Fastest way to convert for Avid on a feature

[Michael Robinson]

Hi,
We are shooting a feature film in Perth Western Australia using Red. We are editing using Avid 3.5.4.
I'm looking for the fastest way to ingest and convert to minimise down time in the edit suite.

Is Red rushes a viable option?

We are also trying to avoid the $ outlay on a RED Rocket™ card.

thanks

Michael

[Cail Young]

Red Rocket is fastest, but Metafuze on a decent number of cores is the next best thing.

[Steve Freebairn]

Unless you have a lot of CPU cores just sitting around, or weeks to waste, then the RED Rocket is by far the most cost effective processing method out there for converting R3D to any other format. If your time is worth nearly anything, then you'll be able to see that the ROI of a Rocket is super quick.

You're other option is to hire a DIT that has a Rocket as part of his/her kit.

[M Most]

If you're converting for offline, there's no need for a Red Rocket. Converting to 720p/24 at 1/4 debayer will provide you with excellent HD images for editorial and take about real time to convert on a reasonable 8 proc Mac, which is about the same speed you'll get with the Rocket. This is, of course, provided you're converting for offline purposes.

[Steve Freebairn]

One more thing to remember is to use a program like clipfinder to render at least 1k+ files (see the help menu in clipfinder) if you're going to 720p for offline (which isn't a bad idea at all).

The problem some people run into is they shoot 2k footage, then do a 1/4 debayer and then blow that back up to 720p, which is a 250% scale up and then they wonder why things don't look good.

[Colin Hubick]

The other option if you have more than one intel based machine you can set up a Qmaster cluster and use Monkey Extract to do distributed processing.

[Rainer Fritz]

Please remember that you can render with the rocket in realtime and full debayer ready MXF container for your avid system. so you have no import times on the avid.....

[Luca Immesi]

If you use the 1K+ option for instance, Clipfinder will debayer: 4K at 1/4 resolution, 3K and 2K at 1/2 resolution. This is useful to render clips with different resolution.