5 Tips to Maintain Sanity in RED Post

 
1. Ascertain the target output format at the outset (if you control your own format destiny, skip to 2)
2. Decide who, if anyone, controls the color intent at the outset (if no one has specified how the footage must look on set, skip to 3)
3. Leave R3D and 4K behind as soon as possible (and no sooner)
4. Take control of sharpness, noise & more during conversion; don’t leave these to tools that can’t work with them
5. Make use of great free and cheap tools if you can’t just rely on Scratch

The RED ONE camera is innovative technology that will only improve. Someday, perhaps the good people at RED will anticipate the workflows most often used to work with their footage and offer specifications that help ensure their users’ success; for now, however, the following incontrovertale facts about RED often guarantee the need to make decisions more or less on your own:

• no tools exist to write an R3D file (although several can read them), nor does RED endorse any alternate standard for converting their footage
• the color intent of an R3D file cannot be controlled (although it can be specified)

It is no coincidence that the happiest RED post-production pipelines have been the ones in which a given studio is master of its own destiny when it comes to the color look and output format of its footage. Likewise, hapless studios have in some cases encountered actual crisis when confronted by the demands of the director or DP to match the footage to how it looked when shot, or when required to deliver a particular format to another facility (typically for the purposes of conforming and finishing, often on a system standardized around 10-bit log Cineon DPX files).

Things can only get better. Meanwhile, here are some tips to keep from going crazy.

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