Welcome to a behind the scenes look at Desire, a short video project created to tell a story using only macro shots.
Preproduction
A month or so ago, I was tasked with a brand new challenge: Make a video about sex… for a church… that’s not a joke, or takes the topic lightly. It took me a week or so of pondering, but the resulting concept, I think, was pretty cool. Most of the preproduction work was done for us, as the project follows very closely a video that inspired me a several years ago. So in essense, our preproduction was already done for us. The biggest challenge was reverse-engineering the shots. I’d never worked with macro shots that were close enough to make the human eye fill the entire frame.
Production
The entire project was a relatively quick turnaround, which actually worked out because all of it was filmed in a single location. The trick was trying to convey different locations and moods, almost entirely with lighting.
Postproduction
This project was one of the first (professional) projects I cut in Davinci Resolve. My experience was nearly seamless coming from Premiere Pro. Didn’t have to search for much, and instantly fell in love with the tab system. Overall, had a great experience with this project and it’s probably my favorite of 2019. Check out the final below!
If you’re wondering how to edit r3d on linux, you’ve come to the right place. This post is inspired by an official, yet very under-the-radar release of something called REDline Linux released back in mid 2018. As a fan of Linux as well as continuing my quest to discover a complete replacement for the Adobe Creative Cloud, I ran into this question: Can Linux handle R3D raw? After just a little bit of research, I discovered that ffmpeg can actually decode an early version of the R3D codec! The downside is, as of the writing of this article, ffmpeg isn’t capable of decoding the latest version of the R3D codec. However, this could change if someone comes along and reverse engineers the new R3D codec.
Yet the question still remains. How can I work with RED footage and use Linux at the same time? Enter Resolve. (Opinion alert!) Blackmagic Design has positioned themselves in a way that could completely dethrone the current king of postproduction software, Adobe. Adobe makes a great suite of programs. One of the biggest advantages they have is that their software can not only ingest and work with project files from other software within the suite, but it also does this seamlessly across Mac and Windows. For example, I can save a Photoshop project on a Mac, and open that same Photoshop file inside of After Effects on Windows (and still have access to all of the Photoshop layers). The biggest disadvantages of Adobe CC is that it’s a fairly expensive monthly subscription model that doesn’t support Linux.
Blackmagic Resolve
Blackmagic Resolve has been the industry standard for color correction for a very long time. Recently, Blackmagic Design revamped Resolve to be able to handle much more than just color correction. In a lot of situations, Resolve can be a sort of one-stop-shop for all you postproduction needs, providing basic edits, basic audio workflow, and some basic VFX. The biggest news is that Resolve is free to download, and upgradable to the full version for a one-time purchase of $300. So after your first 6 months, you’re already saving money over the standard Adobe CC subscription.
Anyway, point being, Resolve is quickly becoming the powerhouse one-stop solution for professional post video. Handling R3D files is as simple as importing them off your RED mini mag, opening up Resolve, and grabbing them from inside the Media Pool tab. Pretty much like using the Media Browser inside Premiere Pro. Except better.
R3D in, TIFF out
From there, you can make the edits you need and export to whatever format you want, even image sequences like TIFF and others. What’s more, is that you don’t have to convert your footage with FFMPEG or something similar before importing. You can just import raw R3D without a hitch. Happy editing and Blendering!
Janne Liljeblad and other contributors released Flowblade 2.0 recently and I thought I’d try it out. I edited a quick 1 minute video from about 10 drone clips shot in 4k. The first impressive feature was how easily I was able to render proxies. It was just as easy to replace them with the original media before the render.
As both a Premiere user and a Linux user, I’ve been on a quest to find an NLE that is just as capable and intuitive as Premiere, but on Linux. So far, I’ve used only a few and had just ‘okay’ experiences. My first Linux based NLE that I dove headfirst into was Kdenlive. I was cutting some footage for a client and built out the complete project in Kdenlive for a few reasons. First and foremost, at the time, I no longer had access to Adobe CC through a former employer. And finally, even if I had $53/mo, I could think of 1,000 things I’d do before I got an Adobe CC subscription.
But I digress, this is a post about Flowblade. My experience with Kdenlive was fine, the hotkeys took some getting used to. The alpha channels weren’t automatic either, but it worked. Flowblade, however gave me a much more ‘automatic’ experience. I’m on an older mid-range GTX-970 machine and 4k footage doesn’t playback smoothly. Regardless, it felt like proxies were easier to create in Flowblade than in Premiere. Just a few clicks and it was done. Updated right there in my timeline. And encoding was a breeze. Once I made my edits, which was a pleasure by the way, All I had to do was choose “replace proxies with original media” and I was all set to render.
Intuitive Experience
There were several hotkeys that carried over from Premiere and others that just made sense. The i and o keys set in and out points, the HOME and END key pops your playhead to the beginning and end of your timeline, stuff like that. The alpha transparency and title card system took some getting used to, but it wasn’t that bad. I feel like color correction is slightly easier in Flowblade than in Kdenlive. That’s just my experience, and the clips I happen to be working on.
Overall, I still can’t completely commit to Flowblade, even though it’s a pretty great application for basic edits. If I were a vlogger and just needed something to spit out videos with speed, I’d definitely use Flowblade for everything. And even as a pro editor, I still may use Flowblade for some quick edits here and there, based on the situation. But as long as Resovlve remains an option for Linux users, it no doubt offers the absolute best postproduction experience so far. The grades are otherworldly. I’ve never had so much control over color. Not even in Premiere. Lumetri Color doesn’t even compete with Resolve.
So far, my only issue with resolve is it can’t take Panasonic .MTS files by default, they have to be transcoded first. And that just may be a “free version” limitation, I’m not sure. Either way, I’m just a few freelance jobs away from picking up a full copy of Resolve for my personal Linux machine, so I’ll keep you posted if my experience changes once I get everything up and running. Until next time.
It all started when Premiere Pro started glitching out. When I was trying to import a simple image sequence, like I’d done a thousand times before, it only imported the first 25% of the frames. Everything else was missing. There was no inconsistency in the file naming convention. Everything was sequential. There were no missing frames. Premiere is just glitchy.
The Workaround
I came up with an idea for a workaround. Instead of importing an image sequence, what if I just concatenated all those image files into a ProRes MOV? That way I can just drop the whole thing into Premiere with no problems. I tried to get Adobe Media Encoder to do that, but it wasn’t the most intuitive experience of my life. Every time I tried to import a sequence, it only gave me the first frame, and ended up rendering frame 1 over the entire length of the sequence. Solution? FFMPEG.
What is FFMPEG?
Ffmpeg is a command line application that allows you to manipulate images, video, and audio. It does take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it is WELL worth the time you put in to learn the basics of the application. I do want to emphasize just the basics, as ffmpeg and all of its options are pretty vast.
As a 3D artist and animator, I deal a lot with image sequences. Unfortunately Premiere and other NLEs can sometimes glitch out and not give you what you want when you import a sequence. FFMPEG allows you to concatenate a series of images and encode those frames into a single video file with a codec and container of your choosing.
If you have other open source video applications like VLC player or Handbrake, you might already have ffmpeg installed on your system. You can check by running this in the terminal:
ffmpeg -version
If you don’t have it, you can get it easily by running:
sudo apt install ffmpeg
Now that you’ve got ffmpeg, you can do TONS of stuff with it. There’s a giant list of commands or you can check out the man page:
man ffmpeg
You can convert video files as simply as:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi
The Tricks
ffmpeg is used to initialize the program, -i is used to set your input file(s), and you can add more options like scale, fps, codecs, bit rates, and more with a long list of options available. For my purposes, I usually want to take a folder full of .png files and convert them into an MOV file for editing. For that, I can just ‘cd’ into the folder containing all my .png frames, and run something like:
Let’s break that down. The -f tack lets you indicate a format. To see all available formats, just run:
ffmpeg -formats
It’s worth noting that formats are different than codecs. To view the massive list of codecs available in ffmpeg, just run:
ffmpeg -codecs
Easy, right? Next we told ffmpeg to grab all the .png files in the current working directory matching the pattern we defined. In my example, all my files were named cyclesShotFour_0001.png, cyclesShotFour_0002.png, etc. There’s quite a few ways to define a pattern, and you can learn more here. Once ffmpeg has all your images defined, all you need to set your framerate and other stuff you may want and you’re good to go! Tack -framerate defines your framerate. At the end, just type the name of your output file. That’s it!
Some of the other options that wasn’t mentioned in the above example, that I use quite frequently is setting the bitrate and the codec. The tacks for those options are -b:v (bitrate for video) -b:a (bitrate for audio) -c:v (codec for video) -c:a (codec for audio). So let’s say I want to encode a bunch of .jpg files into a Apple ProRes MOV file. Clearly, the output won’t have audio, so we don’t have to specify any audio options.
Anway, there are tons of different things you can do with ffmpeg, and it’s an absolutely amazing tool. It saved my butt just last week! Have fun and keep learning.
If you’re like me, you’ve been on a quest to find the best video editing software that you can run on your Ubuntu Linux PC build. If you’ve been in the video world for any amount of time, you’ll probably know that Resolve 15 is arguably one of the most robust tools in the industry. Here’s my experience on running DaVinci Resolve 15 on Ubuntu 18.04
After the initial install, everything seemed to have went fine, but when I clicked the new icon in my application tray… nothing happened. After a few more clicks, I uninstalled it and went on with my life. A few months later, DaVinci Resolve came up in conversation when talking about postproduction solutions for Linux. So I decided to give it another shot. Same issue.
Unfortunately, in Linux_Installation_Instructions.PDF there is literally nothing telling you that you should install dependencies. I ended up finding the required dependencies somewhere online.
After that simple line in the terminal, Resolve fired right up in Ubuntu 18.04 On to the next hurdle: limited file type imports.
Convert footage using FFMPEG.
Only some file types work with Davinci Resolve 15. The ones I’ve tested that work are:
Apple ProRes (.mov)
Motion JPEG (.mov)
If you can afford the space, I’d choose Apple ProRes before anything else. Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to specify 4:2:2, 4:4:4, or HQ preferences. It’s just ProRes, and from the looks of it, it’s the highest quality possible. You may be able to change this with the -q value. Still testing this.
In my 10+ years as a video editing professional, I have never used the motion jpeg codec. However, after running a few tests, playback in Resolve 15 is flawless, and the file size is the same, if not slightly smaller than the original file. My original test file was a Panasonic .MTS file clip at 1.7GB. After the transcode to motion jpeg, the result was 1.6GB, and played perfectly inside Resolve.
The further I tested this transcode setting in ffmpeg, this reduced the file size just a little bit. The biggest clips were originally 4.3GB and the resulting files were hanging out around 2.3GB-2.7GB.
The only way to truly test if this is a viable alternative to Adobe CC on Mac or Windows is to actually test it on a live project with a real deadline. This may have been unwise, but I found it to be thoroughly worth it. I tried the above ffmpeg commands, only to realize after exporting that the resulting transcodes were sub-par. Pixelated garbage in, pixelated garbage out. So this time I hit up Handbrake. This one got me. Handbrake is essentially ffmpeg under the hood, but it doesn’t offer all the options that the command line does. So my exports out of Handbrake looked great, but there was no audio supported. On Ubuntu, Davinci Resolve only supports PCM audio, and that’s the one thing you can’t kick out of Handbrake (at least from the options I have).
New Plan
The original exports from my ffmpeg commands above looked like garbage, but the audio (pcm_s24le) was supported and sounded fine. So I ended up exporting Mpeg4 video out of Handbrake with no audio. I synced those clips up with the existing PCM audio in Resolve, and everything looked and sounded awesome. Next objective, getting an H.264/AAC file out of the free version of Resolve.
Instead, I exported 20-30 minute bits of my 3 hour long timeline as Quicktime MOV files with MPEG4 codecs. They looked and sounded great, but were a touch big on the file size. Next. I just dropped them in order into Shotcut, and encoded the whole thing as H.264/ACC. Done. So for future reference, it probably wouldn’t hurt to just encode everything as Quicktime ProRes PCM, do my work in Resolve, then export QT ProRes PCM as an intermediate, then concatenate in Shotcut or Kdenlive. Kind of a wonky workaround for now, until I can afford the full version.
Notes about the free version of Resolve 15
The editing capabilities of the free version are quite nice, but they clamp down your options when it comes to exporting. First cheap shot: they don’t support H.264 encoding on export for Ubuntu. And at the time of this writing, DNxHD and DNxHR both cause Resolve to crash upon export. So without H.264 and DNxHD/HR… your export options become extremely limited. This is especially true if you have a long (3 hour) timeline that you need to deliver to a client. So is there a workaround? Fortunately there is one, but it requires a bit of hard drive space, extra time, and some FFMPEG knowledge. First, trying kicking out your timeline with these goofy settings:
I thought a Kakadu was a bird…
Here’s the gigantic and disheartening list of features that they hold back from the free version. Also, here’s another magic setting that seems even smaller than Kakadu:
Project Complete
I eventually exported the video in about 10 different sections, using MPEG4 encoded Quicktime MOV files. Decent quality, and decent file size. I ended up assembling all those color graded and sound-edited files in Shotcut and rendering the H.264 MP4 that I was looking to deliver in the first place. A super wonky workflow, but in hindsight, I think it will be worth picking up a copy of Lightworks for my edit work Resolve Studio for my color work, and cutting audio in Resolve’s Fairlight, or if Fairlight absolutely cannot handle the task at hand, I can always grab a copy of Ardour. Those softwares paired with Blender, Kritia, Inkscape, and GIMP, I don’t think there’s anything I’d be missing from Adobe CC that these platforms can’t provide.
