID5. I'm getting nearly the same performance out of this system as on one of our Nehalem MacPros with 32GB RAM

I agree that for the straight edit switching to Proxies makes things go much faster. But I would not grade on the Proxies.

Decided it was silly to finish in 4K since this project won't live anywhere but the web or a regular DVD.

So halfway through the edit, I decided to go back to RCX and rerender out ProRes 4x4 files with a superflat color grade at 2K and overwrite the files I had.

I opened FCPX 10.0.3 and everything reconnected brilliantly. I got a message saying the files had been modified. Then I changed my sequence settings to HD from 4K and now I'm back in business.

Go Apple. That couldn't have been easier.

As a dear friend of mine would say: good news, I love good news

Glad it worked out fine for you.

Wow that's awesome!!! How's the Scarlett working out? How's the software on it? My past experiences with the RedOne left some features to be desired.

The camera is great - seems to be a large improvement from the original RED. The DP said the whole kit was about $18,000 all in without lenses - which is not bad at all, considering.

RCX leaves still some to be desired. While fantastic (and free) I found an annoying bug in the workflow which is the latest version won't render out your custom grades using REDLine (which allows you to use all your cores and process multiple clips simultaneously). A bug they are fixing, but it did take my iMac several hours to churn through the footage.

Anyway, for those who are interested: here is the video. I decided to go for black and white and added 35mm grain using cinegrain. All grading was done very quickly in FCPX. Now I need to brush up on my audio skills - any good free tutorials?

looks good but I'd like to see it in colour.

Seems a bit reductive to make it grainy and B/W - but maybe that's just me.



How was the work flow in to FCPX - any problems on the day or in the edit?

BW was the definitely the way to go, it helped express the emotional content of this guy and his story. Great shots, great script, great acting, super well done. I'm sharing this with my friends locally. This is a wonderful piece of art.

Just remember (not this film, but for others doing BW), when you go desaturated with an image, you should still play with the colors. Because the red, green and blue channels all desaturate independently of each other, and you can get some cool looks.

I loved the look, the feel, this was a great little video. Bravo!

Thanks BenB!

Snapdragon, the workflow into FCPX couldn't be easier. RedCineX was the only headache since (as I mentioned) the transcoding took much longer without the ability to use RedLine (they said they are working on a fix).

One note, when importing, I decided not to move the files into the event folder, which was a smart choice since I re-transcoded at a different resolution.

I've posted a screenshot of the flat output from RedCineX. I find that I was able to bring a lot out of this and push it pretty much wherever I wanted to go. Of course, I could have set a basic look in RCX first with the raw files.

Have to agree B&W is what makes this work. Loved the little insert shots, cup, spoon, etc. Could have done with a couple more of those when it became a bit static. I know you're trying to keep us on him during the big part of the speech, but a shot of some of that emotion thru his hand clenching or close in on the mouth or eyes, won't break the hold. Found the writing could do with a bit of work, the monologue didn't seem entirely natural to me, which made the acting tougher too. Serious drama is one of the hardest to write because it all hinges on 100% believability. The audio wasn't too bad, perhaps a tiny bit flat but adequate.