[Michael Gissing]

Shoot first and ask questions later. It might work in the movies, but it doesn’t work when making movies.

Firstly what cameras did you shoot with. All you have told us is what you used imovie to create quicktimes. As Sacha has said, you need to re convert the other crews camera. But before you do that you will have to do some homework.

Some basic reading of the FCP manual is neccesary to understand the process of capturing in FCP. Avoid iMovie please. If you want to edit in FCP you should learn basic workflows. It starts with matching frame rates as a bare minimum for all sources where possible.

[Michael Gissing]

Bryan, the RED tool you need is called RED Rushes. You select the files you need to import and then you have various selections on what quicktime codec format to create and there are presets for standard frame sizes.

In this case I would recommend converting to ProRes 1920 x 1080. Under Render, select Color Space to REC709 and the same for Gamma. In Resize select scale and the 1920 x 1080 preset with fit width. In Output, select quicktime ProRes.

Do a test on one file and drop that into an FCP sequence that matches your quicktime settings. It should look right with letterboxed top/ bottom and correct width and not need rendering in the timeline. I couldn’t see anything specifically for anamorphic in the settings so there may still be some distort values you will need to use in FCP.

Again, it is important to study the documentation on FCP workflows that RED have on their site. I learned all that I have passed on to you by studying those docs and testing on one project.

[Michael Gissing]

Did you capture 1 track as your first post said or both tracks linked as stereo?

If you captured your dual mono as stereo linked, you can unlink and treat each track as independent in the timeline. Linking/ unlinking is well explained in the manual or search this forum as it has also been covered many times before.

[Michael Gissing]

If the final output is HDCam for broadcast, then you should consider letterboxing in a 16:9 file.

1920 x 1080 is the easiest to work with. I have Kona3 so can work with 2K files but monitor and output to HDCam as 1920 x 1080.

[Michael Gissing]

Neither your import ratio or your sequence settings are right. The editor I worked with used the RED tools and he was able to create a letterbox at correct aspect within a 2k 16:9 ProRes4444 file.

We then used standard 2k sequence settings for a final output as a letterboxed HDCam. The file settings and sequence settings should match but as Gary has asked, what is you final output?

[Michael Gissing]

The problem Kent is unfortunately operator error. Importing RED proxy files directly into FCP is not the recommended workflow.

FCP can’t mix audio on a file import. It must be the proxy files are like that. If you do work that way then you need to reconform your project with properly imported files with full quality picture and sound using REDs import software.

The RED workflow for FCP is well documented. Download the pdf and necessary software from the RED site.

[Michael Gissing]

In Log & Capture you have options to set up capture of video and audio tracks. It must be set to only capture one track. Change that to dual mono or linked stereo.

By changing to AIC you are simply selecting an easy setup that has both audio tracks enabled. You don’t want to transcode everything to AIC so change your capture options and save that as an easy setup for the future.

[Michael Gissing]

How are you importing the footage? What codec and frame size are you converting to?

I have just finished a short short on RED with that aspect and the editor used the RED import tools and made 2K files with the correct aspect so it is possible.

[Michael Gissing]

[Matt Jones] “What’s the best option?”

Uncompressed 10 bit 422 closely followed by ProRes.

[Michael Gissing]

Try typing “hard drive speed test mac” into Google. I only got 4,860,000 hits and the first few look good enough.