Workflow suggestions for Premiere Pro CS5 using RED footage

[David Brook]

Oh and I was planning on editing the 4K footage natively (but putting playback on 1/4 quality). This seems to work fine on the test I did with previous footage.

[Jon Frost]

Sounds like you would want to be networked between two workstations… or share the same drives. Don’t forget to backup all your footage to at least two drives/RAID arrays. Are you syncing your two system audio to your clips before editing?

Do you have a logical file management system in place so you have the exact same folder/file structure for both workstations to look at?

Which RED camera system did you shoot on? RED ONE, Scarlet, EPIC? How fast is your computer…. specs please. If you are able to edit OK on 1/4 quality… good for you. Is this also true of your assistant on the MacBook Pro?

It’s nice to be able to edit natively in Premiere Pro… just make sure you are editing on a COPY of your original footage in case something gets corrupted/lost.

i found it’s always a good idea to run a sample file or two through your entire workflow from production through post to output, including syncing audio to video, just to make sure your planned workflow will work as expected.

Congrats on your first RED project. Let me know how it goes.

Jon Frost

[David Mcgavran]

You might want to head over to reduser.net there are ton of helpful people in the adobe workflow section who work with red day in/out.

Cheers

Dave

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

How about this: (note, this was tested on a single computer and on CS5.5. Your Mileage on CS5 and multiple computers may vary. )

Create a new PP project. Name the project something that will eventually be a bin, lets say “Scene 1”.
Click cancel on the New Sequence settings window. You don’t want this project to contain a sequence.

Import your footage, and organize it into bins, lets say, a couple of shots into bin Scene 1A, a few shots into bin “Scene 1B” ect…

Save the project.

Now, open your Master Project. This is the project you’re doing the editing in.

Point to File> Import, and select the project file with the bins in it.

You will now have a new bin in your project called “scene 1” and bins inside that bin called Scene 1A, 1B, ect and your footage in those bins.

You can repeat this method with as small or as large chucks as you want… You could do it on a Scene by scene basis, or a shot by shot basis, or even take by take. You just need your Assistant make a new project, and that will become a bin.

Does this work for you?

[David Brook]

Fantastic, that was just what I was after – seems to work a treat.

Thanks

David

[David Brook]

Networking wouldn’t really work with the way I want to be working unfortunately, but thanks for the suggestion. And yes, we’ll be backing everything up – that’s the edit assistant’s main job, making sure that is done as soon as possible and keeping a unified file management structure on all the drives (as you mentioned). I’m not sure about audio yet – I still need to speak to the recordist to find out his plans. I’ll probably be doing the syncing myself on the main project I imagine.

It’s a RED ONE. Our Mac Pro is a few years old, so not top of the range, but still pretty decent. It’s got 2x 2.8GHz Quad-core Intel Zeon processors, 8GB RAM and has 3x ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards. I tried whacking a few clips on the timeline and chucked a couple of basic colour and crop/overlay effects on and it seemed to handle it fine at 1/4 quality. Fingers crossed it retains this once the timeline starts to fill up! The MacBook Pro wasn’t as happy though – it needed to be on 1/8, but seemed manageable. That is only really going to be used to check through footage and log it etc. though so it’s no big deal.

Yeah I’ve been running a few tests yesterday and today and so far things are working out smoothly (fingers crossed).

Thanks for all the help.

David

[John-michael Seng-wheeler]

You may need to clean up the files left over from all the projects periodically. Since you aren’t creating sequences, there won’t be render files, but there still will be autosaves and perhaps a bunch of conformed audio. Just save all the projects in some folder away from the master project so you can delete everything periodically. (Or save them in the same folder as all the video files that will be loaded into that particular project.)

[Jon Frost]

David:

Sounds like to have things well in hand. 1/4 quality is fine for editing on a slower MAC Pro. If you have the resources, you might want to bump up your DIMM to as much as you can afford and at the fastest rate DIMM for your specific machine. I just went from 12GB to 32GB for about $1K. Well worth the investment to be able to crunch video data!

[David Brook]

It’s me again. OK, I’ve got my first actual batch of RED footage to use and when I imported it this time it comes in fine, although it’s imported all the individual files from the clips including any spanned ones (and now the wrappers too since I installed REDCODE).

Is there something I’m doing wrong as I’m sure with my test footage the files conformed to single clips per clip in Premiere? Unless my test shots were all under 1 min, but I thought there were one or two longer ones in there.

It’s just a bit awkward having multiple files for each clip and I don’t know whether I’m can happily delete the extra ones or not. Each file I click on from a spanned clip plays the whole thing identically so I’m not sure what to do about it.

The only thing that noticeably went wrong on importing from the RED brick hard drive that I’m aware of is that one single file (one of the R3D ones from a spanned clip) was corrupted and would drag over to either of my hard drives, so I skipped that file in the end.

Any thoughts?

David

[David Brook]

Problem solved. I should have used the Media Browser to import footage instead of just importing or dragging and dropping it from finder.

All running smoothly now.

David