• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Optimizing MacPro 12-core for Editing Red Footage on Adobe Premiere CS6

  Posted by May Kuckro on April 11, 2013 at 4:37 pm

  Hello all –

  I’m an editor in Austin looking for advice on optimizing my current Mac Pro 12-core(5,1) for editing Red Epic footage in Premiere CS6.

  I’m prepping to cut a short film that will be shot on Red Epic and because of the budget, I’ll be essentially functioning as the DIT and the Editor.(sigh)

  First off, the MacPro. I’m looking to upgrade at a reasonable cost.
  What I’m leaning towards is:
  -Boot Drive: Mercury Accelsior_E2 120GB drive from OWC – this has 2 600 MB/s eSATA ports
  -Internal Storage: 2 2 TB Hitachi Ultrastar drives, 7200 RPM
  (grouped into a RAID 0).
  -NVIDIA Quadro 4000 Video Card

  -I’ll upgrade my 12 GB of RAM to 28 GB.

  Does this sound reasonable?

  And then Premiere – I’m an Avid and FCP 7 editor, but based on what I’m reading on-line, am thinking of switching to Premiere. I’ve heard it’s possible to edit without transcoding, but would this be possible on my MacPro with some upgrades?

  In essence, if editing with the 4k files is possible, does it allow for smooth, unrendered playback, or is it better to take the time to transcode/debayer and then do an uprez later. And is doing an uprez something that Adobe handles well? Pardon the Premiere newbie questions.

  Thanks for your time & advice.

  Best,

  May

  Angelo Lorenzo replied 13 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Angelo Lorenzo

  April 13, 2013 at 5:46 am

  Your setup seems relatively solid, but let me chime in on a few things:

  I wouldn’t worry so much about hard drive speed. If you’re doing a narrative then a single stream of 4K RED footage actually plays pretty well of something as humble as a firewire drive. I’d worry a bit about USB2. The fact you have an internal RAID is a plus.

  As far as a 12 core processor, I’m not sure if that can debayer RED footage in real time; I have a quadcore i7 and without my RED Rocket the processing time at full debayer is 20 minutes to every one minute of footage so do the math. On the other hand Premiere’s program monitor has the quality switch which works phenomenally well for playing RED footage at 1/4 or so quality if you’re getting sluggish response or dropped frames.

  Premiere pays the render tax at the end of the process, during export. If you’ll have review sessions on-site with your director then you should be fine. If you know you’ll be exporting then benchmark your system to see if you find the times acceptable.

  Without a RED Rocket, I would say you’re better off exporting proxies at half debayer quality 1080HD from Redcine-X in something like ProRes and then onlining the film during finishing. There is little reason to edit a full film in 4K, you’ll run into more things that suck time out than save you time.

  ——————–
  Angelo Lorenzo

  Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
  Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
  Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
  RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
  Fallen Empire – The Blog
  A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
  Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up