minimum requirements to edit

[adrian vedder]

Hi! I have a friend making a short film next week and i'm gonna be editing it. I'm very familiar with final cut/adobe cs, and I've done a bunch of editing in my life, but never with red material. Always stuff from sony/canon.

My question is: Without the red rocket, how slow would it be to edit? i have a macbook pro retina, 256gb model. Also a 3TB time capsule to handle the material. They want to shoot at 4k, but I don't think the machine would be able to handle that, so i was thinking downscaling to 2k and go from there.

Now, at 2k is the ethernet connection of the time capsule fast enough? or should i try to get a leica thunderbolt HD?

Any specific things I should know? I know red material is tricky, just never had the chance to try it myself. And does anyone have a couple of raw 4k-2k files available to download and play with them a little?

Thanks for taking the time people!

[Brian Merlen]

you should be fine, even with 4k. just try it natively in cs. if you have trouble transcode to a proxy editing codec and relink/reconform at the end. but i think your model is high end enough to edit natively. you might benefit from faster storage though, say a r6 thunderbolt, but if its not in the budget, screw it use what you got, you will be fine

if you use fcp7/x you should use redcine to transcode to prores. if you use cs5/6 i would try natively editing, and lower the playback settings if its choking. if that doesn't fix it, render... but honestly reds not as bad to work with as some people say.

[PatrickW]

Time capsule is not designed for attached storage to edit from. Use it to backup footage and project files, but use some sort of direct attached storage for editing.

[adrian vedder]

Thanks to the 2 of you. Patrick, why do you think time capsule is a bad idea for that? it does behaves rather weird for a hard drive, but the reason i originally got it was because i wanted to share editing projects in a local network (granted, only 720 or 1080), without having to throw all the footage to two or 3 computers and updating constantly the fcp file. We did this for about 9 months and never saw a problem with it (ethernet always). But I'm no expert (far from it, i just came up with that idea cause it seemed like the simplest solution), so I'm just asking to learn.

And thanks Brian! that's actually a relief. And I'm used to render. I don't mind actually. I just wanted to know how bad it would be without the red rocket, and such a stripped down set up but you guys give me hope.