playback stops on its own with RED footage

[Dom Silverio]

Try changing the Source Settings, in particular the quality of the playback (resolution, debayer, etc).

If that does not work, see if a different version of the R3D plugin can fix it.

[Shane Ross]

Playing back Red Raw requires a lot of processing power. Is your computer up to the task? What are your system specs? What version of Avid MC are you running? Might also be related to why you can’t transcode the footage…which would be recommended. I wouldn’t try to edit Red native footage.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Joshua King ortiz]

Hi guys,

I tried Dom’s suggestion in the Source Settings and it didn’t work.

I have a 2012 Mac Pro with dual Xeon 6-Core 3.33GHZ CPUs, an Nvidia GTX 1080ti, 64GB RAM, PCI-e SSD system drive…it should be handling at least one r3d stream no problem. Premiere handles RED footage on this same system without a hitch. And, even though Avid’s playback performance is significantly worse than Premiere’s with codecs other than DNx or ProRes, it still shouldn’t be this bad. It literally plays for about 3 seconds and stops playing.

I think it has something to do with Quicktime and/or RED’s AMA plugin. The activity monitor on the Mac also has an alert saying Quicktime OPServer (Not Responding) whenever I open Avid.

I’ll try Dom’s suggestion of re-installing the RED AMA plugin and let you know if that works.

Thank you for the help!

Joshua King Ortiz
Editor/Shooter

https://vimeo.com/joshuakingortiz
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4298076/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-king-ortiz-6b880379/

[Joshua King ortiz]

oh, and the version of Media Composer is the 2019.8.0 and yeah, it has to be related my other problem of not being to transcode RED footage either.

Thank you guys!

Joshua King Ortiz
Editor/Shooter

https://vimeo.com/joshuakingortiz
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4298076/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-king-ortiz-6b880379/

[Shane Ross]

Try going back to 2018.12.x…see what happens. Some people reporting sporatic issues with 2019. OR…go to 2019.11…sure to have bug fixes.

And just because PPro plays back native footage fine, doesn’t mean Avid will. Completely different engines in them.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Michael Phillips]

Sometimes that means the hard drive can’t keep up either. What drive type and connection are you using? Can you move one of the files to another hard drive and try again?

Do they play with any other player such as Red’s own player or RedCineX Pro, Resolve, Premiere Pro, etc?

Michael

[Joshua King ortiz]

Hi guys,

So, I updated to 2019_11 like Shane suggested and it helped solve the playback problem. It still stops on its own at times, but it works much, much better, specially when I turn on proxy mode in the Settings and bring down the playback resolution to Best Performance in the timeline. I can get several layers going if needed with that setup.

Tried transcoding (which was the other big problem I was running into with RED footage) and I’m still getting an error (Exception: AMAProducerTask::Execute: AMA Plug-In Unable to Provide Sample) halfway through transcoding the first clip. Any suggestions regarding that?

To answer Dom’s questions, the drive is a 4-bay 16TB USB 3 RAID and yeah, they play flawlessly in Resolve and Premiere…and now in Avid too ☺

Thank you for your help guys and let me know if you have any ideas on how to solve the transcoding error.

Joshua King Ortiz
Editor/Shooter

https://vimeo.com/joshuakingortiz
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4298076/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-king-ortiz-6b880379/

[Joshua King ortiz]

Hi guys,

So, I installed 2018.12.8 and it still not allowing me to transcode within Media Composer.

Is there some kind of setting that might be causing this? I’m trying to move back to Media Composer, but all of the problems I’m encountering (transcoding and playback issues with RED and Blackmagic footage mainly) is deterring me.

Thank you,

Joshua King Ortiz
Editor/Shooter

https://vimeo.com/joshuakingortiz
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4298076/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-king-ortiz-6b880379/

[Michael Phillips]

I’ll try some files myself later today, but what camera version or other info can you give on your RED files? My test files are at least a year old and some are older. I can download some from RED as needed.

There are a few issues to track here and they are slightly different. Avid’s AMA strategy is to let camera manufacturers and third parties (like Nablet for Sony) create codec support as needed. In the case of BRAW, Blackmagic’s camera team develops the AMA plug-in. In the case of RED, it is AVID who creates the AMA plug-in based on their SDK and will update from time to time as new versions of RED’s SDK get released. It should also be noted that Avid’s implementation does not offer the full feature set or all of the parameters available to them.

So in the RED R3D scenario, it is an Avid controlled pipeline and filing a bug with support “may” help get to the bottom of the issue faster.

In the case of BRAW, it’s sort of middle ground at this point – the codec clearly decodes the file as you can play them. They updated the plug-in to properly handle the timecode, but now it doesn’t transcode. Transcode is on the Media Composer side of things – as far as I know, a third party cannot control that part of the process. So there is an issue between the decode handoff and the transcode process which could be a BMD issue, an Avid issue, or both. Now as a customer of both, you’re stuck in the middle while two customers who are partners, as well as competitors, work it out.

In order to get up and running now, the only solution is to use Resolve for BRAW transcoding to make your DNx versions for editorial – and optionally the same for RED RAW. Or you could use RedCineX Pro to create DNx media. In both cases, you have access to all the parameters for color/exposure/gamma management at your disposal.

I’ll update as I try RED files in latest version of 2019.

Michael

[Michael Phillips]

I just did a quick check on RED R3D SDK versions available from the RED development page and the version declared in the Avid RED AMA from the Avid AMA download page and the latest Avid RED AMA version is listed as 7.0.7. According to the RED development page, the latest version is 7.1.0. The previous version is 7.0.8 which was released 7/20/2018, meaning 7.0.7 is almost a year out of date.

This may or may not be a factor, but certainly being a year out SDK wise for any camera/codec updates released since that time could be a factor.

Michael