[Job Ter burg]

The offer to purchase MC4 now and get MC5 for free most likely means that you would need to purchase MC4 from Avid, not from just anyone, not just a used copy from ebay. When you say “stealed” ones: I doubt Avid would warrant those. Whether the copy you purchase is sealed or not is probably less relevant than the date it is registered and to whom. YMMV.

Pricing for MC5 and/or various upgrade paths have not been announced yet (except from the grace period for folks that purchase MC4 between now and the release of MC5).

Academic purchases are a different beast. If you purchased MC4 academic, you are going to be entitled to 4 years of free upgrades anyway.

I bet a gazillion of editors around the globe are wanting to test ride MC5.

[Job Ter burg]

As others wrote, the preroll is needed for Avid to poll the deck over RS422 (or FW), so it can properly determine the starting TC value for the clip.
Without proper preroll, no proper TC is read/calculated.

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You should follow the instructions posted here:
https://avid.custkb.com/avid/app/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=290337&Hilite=

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RedRocket is indeed an acceleration card and RocketCine-X will not work without it.

RedAlert is a thing of the past, though, Joe. As is RedRushes, and RedCine (non -X).

And RedCine-X is actually both Mac and PC! And its latest builds will create MXF mediafiles directly, without the need to import into Avid anymore. RedCine-X is the application that is meant to replace any and all older incarnations of Red software.

RedCine-X works very similar to RocketCine-X. You can open clips into a bin, then export from that bin after creating an export setting. The most recent builds of both the Mac and the PC version allow you to create Avid MXF files immediately (like MetaFuze does). But you can also choose to export as Quicktime. As long as the Avid codecs are installed (avid.com/codec), that should provide you with the option to convert to QT’s that may be fast imported (you’d need to also generate an ALE somehow, though, otherwise you won’t have tape ID’s).

Indeed, MetaFuze is PC only.

If your footage was shot with the latest version of the Red camera (with the Mysterium sensor), note that MetaFuze will not correctly convert the colors for that. RedCine-X does.

RedCine-X is early beta, according to Red. This means that there may be some issues/bugs/annoyances. A lot of support info can be found on the Reduser.net boards.

Important to know is how to set the debayer options. It may be tempting to select Full Premium, but without a Rocket card installed, that is going to take forever.

The speed of your machine and drives matter much. R3D decoding is a pretty processor intensive task.

[Job Ter burg]

I’ve never seen the point in all the business strategy speculation myself. I just noticed that there is a more than strong suggestion that Avid video editing systems are going to be able to use the Euphonix Artist Series.

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You forgot about https://www.marquisbroadcast.com/marquis/bridging.htm

I’ve personally never had a reason to start in FCP. Nor finish, by the way.

On a sidenote: Avid is buying Euphonix.

[Job Ter burg]

And that’s just the beginning. Some more stuff I heard/read:

AMA Red Rocket support.
Enhanced AutoSync & BWF handling features.
Stereo tracks.
RTAS support (realtime AudioSuite).

If there ever was a time that Avid got it right…

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Automatic Duck. Period.
However, if you intend on moving a synced and logged project, not edits, that won’t work easily.

[Job Ter burg]

Uhm, Avid has owned Digidesign since 1994.
Pretty sure that your best answer will come from the Digidesign community.

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The transcode function is either under the Bin or Clip menu, I forgot, one of those. It’s combined with the Consolidate module.

The transcode cannot take place in the background, AFAIK.

A transcode is usually much faster than realtime.