Going one better: RED editing and what Vegas 9 has under the hood

By Mike Jones

There's a substantial history of camera technology being released to the public before the technology of post-production has caught up. HDV springs as an obvious example where the long-GOP structure was fantastically efficient for image acquisition and recording but presented considerable issues for non-linear editing systems traditionally reliant on individual frames and not groups-of-pictures. AVCHD presents the same issue where shooting is easy but timeline performance is less than stellar. And Sony's XDCAMEX is a great balance of quality and efficiency but it's wrapping in an Mp4 format initially gave many NLE's considerable trouble.

And of course at the top of this heap is the RED ONE camera. No doubt a paradigm shift in digital cinema - 4k resolution, RAW metadata and all kinds of digital flexibility and power - but wrestling with a brand new format, uncommon resolutions (particularly the RED unique 3k) the new headspace of RAW workflow and tapeless ingest, has made post-production of RED far from simple. All the major NLE developers have moved to accommodate the RED's unique format but to date few filmmakers would attest that any of the available editing options are as good as they could or should be.

Apple was first and seemed embedded in the RED structure itself as the RED camera writes QuickTime native proxy files in-camera along with the R3D RAW files. But the Final Cut Pro RED workflow remains decidedly problematic. The proxy files at lower resolutions work well enough but since a deep down flaw in the QuickTime architecture means that FCP has no native support for a full 4k - 4096px resolution at all, FCP seems to be relegated to a 2k/HD or off-line only solution. Perhaps not a big deal for many RED productions but certainly FCP is not the complete RED solution many would hope it could or would be. Indeed until a recent update, FCP also had no way to read the native RAW R3D files from the RED. The update now allows the R3D's to be re-wrapped to MOV to make them FCP compliant but this too has issues. FCP's playback scaling engine is very far behind the eight-ball of where other NLE's are at so real-time performance of MOV wrapped 4k, or even 2k, R3D's is abysmal even on very powerful MacPros. At the same time, even though FCP can now read R3D files (albeit in MOV skins) it has no internal access to the RAW metadata and so is reliant on one-light processes conducted in third party applications such as RED's own RedAlert and RedCine.

In this regard, RED Digital Camera Co. may well have delivered an amazing piece of hardware but its software development leaves a lot to be desired. All the current RED applications are buggy, beta software and many users have been prompted to declare that RED should stick to hardware and let software specialists come up with the software solutions.

Avid was a little slower than the others to the RED party, something Avid is known for but which is not necessarily a bad thing. Their RED solution follows a fairly typical off-line/on-line process whereby R3D's are converted to DNxHD files for offline performance efficiency and then conformed back to the original native R3D's in an Avid DS for finishing in 4K. Certainly a very functional workflow, despite the down-time of a heavy transcoding process of the R3D's to DNxHD offline files. Avid does however deliver both native R3D and 4k support with the catch being that the process largely relies on an expensive DS system for the online and still requires the use of RED software such as REDAlert for the one-light. The Avid process can read the one-light look from RedAlert but cannot it self manipulate that metadata. The utility Avid developed for the batch processing of R3D files is called Metafuze and while it looks to be heading in the right direction it current has some significant drawbacks; among them that it is Windows-only and that it cannot read embedded audio in the R3D files.

So then along came Adobe with its offering that seemed decidedly more forward thinking and aiming to provide a native RED workflow that was accessible to indie filmmakers and smaller productions. Premiere Pro CS4 can read the native R3D's and drop them straight on the timeline. More significantly the scaling playback engine of Premiere allows for the editor to select which decoding resolution to use to gain maximum playback performance. So in testing I was able to have native 4k R3D's on the timeline of my MacBook Pro and edit in real time using a 1k preview res at medium quality. When ready to finish you can simply switch the decoding to 4k full inside Premiere Pro and while playback performance stops dead you can colour grade in 4k and export to whatever res you need.

The real kicker in this workflow however is the ability for After Effects to directly open a Premiere Pro project file. This opens the door for After Effects with its 16-bit color space to become a very effective low-cost 4k online finishing system, leveraging all the power of After Effects' color correction tools and render queue.

At this point the Adobe workflow seems to be significantly more advanced and flexible than either that offered by Apple or Avid. But there's a big catch, the elephant in the room with Adobe's RED workflow is that neither Premiere nor After Effects seem not, at this time, to be able access the R3D metadata, nor can they read alternative looks created in REDAlert. This means that R3D's pulled onto the Premiere timeline will use the default look set in-camera on set but is unable to change this look or use any alternative looks. One can only assume that this missing component of the Adobe RED solution is a work-in-progress but for now it puts Premiere Pro potentially in the same 'close but not quite good enough' category as Apple and Avid.

Enter the cocky young upstart of NLE systems, Sony's Vegas. Despite the dominance of the three A's (Apple, Avid and Adobe) and the stubborn refusal of most editors to even consider anything outside of FCP and Avid, Vegas is the NLE that seemingly refuses to go away and continues to slowly but surely forge a solid user base.

Human history of progress has taught us time and again that profound change, innovation and adventurous experiments that lead to bold new directions almost never come from the mainstream; they almost always come from the dynamic fringe. In simple terms it's the outsiders looking in that are forced to go one better just to get attention. Indeed market economics itself demands that to attract a market share away from its establishment you must provide a distinct and compelling point of difference with your competitors.

This is where the new Vegas Pro 9 stands. Increasingly popular and holding it's own but otherwise still standing on the outside looking in - banging on the door trying to get the attention of the relaxed and comfortable established NLE folks inside. To get that attention Sony is going to have to bang very loud and the latest release of Vegas might well be a very loud bang indeed aimed squarely at RED users.

The Vegas 9 offering for RED post-production seems to follow the path Adobe identified of providing a more flexible, low-cost solution that doesn't rely on an off-line/on-line process. But in following that path Vegas seems to have gone several steps beyond where its competitors currently are at.

Vegas Pro 9 RED settings

To begin with, Vegas 9 delivers full 4k resolution support of 4096 horizontal pixels along with 2k varieties (although the problematic RED unique 3k seems to have been omitted). Like Adobe, Vegas 9 also has native support of RED R3D files so an editor can drop the R3D files straight from the hard drive onto the timeline without any form of transcoding or re-wrapping. Similarly the major strength of Vegas has always been its audio tools as it is decidedly as much a DAW as it is an NLE. When importing R3D files they can be laid on the timeline directly as multichannel audio files where any channel can be kept, removed, grouped or isolated with a single click and without any 'break-apart' functions or rendering. This is an area where both FCP and Premiere fall short.

4K project settings

Vegas has long been in possession of one of the most efficient performance scaling software engines on the market and when working with RED 4k files this efficiency really shines. Vegas can automatically scale image settings to match the system capabilities and ensure real-time playback. Our test machine was far from being a monster; just a single processor Quad-Core at 2.8GHz running a 2TB RAID with just 4GB RAM under 32-bit Windows Vista. And yet on this quite humble workstation I was easily able to edit native 4k R3D files to a full screen external DVI connected HD monitor in real-time with a more than acceptable, indeed very good, image quality. Moreover even when I placed a moderate color grade on the 4k R3D clips using Magic Bullet Looks (an app notorious for its render intensity) I was still able to get at least 20fps and peaking up to real-time. This level of performance is nothing short of astounding. When ready for finishing and accurate color correction it's a simple matter to change the Vegas preview quality settings to maximum; playback slows down but it remains very viable as a low-cost finishing system.

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