Red1 Workflow with FCP on a Macbookpro

[Walter Biscardi]

[Neil Fergusson] “I also imagine that my media will be stored on a 1TB GRaid 7200rpm drive connected with a Firewire800. “

I would not go into a project like this with a single 1TB FW 800 drive. eSATA at the very least and 2 drives striped together at the very least.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Russell Lasson]

[Neil Fergusson] “I am going to transcode to a special preset Red suggested which is basically a variation on the ProRess.”

So are you using Log and Transfer to ingest the footage to ProRes? Will you finish with those files or reconnect back to the RED files for finishing and color correction?

-Russ

Russell Lasson
Colorist/Digital Cinema Specialist
Color Mill
Salt Lake City, UT
http://www.colormill.net

[Neil Fergusson]

Cheers for response Walter/Russell.

After doing some research I was planning on archiving onto suitable drive (still trying to figure out if this needs to be an eSATA connection or not), then using Log and Transfer to ingest footage as ProRess 422, then do an online edit of this on Macbook Pro. Then once the cut is locked taking the project to a post house to do an online grade etc, hoping the can re-ingest the footage as the R3D media, thus giving the technical part of my brain a nice holiday away from RED technology!

We are still to talk to post houses about this. First trying to see if RED is gonna work in this offline workflow using my Macbook Pro. All this RED technology is very exciting, but there seems to be a lot of noise out on the internet about best practice etc. A little hard to cut through.

My Macbook Pro specs are;

17inch 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 2 GB 667 MKz DDR2 SDRAM.

have been thinking about putting more RAM in and maybe this might spur me onto doing it sooner rather than later.

[Joe Hedge]

Get an eSata express34 card for that expansion slot on the left side of your MBP and use eSata drives (as in, 2) to back up the raw camera files, and transcode the ProRes files to the GRaid. That way the transcodes will be on a striped RAID drive with faster bandwidth for editing, and the raw files won’t be on a striped RAID drive where if one of the drives fails, you lose everything.

[Neil Fergusson]

Hi Joe

Thanks for the reply. I currently have a 500gig Gdrive 7200 RPM SATA II drive with 32 MB cache, as well as my 1TB Drive. Will this work as one of eSATA drives you recommend for archiving the raw camera files?

Neil

[Neil Fergusson]

“then do an online edit of this on Macbook Pro” sorry i meant to say offline edit on my macbook pro.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

You can certainly edit effectively on a Macbook Pro. There are several workflows. Here is one workflow I’ve use on location. It requires R3D software from here: https://www.r3ddata.com/ Tiger Direct sells Dual Channel SATA cards for the Macbook Pro Express Slot. (Remember that the engineer who designed the SATA connectors did not have a clue they would be used like a firewire 800 external drive. The connectors and the express card can easily slip out. I’m gaffer taping the SATA cable down from now on.

1. Using R3D software create two “sum checked” backups on two separate SATA drives. On a Macbook Pro, use the firewire 800 port for the Red Hard Drive and Two SATA Drives via a two SATA port Express Card. The “sum check” guarantees the files are perfect copies.

2. At the same time a ProRez file can be created and put on either of the SATA drives or on the MacPro HD.

3. Vault the SATA Drives.

4. Edit with the ProRez files.

Like film, the asset management at the beginning is slow and time consuming. However, RED is a high end tool much like film. Film is processed, then workprinted or transferred to digital for editing. The camera original is placed in a vault. This process takes time. Same with the RED. Instead of processing and workprinting we create sum checked backups and a ProRez (or codec of your choice) workprint. It takes time. These are large file, but drives are cheap. Reshooting footage is not.

We have found DP’s who are using the RED are treating the digital assets like betacam footage or HDV footage shot on memory cards. Many of them don’t understand the workflow or why sum checked backups are needed. As a result they are asking for trouble. Additionally, a feature film completion bond company is going to require the backups. If you don’t and the drive fails, they are not going to pay for reshoots because you did not properly create two to three sum checked copies. Again, Drives and sum checks are cheap, reshooting is not.

My 2 Cents

[Walter Biscardi]

[Dennis Lisonbee] “Again, Drives and sum checks are cheap, reshooting is not. “

Yep and to that end, I just picked up a sweet little WiebeTech 2 bay tray less drive chassis so we can literally use our hard drives just like removeable media. Since there’s no trays, no screws to deal with, just slide the drive in, archive, slide the drive out.

Last night I picked up three 1TB SATA drives at Fry’s for $99 each. Drives are getting cheaper all the time and now with tray less systems, it’s even easier!

https://www.wiebetech.com/products/RTX200.php

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Neil Fergusson]

Thanks for all the advice guys.

Completely understand what your saying about having archiving/backing up drives and having fast enough connections to handle the raw red media.

Starting to realise how I might of took for granted the process of Tape (be that DigiBeta, DV, HDV etc) dupes, and Tapes in general. It easy to forgot that tapes are a permanent record of the footage and how important that is. Data is just that, Data. It has to be stored etc. (I know that all sounds very obvious, but I think a lot of people take the subtleties of it for granted)

Anyway, gonna def go with suggested workflow, using two external drives connected with eSATA on my Expresscard 34 slot. Archiving from the RED Drive the Raw media onto each of them (two archives, one to lock away, the other to have to hand incase we need to go back to Raw media files at anytime during edit). Then I’m going to transcode to ProRess 422 from that. Offline edit with that. Lock picture cut. Take it to desired Post House for online and mastering. Using one of the archived eSATA drives to link back to edit, instead of the ProRess (As I understand there are a few ways of going about this). If anything goes wrong we always have the untouched archived eSATA drive to start again from.

The R3D Data Manager looks like a very handy piece of software. Some people complained that it tripled the data transfer rate (as opposed to drag and drop) but the sumchecked transfer seems like a great idea, and allows a laptop to be as equally useful on a Low/No Budget film to more high end TV Film productions. Plus, I am always of the nature that ‘time’ is a much more manageable asset than ‘money’.

Anyway kind of gone on a bit too much,

thanks again for advice.

Neil