My Blog

Category: reLink reTooled

  • Saturday Night Live Film Unit Adds reLink reTooled to Workflow for Stefon’s Farewell

    When the Saturday Night Live season finale aired on May 18, the cast bid farewell to longtime Weekend Update correspondent Stefon in a sketch that used pre-recorded elements conformed on the innovative new tool reLink reTooled.

    The short was directed by Rhys Thomas and shot by Alex Buono. Editor Adam Epstein cut the piece inspired by 1967’s The Graduate using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Colorist Emery Wells of Katabatic Digital color-corrected the footage in Scratch and rendered the final material to Apple ProRes 4444 for the final conform process. The piece was shot using a combination of Arri Alexa, Red Epic, and Canon EOS 1D-C cameras.

    In previous edits, Epstein was forced to realign every shot in the Premiere Pro timeline, redo any repositions, blow-ups, and speed changes and make sure they matched the original offline cut. For the final Stefon sketch, Epstein turned to reLink reTooled, the groundbreaking tool that uses industry standard XML to relink to files of different durations and file names without the frustrations of traditional editing applications.

    With the tight timeline of SNL production and post schedule, Epstein shaved precious time off of the process by automating the relinking process and maintaining key information like speed changes and motion properties. “We’re always working up to the last minutes before air, and the final color-corrected overcut is normally the final step. Being able to automate what is often a frantic process and have spare time to focus on other details of the piece is an immense help,” he said.

    reLink reTooled can be used with programs like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro and allows editors to relink timelines with user-selectable metadata.

    Watch Stefon’s sendoff:
    http://www.hulu.com/watch/491721

    Learn more about reLink reTooled:
    http://www.retooled.net/?page_id=784

    Pricing and Availability 

    reLink reTooled is available immediately, priced at $39.99.

    reTooled.net is all about making your life easier. Tutorials in editorial, design and compositing, plus innovative new tools like reLink reTooled, maximize standard desktop applications and streamline everyday tasks. For more information, visit http://www.retooled.net.

  • Media Manager or Project Manager in conjunction with reLink reTooled – Work From Home

    Ok, so if you’ve been following the site you probably know about reLink reTooled. You know that it was created to be able to relink files of different titles and durations, for things like relinking an offline edit to a color correct.

    What you may not have realized is there is a ton of other ways to use it. In this video, we talk about using it in conjunction with Final Cut Pro 7’s Media Manager or Premiere Pro’s Project Manager. Now we all know we can use these features to archive our projects to make our project smaller. But we can also use them to be able to take our projects on the road without the overhead of all of the original media.

    So here’s the scenario, you’ve been working all day on an edit and its starting to get late. You want to finish up the edit at home, but you don’t have time to copy all of the media to an external drive. After all, a large edit could easily contain hundreds of gigabytes worth of footage. Sure, you could media manage your project so you can trim your sequence down to just a few seconds of handles to finish your edit, but how would you then get your edit relinked to your original media when you get back to the office.

    Enter reLink reTooled…

    Just remember, all of your media needs to be .mov files for this workflow to work!

  • reLink reTooled Used to Conform The Bike Maker – A Made by Hand Film

    The fifth film in a series of shorts by Made by Hand was released today. It was directed and produced by Keith “keef” Ehrlich and edited in Final Cut Pro 7 by editor Matt Shapiro. The film details the story of bike maker Ezra Caldwell and his fight with cancer.

    After doing his offline edit, Shapiro had his color correct done by Jamie O’Bradovich at Company 3, New York. He got his files transfered to Apple Prores 4444 and turned to reLink reTooled for the conform and relinking process.

    Speaking to the conform process, Shapiro said, “The reLink reTooled app was incredibly efficient and easy to use. It made our conform process run extremely smooth when finishing our most recent ‘Made By Hand’ film. I can’t tell you how much time we saved over doing this manually.”

    You can see the full site here:
    http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_bike_maker

    The film has also been featured on Gizmodo:
    http://gizmodo.com/the-story-of-the-bike-maker-who-can-hardly-ride-his-own-507533391

  • The Project that Wasn’t at NAB – reTooled.net Joins AOTG for an Interview!

    You can listen to the interview here.

     

     

    It hasn’t made it to the iTunes version yet, but check out the link to the official podcast. Rate The Cutting Room, and show your support!

    https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cutting-room/id292530207

  • reLink reTooled at AENY-Thursday April 25th

    I’m happy to announce that I’ll be doing a live demo of reLink reTooled for this month’s AENY meeting. We’ll do a few sample relinks and demonstrate how you can use reLink reTooled with your NLE to conform color corrected footage, and even how it can be used with After Effects or other compositing programs. Most importantly, I’ll be there to answer any questions you might have about the product. Be sure to get there on time, because we’ll be going on first!

    You can get the full meeting information here:

    http://aeny.org/2013/04/april-2013-meeting/

     

    Please remember to register with Eventbrite due to new security regulations:

    http://aeny13.eventbrite.com/

     

  • After Effects Render and Replace in Premiere Pro and FCP7 – Using reLink reTooled

    A lot of films, TV shows, and commercials use After Effects as their go-to motion graphics, visual effects, and compositing platform. In some workdlows, its okay to render your final out of After Effects, but personally I find that workflow too limiting. After all, how often is an edit really “locked” when your client, producer, director, etc. say that it is? And to start tweaking an editor or worse have to play back edit changes from After Effects, isn’t ideal to say the least.

    (more…)

  • Conform in your NLE with Our New Software

    Anyone who works in a facility that works with an offline and online process probably knows that the online, or conform, process has typically been handled by the big guys. Smoke, Flame, Pablo, you know, the expensive ones. (Ok, maybe Smoke isn’t THAT expensive anymore, but you get the point).

    The main reason for this is trying to relink an offline edit to your trimmed color correct files has always been a nightmare. If you were to take an offline EDL or XML into FCP7 or Premiere Pro, and try to reconnect to the clips manually, it was an insanely tedious if not impossible process. Those applications want clips to be the same length as the original, the same names, the same frame size. With a color correct, however, that won’t be the case. Maybe you did your offline edit at proxy resolution. Maybe your file names have changed. And even if none of that happened, the clips length won’t match. When you edit, you edit with long clips. Then you might use a few seconds of a several minute clip. Color correct with a few seconds of handles, and want to relink. You might also have several source clips from the same original clip, necessitating new file names.

    That is where reLink reTooled comes in. You take your offline edit and export an xml. Then open up reLink reTooled, load that XML and point it to your new media. Then you can choose your relink criteria and save out an XML that references your new media. That’s all. I’ve been using this tool for many months now, and have put it to the test on large national clients. Using a combination of FCP7 and After Effects, conforms have been simplified and transformed from the days of capturing from a D5. The whole process is intuitive and simple. But your best bet is to just watch the video and see it in action. Check out a brief teaser above and a full demonstration below.