Hi team,
I am about to work on a short film that was shot Blackmagic Raw at 12k. It is one shot at 2 minutes long that is blue screen and requires a key & Comp and some additional elements.
How am I best to work? Should I work on the 12k BRAW footage and deliver ProRes 444 for grade? Is so what settings do I choose?
Or should I convert to ProRes 444 in resolve first and work on that file in Flame?
I’m using a 2019 Mac Pro with 192gb ram and 32gb GFX card.
Cheers,
Drew
Not sure about the best workflow for you, but I would triple check with your client if they actually need 12k comps delivered. Unless it’s some special installation or something, that sounds insane. Hopefully you can size down and work at a reasonable resolution.
This might require a chat with the person doing the grade.
I would be aiming for the smallest size possible.
If it were me I would probably do a media manage / transfer using Resolve where I convert that BRAW into Arri Log-C proRes 4444.
I work a lot with Log-C and just find it familiar. I also love Arri shooting log-C into proRes but as I said your colourist might have a strong opinion on your workflow if the grade is at the end 
They are doing post zooms on the shot that go right into the image so they need to retain resolution and keep it at 12k. I think I will contact the Colorist and discuss workflow, but I like the idea of converting it to ProRes log-c.
Thanks!
Slightly offtopic but just curious how ‘good’ this 12K actually is. If you were to crop to a HD framing, does is retain enough quality to be used as such? Basically if the answer is anywhere near NO, I would go to 6K with a good filter and work from there still retaining enough quality for your post zooms.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster. 12k? That’s 42 times the amount of information in an HD frame. That could be like what 500 to 900 MB per frame? And you want to complete this work on a Mac? That’s like what…4-5Gb/s?
Do you know how long that’ll take you just to one point track something on that size/duration?
I don’t even think you’re gonna be able to denoise this clip.
I think working on 12K footage in flame is a disaster by itself but naturally it’s not the safest route :).
More stats.
Blackmagic 12K at 12888x6480 x 24fps is 1.27GB for 1 sec of ProRes4444.
Blackmagic 12K at 12888x6480 x 24fps is 7.13GB for 1 sec of 16bit EXR PIZ.
It takes me 12 seconds just to generate 24 frames of 12K color noise on a Lenovo P620 with RTX A6000, which currently benchmarks at 3 times the performance of a 2019 Mac Pro.
2 minutes of footage x 24fps = 2,880 frames.
2,880 frames x 1.27GB = 3.67TB just for your ProRes4444 2 minute source clip
A Neat Video operation takes me 3 minutes to denoise 1 second of 12k. That’s 6 hours to Denoise a 2 minute clip on a P620. If your MacPro doesn’t choke, that’s 18 hours just to denoise your clip, let alone another 3.67TB of storage to deal with before you’ve keyed a single frame.
Fuck these people for even attempting this. Do not agree to comp at 12K because production was too cheap to rent a zoom lens and/or dolly.
I also don’t agree with the concept that punching into a super high-res plate has the same look and quality as shooting physically closer at a lower resolution.
Glad Randy gave real data points to back up my nebulous description of this being an “insane” idea. Do you have a producer to manage expectations and Reality?
Lazy cinematography, IMO.
If it were me, I’d take three days upfront on this project. Take a maximum of seven frames from the original two minute shot. Resize those seven frames from 12K to 2K. Then I’d feed those before and afters into Copycat in nuke. I would train a custom Machine Learning model to do the resize and MAYBE the Denoise. Then I do all my work at 2K at the very end use the custom ML inference to resize from 2K to 12K. If you’ve been watching the Logik Lives you may have seen enough to know how to do this.
If you don’t have Nuke or the desire look into this, heck, outsource it to me and I’ll handle this for you. Send me a 10sec test clip at 12K and I’ll test it out for ya.
Yeah, I’d do the whole job at 3k and ML upscale it using Topaz or Copycat.
There is zero reason to ever work at 12k—as in there is no situation where human eyes can perceive that resolution and few lenses are sharp past 4k—other than “we are shitty at planning and do not know what we want,” and that should not be a problem VFX is looking to solve unless there is considerable money involved.
I did a job on the Panavision/r3d 8k camera and HATED IT. Production skipped the external recorder so all the plates were overly compressed & had to go through Neat video just be keyable. I can’t imagine Black Magic being better.