[Aaron Neitz]

Thanks Richard. Excellent places for me to start. Definitely want to keep the entire audio budget under $1000 – which I would think could get us decent gear for our immediate needs.

[Aaron Neitz]

Sage advice.

It’s too late since you’re already engaged in the project, but like I said the RED white paper for FCP is VERY informative and shows you exact workflows depending on your final needs.

I honestly see ZERO need for the ProResProxy – and it’s the big unknown to me. Maybe it’s buggy? Decent firewire storage is cheap, just transcode everything to old school ProRes or ProResHQ and follow the proven workflows. Maybe your laptop doesn’t have enough horsepower to RT 3k ProResProxy with 2K ProRes?

[Aaron Neitz]

2:1 is the most common way people shoot RED (the sensor is native 2:1). So you typically end up with ProRes files that are 2048×1152. So you should be ideally working in a 2048×1152 ProRes timeline.

What other resolutions did they shoot?

It could very well be ProResProxy that’s causing problems. I’ve personally never transcoded to anything but ProResHQ.

[Aaron Neitz]

Log and Xfer IS slow…. FCP can only use a couple cores. But why not just start a L&T batch and let it run overnight? It makes great looking ProRes that can be easily re-tracked to the original RED for finishing.

Or you can start editing right now using the QT proxy (H,M,L) files that are generated within each RED shot folder. There’s a great white paper included with the RED for FCP installation file on the RED website that walks you through how to set this up. You’ll have Orange render status – not red. Try setting your sequence to Unlimited RT?

Red Rushes is multi-core aware so you can blast through RED. But then you need to develop a workflow strategy to get back to RED. However with the intrduction of ProRes4444 I don’t see any reason you’d WANT to go back. RED is pretty noisy stuff to begin with….

[Aaron Neitz]

…here’s a question:

my designer doesn’t have FCP. But can he get ProRes4444 as a codec to render to? He renders from After Effects CS4.

[Aaron Neitz]

Oh man! – no more Animation+Alpha from After Effects/Nuke/Maya/Whatever. Now we can get high quality renders to the editor that will matte over video with realtime results. No more renders!

This is great for greenscreen elements, graphics, text, and CGI.

[Aaron Neitz]

I assume the 59.95 tape is 1080i? In which case it’s most likely your 23.98 timeline with 3:2 pulldown added and 29.97 fps timecode.

So do they want a new clean 23.98 timeline created? Or are they cool keeping things in 1080i/59.94?

Either way your first step would be to use Cinema Tools to turn a 23.98 EDL from FCP into a 29.97 EDL. That will capture all the pieces. Add some healthy handles to the recapture so you can roll clips around a bit. It’s never perfect.

Now if they want clean 23.98 again you’ll have to spend some time reverse telecine-ing each clip.

[Aaron Neitz]

That’s EXACTLY the graphic card in two of our MacPro’s that had the same problem.

You’ve gotta upgrade that card. It can’t handle the realtime 2K prores proxy conversion so you can see an image in your FCP windows. Nothing else is wrong – the data is all safe – Apple’s Nvidia drivers are shit.

You can re-process all the RED footage in RedRushes as 1080 ProRes quicktimes. Those will work. Or get an ATI card for your Mac.

it totally sucks. we were in exactly the same jam… had editing machines that worked great until we got into those red 2k files

[Aaron Neitz]

What video card does your Mac have? Do you see these effects if you open the ProRes quicktimes in quicktime player?

I ask because recently doing a 2k RED job I saw VERY similar problems on our junk nvidia cards…. but not our boxes with ATI

[Aaron Neitz]

m2t is basically HDV. You can transcode to that codec if you want to keep things fairly equal.