Recommended MacBook Pro Specs for working with Red

[Angelo Lorenzo]

A few things, as I don’t tout myself an expert in keeping up with Apple’s hardware offerings (I really only research the market when I upgrade, but I’m sure others will chime in), I won’t get into deep detail.

RED footage is difficult to work with because of the debayering process. Most camera sensors work from a debayer pattern; a specific combination of red, green, and blue pixels that are, for engineering purposes, not even in number which have to be sampled in a way to create an actual color image. You have two options: You work with footage at a lower debayer quality (1/4 debayer quality, will make the footage appear that it has lower resolution, but for editing this is rarely an issue unless you have to review critical focus) or you can get a Thunderbolt enclosure and a very expensive RED Rocket card. The RED Rocket offloads the debayering process from your computer’s processor, allowing you 1/1 quality playback, but runs around $5,000.

RED footage playback is not improved any way by the Mercury Playback Engine’s use of Cuda or (I guess this is new) OpenCL/GL. Adobe uses code supplied by RED, and the debayer process is too complicated for a GPU.

If you aren’t getting a RED Rocket card then the best investment is a beefier CPU.

I would look into an external drive or two, either Firewire (footage review, simple edits with one lane of video) or Thunderbolt for more complicated edits. New MacBooks will need a Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter, I think they run about $20-$30

A normal internal drive will be too slow (or at least headache inducing, I assume 5400 RPM) and a solid state drive won’t have enough space to be useful.

Angelo Lorenzo
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

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Angelo Lorenzo] “RED footage playback is not improved any way by the Mercury Playback Engine’s use of Cuda”

Yes it is. Where did you hear this?

[Tero Ahlfors]

OK, I tested it and normal playback performance stays pretty much the same so Angelo was correct. BUT! It does help if you use effects or have multiple tracks on like split screens etc.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Tero, you have me there. The playback engine does still help with the normal stuff, I should have made that more clear 🙂

Angelo Lorenzo
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

[Angelo Lorenzo]

To point to a reason, Adobe uses RED’s SDK (developer tools and code) to handle RED footage, and RED does not move any functionality to the GPU.

A gap in my knowledge is that the RED rocket actually assists with wavlet decompression. A misnomer since the quality selection is marked as debayer quality… *sigh* (Techy nerd stuff)

The consensus on the RED forums is that the RED Rocket is purpose built and still far more efficient at the task than any GPU on the market today or in the near future. https://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?86738-Can-we-please-please-please-have-some-NVIDIA-ADOBE-RED-love is worth looking through.

Angelo Lorenzo
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