CoreMelt Visual Effects

So the first question is, why pay for CineForm when Apple's ProRes and the R3D codec are both freely available? In many cases depending on your final output, ProRes might be acceptable, but if you are trying to obtain the best quality possible using Final Cut Pro then you should take a close look at CineForm's NEO4K Codec.

High end projects where money is no object will as always want to finish with uncompressed DPX files and use a dedicated online finishing system like Scratch or Autodesk Smoke/Flame. However if you already have a Final Cut Pro system, the switch to CineForm will give you a potentially large boost in final outbut quality for much less outlay.

First, CineForm is actually several codecs. Cineform supports both RAW and RGB color formats, but you cannot render to the RAW codec from an editing application so we're talking about using Cineform RGB as a digital intermediate format. Cineform has also just released a new "Cineform Express" codec, which is a form of instant proxies for doing offline editing, however that's not yet available on Mac OS X so it's not covered in this article.

Why Cineform?

• Higher visual quality: Visually lossless, ProRes can show compression artifacts when recompressing more than once.
• RGB 444vs YUV 422: CineForm gives you a 444 RGB option, while ProRes is limited to 422 YUV.
• 12 bit vs 10 bit: Cineform allows you to select 12 bit RGB to keep the full color range of the R3D files.
• Windows Encoder available: Apples ProRes codec is only available as a decoder on Windows, so AE users on Windows can't render back to ProRes format.
• Plays nicely with others: ProRes should work with any Quicktime application, but in practise there are gamma shifts and other problems when trying to use ProRes in apps other than Apple's FCS Suite. Cineform is much more widely supported in 3rd party apps.

CineForm has now released their Red to Cineform direct conversion tool called R2CF, full details of this are available on CineForm's RED workflow page. Unfortunately the R2CF tool is not yet available for Mac OS X, so direct R3D to Cineform RAW would require using a Windows machine. There is still a decent workflow solution available as you can now directly render Cineform files straight out of RedCine.

The FCP Offline - Crimson - Redcine - FCP Online shuffle

The workflow is similar to what's suggested for ProRes: Take quicktime proxy files from the R3D camera or created in Red Alert and use them to cut your off line edit. Then export an XML file and use Crimson to convert that to a Redcine Telecine XML. Load the sequence into RedCine and do your one light color adjustments. Then after setting your size settings for each clip, choose "Cineform HD/2K/4K" and "Maximum" as the Quality setting. Then choose an output folder and hit the big red shiny "GO" button. Note that currently RedCine crashes often when attempting to transcode at 4K resolution but 2K or 1080p seems to work fine.

Then you use the "roundtrip XML" from Crimson to load the new Cineform sequence back into Final Cut Pro. These clips become your new digital masters and can be handed off to other artists on After Effects or any other app on Mac or Windows. Quicktime is renowned for gamma shift problems when copying clips between applications but Cineform seems to have done all the hard work for you in this regard and I was not able to find any gamma shift problems when using Cineform in my own testing.

Beware "silent truncating" of color information in Final Cut Pro.

When you are doing the color grading or applying effects or filters in Final Cut Pro on your Cineform master clips, you need to enable "high precision rendering" in your sequence settings and be aware that many of the built in effects and filters in Final Cut Pro are not able to render in more than 8 bit color. See my other workflow article for details on which built in effects are "12 bit safe".

All the plugins in the CoreMelt Motion pack, Editing Pack, and PolyChrome transitions are capable of rendering in high precision color when used on Cineform codec material and we test with this codec in our development cycle. The CoreMelt plugins are now available in After Effects CS3 as well as Final Cut Studio giving you many more potential workflow options.

The big missing gap in this workflow is that you can't yet use the Cineform codec with Apple's Color grading package, so you have to finish in Final Cut Pro, or do your final online in another app such as Premiere Pro. If Cineform and Apple can work this out and even better add the same realtime features in FCP that they Cineform has with Prospect 4K in Premiere Pro then Cineform really would be the "one codec to rule them all" for R3D workflows. Until then it's a very good option, unless you need to use Color.