[Neil Fergusson]

Thanks for all the advice guys.

Completely understand what your saying about having archiving/backing up drives and having fast enough connections to handle the raw red media.

Starting to realise how I might of took for granted the process of Tape (be that DigiBeta, DV, HDV etc) dupes, and Tapes in general. It easy to forgot that tapes are a permanent record of the footage and how important that is. Data is just that, Data. It has to be stored etc. (I know that all sounds very obvious, but I think a lot of people take the subtleties of it for granted)

Anyway, gonna def go with suggested workflow, using two external drives connected with eSATA on my Expresscard 34 slot. Archiving from the RED Drive the Raw media onto each of them (two archives, one to lock away, the other to have to hand incase we need to go back to Raw media files at anytime during edit). Then I’m going to transcode to ProRess 422 from that. Offline edit with that. Lock picture cut. Take it to desired Post House for online and mastering. Using one of the archived eSATA drives to link back to edit, instead of the ProRess (As I understand there are a few ways of going about this). If anything goes wrong we always have the untouched archived eSATA drive to start again from.

The R3D Data Manager looks like a very handy piece of software. Some people complained that it tripled the data transfer rate (as opposed to drag and drop) but the sumchecked transfer seems like a great idea, and allows a laptop to be as equally useful on a Low/No Budget film to more high end TV Film productions. Plus, I am always of the nature that ‘time’ is a much more manageable asset than ‘money’.

Anyway kind of gone on a bit too much,

thanks again for advice.

Neil

[Neil Fergusson]

“then do an online edit of this on Macbook Pro” sorry i meant to say offline edit on my macbook pro.

[Neil Fergusson]

Hi Joe

Thanks for the reply. I currently have a 500gig Gdrive 7200 RPM SATA II drive with 32 MB cache, as well as my 1TB Drive. Will this work as one of eSATA drives you recommend for archiving the raw camera files?

Neil

[Neil Fergusson]

Cheers for response Walter/Russell.

After doing some research I was planning on archiving onto suitable drive (still trying to figure out if this needs to be an eSATA connection or not), then using Log and Transfer to ingest footage as ProRess 422, then do an online edit of this on Macbook Pro. Then once the cut is locked taking the project to a post house to do an online grade etc, hoping the can re-ingest the footage as the R3D media, thus giving the technical part of my brain a nice holiday away from RED technology!

We are still to talk to post houses about this. First trying to see if RED is gonna work in this offline workflow using my Macbook Pro. All this RED technology is very exciting, but there seems to be a lot of noise out on the internet about best practice etc. A little hard to cut through.

My Macbook Pro specs are;

17inch 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 2 GB 667 MKz DDR2 SDRAM.

have been thinking about putting more RAM in and maybe this might spur me onto doing it sooner rather than later.