I recently toured Light Iron Digital during the "Advanced Post Production" section of Reducation. LI, who graded Social Network, Atlas Shrugged and Pirates IV work on the Pablo which is a $300,000 investment. Michael Cioni, who founded the company, highly recommended for us mere mortals to look into DaVinci Resolve. I think my new workflow is going to be PP CS5 -> Resolve. Both are very Red friendly, inexpensive and powerful. Well, powerful enough for me.
Here's the teaser for our new short by the way
Congrats for the teaser. It gave me the desire to see the movie.
I agree with Resolve, highly recommended, to take into consideration with their new prices politics. I think there are 2 very interesting softwares for grading at a good price, DaVinci and Scratch. Both are very good with Red (we also shouldn't forget that Scratch was the most Red files integrated at the beginning, in fact the only one for a time, and where working hand-in-hands with Red company). It's more than enough for 99% of the projects.
For the ones on Mac, I strongly recommend to give a serious look at Smoke. The reason is that Smoke is in fact a sort of all-in-one application. Not really hyper specialized in anything but highly featured in everything. What it does it does it really well and the fact is that it does a lot of things. The cost is way more affordable than a Flame unit for ex (costs a MF back), and once you learn the workflow you are trained in most Autodesk applications, without talking about the absolute compatibility with their others products highly present in the cine industry.
Really, Smoke is putting me a mess in my workstation because it's time for me to upgrade the computers and I'm thinking if I should not come back Mac just because of Smoke. I won't even have to deal with naughty FCP, you don't need it anymore with the Autodesk application. So I'm thinking, and thinking, and thinking...without being able to decide...my life would have been much more simple without Smoke!
It's to the point that I've been following discutions on Creative Cow and Red users forum and many Smoke users stopped using FCP but edit now directly in Smoke, from the beginning to the finishing, specially the Red users.
To me there are really 4 softwares that I could call "bang-for-the-buck" wich are Smoke, Scratch, DaVinci, Nuke. I don't mention After Effects because IMO, being a very good software, it is a layer based and not a nodal based, and very plug-in dependant. But the price of Adobe is really unbeatable. IMO, for a commercial studio with some reputation, like some of this forum members, AE could be used to not occupate more powerfull units with peripherical tasks but there is no question that if there is volume and-or time and 4K is important, the solutions are in those 10.000 / 30.000 € units.
I agree that Premiere is very friendly user, and that can be really important. Autodesk is not friendly user, or more exactly, it is very complex and the learning curve is serious. I must confess that the fact that I don't have family obligations allows me to dedicate more time in the learning (sacrifying many pleasures) but I'm aware that it can be a real barrier for a lot of people with less time available and it could simply be out of question unless they want a divorce or overstress healph problems. So friendly-user, intuitive, not absorbing software is indeed an important factor.
I can't comment on the DaVinci interface in use, but Scratch is very user-friendly I must say. Probably one of the best thought interface I've ever experienced for the task involved. In fact, some people in the industry warned me about the complexity (more exactly the mess) of Scratch but better trying always by one self and listen only the most experienced people because indeed everyone has an idea about everything. I didn't experienced this "unfriendly learning curve", on the contrary. Michael Cioni's advice is obviously a reliable source and his DaVinci's advice has to be taken seriously. I think he is a member of Red users.
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/China-post-production-digital-intermediates-workflowAnyway, what is sure is that you can't go wrong with DaVinci and I think the workflow you decided is consistent and will really work brillantly except if you are going or planning to do a lot of 3D or FX (like for advertising spots) wich in those cases most will delegate anyway to fx studio.
http://aimediaserver4.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=ai4/scratch/scratch.swf&width=475&height=307