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The Red Nightmare
Hi All,
Just in the beginning stages of post on a 10-12 min short shot on the highly coveted, and entirely confusing RED Camera, I was looking for some suggestions on workflow, I’ve done quite a bit of research so far, and come up with a million different ways to do this. Firstly I am running a mac pro tower with the 2×3 ghz dual-core intel processors and 6 gb of RAM. As well as the latest version of FCP. I’ve done some tests and tried both editing with proxy files and transcoding via the log and transfer window to prores hq, when I’m cutting with the proxy’s it always plays down choppy even with unlimited rt and low quality playback turned on, the prores obviously are fine, but in the interest of saving time and space I was wondering if anyone had any tips on ingest for this footage. I’ve heard you can cut with the _M proxy files but when I try I always get the red render line and have to render before playback, after which it plays down fine, with no choppiness, but rendering each clip for a short of this length would be a pain in the ass, so I’d rather not do that, also we are not going back to film, most likely we’re looking at an HD output maybe to HD cam SR, but the director and DP would like to do the color correct with the raw files in order to get the best image quality, not sure if I’ll be doing that or if they’re going to pay for it to get done at a facility. So I know that’s a mouthful, but if anyone has had experience using the prores then conforming at the end it would be helpful to hear your feedback on how it worked for you.Thanks to anyone who can help,
Ben -
31 Replies
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The footage is being stored on a g drive firewire 800 connection, which I’ve heard can work ok, a Raid is ideal unfortunately I don’t own one as most of the post work I do is not out of my house, and I doubt the director wants to spring for one. Of the tests I’ve done it seems to spin fast enough to handle the footage. Do you think this is a horrible idea? Should I push for a RAID?
Thanks,
Ben -
Two things, Ben…
First, the memory you have installed is mismatched. This will cause lots of issues with realtime support and unnecessary rendering. In a Mac Pro system, you should have at least 4 gig of RAM and then install in multiples of four (4, 8, 16, 32). Next, you just can’t install any memory that’s rated for the Mac Pro, you really need for these to be all of the same memory from the same manufacturer. For now as a test for you, remove 2 1-gig bars and make sure that the memory is spanned across the risers evenly.
Secondly… Use an external SATA for editing material such as this. Adapter cards are decently priced and the drives are much higher performance. One drive I would suggest for this – Sonnet Fusion F2 drive.
Give this a shot and life will be easier.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
In my book you should always be cutting in ProRes with RED. The proxy cutting method is a dicey balance of immediacy and cross-fingered RT trickery. ProRes however is a very solid codec for editing. Plus it plays wonderfully over FW800 from a GRaid.
On top of all that, ProResHQ from RED is exceptionally good looking compression and could possibly be used for finishing if the money and time runs out (it never does that, does it?).
The re-conform process from Log and Transfer from ProRes back to RED is super easy. Just follow the white paper on RED’s support page.
I can’t comment on 6 vs 8 RAM… but you absolutely should have matching RAM manufacturers. Any slight mismatch in speed is going to cause hiccups.
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Wayne,
Thanks for your input, the G drive has a sata port on it, I’ll just have to buy an adapter for my Mac, that’s a good idea. As far as the ram goes, this version of the Mac Pro only holds 8gb, and I was told that I could install in pairs ie two 512 or 2 1gb cards so the ram would be evenly distributed, since the computer only came with 2gb standard I thought it wise to upgrade to 6 since these came in pairs and they are distributed evenly across my ram boards. As far as manufacturer goes I was under the impression that you could get ram as long as you were installing the same kind ie ddr2 fb-dimm and that would be fine as well, have I received some bogus info? Really I just wanted some input on whether people have had success cutting in prores since this works fine on the drive even with firewire 800, and going back to the raw for cc which I wouldn’t do at home anyway since I don’t have an external monitor. Any tips would be appreciated.
Thanks, Ben
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Dave,
Ha, yeah that might help huh? Actually the prores play fine with no choppiness even playing off the g drive using firewire 800, I’m going to buy a sata adapter and see if that helps as well. Really I was interested in feedback from people who’ve cut RED footage in ProRes and then conformed at the end using apple’s log and transfer tool, since I wouldn’t do the color correct at home anyway since I’ve no external monitor, I think we’ll have to go somewhere else which hopefully will have a system capable of handling the 2k files. Thanks for your help.Ben
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Thanks Aaron,
I appreciate the feedback, I guess prores is the better way to go, and from what I’ve read in RED’s whitepaper and online in forums and whatnot, it seems that this is the most reliable method, also being that the footage raw is only a little over 300gb and I’ve got a lot of drivespace I think the prores space issues won’t really matter. The RAM is from the same mfg except what the computer came with, which is probably apple stock ram whatever they put in to ship it. But it is absolutely the same kind and I’ve never had issues with speed before even cutting HD uncompressed stuff, as well as some fairly processor intensive rendering in after effects.Thanks again,
Ben -
[Ben Baudhuin] ” have I received some bogus info? “
I wouldn’t say that…. But FCP has very different requirements than everything else on the Mac. So, I would suggest going back to 4 gig for now, and then upgrading to a full 8 gig.
By the way, the Mac Pro can go as high as 16 gig when you purchase 2 gig RAM bars.
As for cutting in ProRes 422… We’ve done this alot when dealing with HDV footage and everything seems to work fine on the Mac Pro system. We have two systems just like yours.
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Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
Wayne,
Thanks a bunch for all your input, so does fcp only read multiples of 4 ram then? I wasn’t aware of that, I guess I’ll just get the 8 for now, the stuff’s so cheap anyway, but I’ve heard that maxing out your RAM board can be bad as well, any truth to that? From what I’ve heard ProRes is the way to go, and I think I’ll just have to deal with the transcode time not a big deal as we’re not really under a time crunch with this film.Thanks again for your help,
Ben -
Yeah, it sounds like a bummer and most of the folks at Apple don’t know this one… But here’s the Apple tech doc on this.
https://support.apple.com/kb/TS1957?viewlocale=en_US
_______________________________
Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
https://web.mac.com/schazamproductions
schazamproductions@mac.com -
Follow this workflow, note he’s talking about transcoding with RedRushes in step 1.
https://www.indie4k.com/archives/110
Also you might consider transcoding everything in RR at Full Res Debayer to ProResHQ, scaled to 2k or 1080, Resample Filter set to Lanczos (Sharp), and editing/color correcting those, instead of going back to the R3D’s for CC. That way you get the advantage of 4k files downsampled to 2k, at full res debayer, but at 10 bit color. You only get Half Res High debayers (see System Preferences>RedCode) rendering out of Apple Color, so by CC’ing the transcodes, you would be trading the greater color information in the R3D’s for the better debayering in the ProResHQ’s.
Test both the above workflows on a single clip, and you might find that the full res debayers actually look better.
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