Dual Res All the Time
Adding to yesterday’s post about things Avid could do to improve it’s editing applications, let’s take a look at how we up-res a show.
It seems to me that the duplicate/decompose/redigitize workflow that we use now is very much “Version 1.” It’s flexible, sure, but all that flexibility adds up to a lot of complexity, too. And in the world of feature films, where we inevitably continue to make picture changes after a first conform, the decompose process gets even more complicated.
I want the system to take all the bookkeeping out of this and transparently keep track of two parallel sets of media, allowing me to use whichever resolution is appropriate. The key is that you work with one and only one version of your sequence. The system connects it, as needed, to the low-res media or the high-res media. You can make picture changes either way. If you’re looking at the high-res media and want to extend a shot, the system knows that the extension doesn’t exist at high res and uses low-res media as needed. When you’re ready to conform, it automatically asks for the needed tapes and loads whatever extensions are needed.
Now wouldn’t that be a whole lot easier than what we do now?
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Splice Now 
April 27, 2007 at 9:34 am
I remember that DS used to do this amazingly well. You could have a source clip which could have the entire duration as low res compressed and only sections of it (that you’d used in sequences) as full res uncompressed. If you captured additional sections at full res, it would automatically get filled in on the original source clip. Really really slick.
April 27, 2007 at 10:49 am
DS still does this. It’s great! you can also set the option to tell you the media is offline instead of showing you the low res version if you working on your final conform up-ressed sequence.
April 27, 2007 at 8:20 pm
This is slated to be a feature of FCP6.X and Redcode RAW footage. Through Jetson-level technical magics, the full-res 4K data will live on a master hard drive, and your system will be served up an approriately down-resed feed for offline editing, on the fly , making up-resing, as it were, obsolete.
If they actually get this working, damn. Now all I need is a robot monkey butler to bring me drinks while I cut.