Alex Elkins
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Melissa,
Short answer: no.
Longer answer: You need an Intel Mac in order to import RED footage, i.e. a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro. Your G5 is Non-Intel.
What you can do is have a post facility or friend with an Intel Mac convert the files to a format you can edit with. Then once you’ve finished your edit, take it to a company or person with the equipment and experience to conform and grade the edit with the raw RED files. Or just stick with your conversions if it’s not imperative that you grade with the best quality files available.
NB. RULE 1 for RED post production is do not, under ANY circumstances, rename the files differently to the originals. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do it, take the bullet. Before anyone converts anything for you make sure they know this! The only difference should be the extension of the file, from .R3D to .mov
If you wish the file names made more sense, add an annotation in one of the ‘Comment’ columns in FCP. Just don’t change the name!Forgive my rant about it, you may already be well aware of that fact. I’m soon to begin grading a RED project where the editor, against every piece of advice given to them, STILL decided to change the file names of the converted clips. Now they must waste their own time changing them back, or pay for my time to do it for them. I’ve really no idea why…
Salad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Does the drive show up in Disk Utility?
One thing I had with my troublesome harddrive was it didn’t appear in Disk Utility but did in DiskWarrior. Probably why I didn’t think of it sooner.You could try it. Problem is you don’t know what will happen and can’t go back once you click ‘Repair’. With DiskWarrior (and I imagine other good recovery software do this too) you get the preview of the contents if you do decide to repair/restore, and you can go back if you don’t like what you see. I’d rather not take a gamble if there’s money riding on the result!
Salad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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One addition to my previous post as well…
Please DO NOT capture from the RED over SDI! As Shane pointed out, it defeats the whole purpose of shooting RED. You will destroy any reasonable chance of being able to go back to the RAW files if you do manage to get them off the drive, which I’m sure you will.
Good luck,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Hi Arnold,
As far as I can recall you don’t need any additional drivers to actually see the harddrive. After all, it’s just a FAT32 formatted drive in fancy RED housing.
Last week I had a problem with a drive (not RED, but the situation is still relevant) where the drive wouldn’t mount on the computer.
After a couple of days trying to work it out I remembered I had DisWarrior installed on the Mac. So I started up DiskWarrior and guess what? It recognised the dive! So I told DiskWarrior to restore the drive, which took about 10 minutes. Hey presto! Everything working again with all files in tact.You might want to look at using DiskWarrior (or any data recovery software) to see if the drive does indeed show up. From there you can make a decision whether or not to attempt a restore on it. Incidentally, with DiskWarrior you first get a kind of preview restore, which creates a working sample of what files will be restored. Great for peace of mind before you jump straight into restoring.
The bottom line is that all is most definitely not lost as long as the files still appear to be on the drive (and you say you can see them in camera?). That’s great news.
The problem of mounting the troublesome HDD isn’t too major, judging from my own experience.Good luck, and let us know how you get on.
Best,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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[Jen Dunbar] “My principle concern is to try and minimise motion and graphic render times as much as possible, and also to get the best performance out of Compressor.”
Hi Jen,
To get the best performance out of Compressor you should definitely be going for an 8-core model. When set up properly, Compressor will use all of the cores for encoding. Absurdly FCP doesn’t do this yet, but if finances allow, personally I’d want to spend a bit more on the 8-core to increase its lifespan.
I personally think that the cost of the upgrade to the processor speeds are a bit overpriced. I’d go for more cores over a faster processor for sure.To run FCP etc at its full potential you need to also be using a fast RAID for storage. You don’t mention how you deal with media storage so you may already have a good set-up, but if not then you should look into it.
All the best,
AlexSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Hi David,
I would use Compressor to do this – just drop your HD file in, and apply whichever 4×3 setting you need for your export from the Settings window.
Then in the Geometry tab for the setting, you need to add padding. There is a drop down list from which you should select 16×9 1.78:1 and that will do the trick. This will give you a 4×3 frame with the HD video undistorted and uncropped within it, with bars top and bottom.If you let me know the specs for the delivered file I can send you over a Compressor Droplet which should do it all automatically for you.
Let me know if this isn’t clear enough and I can go into more detail, but really I need to know what the final delivery specs are to be any further help.
Good luck,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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There’s a ‘Go forward/back one second’ shortcut already if that’s any good. Shift+right arrow/left arrow
Also if you have an edit point selected you can use , and . to roll/ripple/extend the edit 1 frame, or Shift , or Shitft . to roll/ripple/extend by 5 frames. 5 framers is the default – you can change that to anything you like in the Preferences>Editing tab under ‘Multi-frame trim size’
Incidentally, if you go to tools>keyboard layout>customize you can search for any shortcut that may exist in FCP, and re-map to any keys you want. Butler is handy when a function requires more than one shortcut to run in succession.
All the best,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Jason,
I’m one for shortcuts too, as I’m sure most editors are. FCP does some simple things that require multiple keystrokes and it winds me up! Yesterday I was looking for a solution to this and came across some software called Butler (it’s free). You can use it to build macros, which means a way to create absolutely any shortcut based on a series of user actions.
For example, I’ve built myself a macro that previews ‘next’ and ‘previous’ clips in the browser by pressing either ‘PAGE UP’ or ‘PAGE DOWN’. This replaces what would normally be a series of three keyboard shortcuts. The best part is you can tell it to only affect FCP, so I can still PAGE UP/DOWN in Word etc as normal.
The point is that as long as you can find out the series of shortcuts to what you want to do, you can essentially create any single-button shortcut you want. Well worth looking into.
All the best,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Hi Derrick,
Does the mov specifically have to be in HDV format? If that’s the case then it’s certain that there will be what’s known as ‘generational loss’ in quality.
What I suggest is:
1. In the Sequence Settings window (CMD+0), change ‘compressor’ from HDV 1080i60 to DVCPro HD 1080i60.2. Render the timeline
3. Go to File> Export> Quicktime Movie and leave settings as ‘Current Settings’. Make sure ‘Recompress all frames’ is UNCHECKED, and ‘Make movie self-contained’ IS checked. Click Save, let FCP do its thing and the file that is created will be a high quality HD file. From this file you can then create web and DVD versions etc using Compressor.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed
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Hi William,
Most editors spread FCP (or Avid, Premiere etc) across both screens. For example, I have my Browser window taking up the entire left screen, and the Timeline, Canvas and Viewer on the right. To my knowledge this is how most editors choose to work. Therefore it isn’t necessary for both to be very high quality. Just make sure they’re both set to display the same resolution.
However, you should be using a separate video monitor as well (essentially a professional quality tv next to one of your computer monitors). There are MANY combinations of how to do this so I will just list my own – I have an AJA Kona 3 card in the computer which sends pictures to a Sony CRT monitor and also a larger HD screen for clients who may be sitting a bit further back in the room.
As you said in your post, it’s a question of budget. Give us an idea and we can recommend the most suitable solution.
All the best,
Alex ElkinsSalad Daze Films – Freshly Tossed