RAW Workflow with RED Footage

RAW Workflow with RED footage

On the 21st of Feb, I attended a demonstration about how to work with RED/RAW camera footage in DaVinci Resolve. Below is what I’ve learnt.

Potentially I would be using a RED camera to film a short film. Because I’m not familiar with the process of using the footage I needed to learn. Luckily a demonstration about the workflow was put on which I attended.

In this demo, I first learned that rec. 709 is the standard format in TV’s, projectors, Video cameras and more. Cameras such as RED and ARRI do not shoot in Rec. 709 but RAW. Because they shoot in RAW the footage is flat and need to be put into a standard and must be colour graded otherwise whatever media you view it on will assume what the colours are.

When colour grading you must calibrate the laptop screen/ monitor you’re working on to Rec. 709. This is so you will know how the film looks on TV screens etc.

 

The Workflow

Firstly, bring the selected footage into DaVinci. When you first import raw footage into DaVinci it is very important not to mess with the duration of the clips or the frame rate because at this point were just creating proxies.

Then drag into media pool and right click selecting ‘New timeline using selected clips’. Once this is done move over to the colour workspace and select the Camera Raw section. Under the ‘Decode using’ drop down menu select ‘clip’. ‘Colour science’ needs to be the latest available option for example ‘Version 3’. Gamma curve needs to be selected for REDLog Film.

Under the settings in the bottom right-hand corner select the Colour management submenu. The first thing to change here is the ‘Colour science’. It should default to DaVinci YRGB, this need to be changed to ‘DaVinci YRGB Colour Managed’. This allows you to edit the colour space input and output. Because the footage is RAW the Input needs to match that so select REDlogFilm. The ‘Timeline’ and ‘Output’ colour space needs to be the same and Rec. 709. As that how it will need to be exported. Underneath make sure Luminance mapping is selected and Saturation mapping is selected under Gamut Mapping.

The next stage is to export it. Below are the steps to follow for the process;

• Deliver – change codec to Avid ‘DNxHD’ 1080p 36 8bit
• Don’t use ProRes
• Render as individual files
• Don’t give custom name – Source
• Save into a subfolder ‘Proxies’
• Render out
• Save project

Once this is done open Premiere Pro, make a new project and import the files that have just been exported. Select the clips and make a sequence from the clip. It’s very important that no colour adjustments, Warp stabilizing etc are made as Davinci won’t be able to use these files. Save the project and export as an XML in a new folder titled ‘Data’

Move back to DaVinci and File – import – XML files. Unselect auto set project settings, source clips into media pool and sizing info. Now that process is complete you can work on the colour grading.

I feel that learning this process will be very useful in my work this term and potentially later in life. There are a few questions I need to ask/research such as;

• How to calibrate monitors
• How many Nits should be used?
• Exporting settings?
• Workflow between DaVinci, after effects and Premiere Pro.

I went to the RED website and downloaded some of the footage available and went through this process and then did some colour grading of my own as seen below.

Learning the process is incredibly valuable, if I was without this knowledge and continued filming without it, it would have caused a lot of problems. I plan on doing a proper Colour Grading test once I have the test footage.