Software rants

[john]

I'm new here, and even though I'm sure these points have been brought up before, I'm going to take this opportunity to rant a bit.

First - the software quality sucks. And when I say sucks, I don't mean it's just annoying - it's very poorly thought out, and very poorly implemented.

Quicktime wrappers cannot be used in Compressor.

The fact that REDCINE takes over the entire screen and doesn't allow for application switching is a horrible bug, whatever the intention, rationale, or justification.

REDCINE's UI is broken in many places and inconsistent in others. For instance, when selecting a destination, the create new folder button doesn't work.

REDCINE does some evil graphics stuff. Try running it on an Xserve with the 64 meg Radeon X1300 - it destroys the display until a full reboot.

I know that RED has an agenda to not piss off the post service industry, but the one thing that many people (I'd say ALL of the people with whom I've talked about this) simply want and would use most often doesn't exist - that is, to have a simple piece of software with which one can select an arbitrarily large number of clips, apply a saved set of color curves or perform a first light manually, then submit as a batch for transcoding to an editing format. If this were distributable via Compressor / Qmaster, and if more clips could be added while the processing is going on, I wouldn't ask for anything more.

There are my rants. Thank you for the opportunity to get that off of my chest.

John Klos
Big Time Picture Company

 

[Arnaud Paris]

John,

Sorry to hear about your frustration. We've been working with Redcine and Scratch, who share somewhat of the same interface, for more than a year now. Some things might turn you off at first but if you spend some time using these programs you might completely change your opinion. We believe they are extremely well thought and designed tools.

Here is some of our experience that might help you with your struggle:

ALT+F9 lets you exit redcine quickly and access other applications. When using a PC the shortcut ALT+TAB also work as usual to switch between programs.

Quicktime warpers should be used in Final Cut Log And Transfer plug. We don't use compressor with the proxies but a lot of people do with great success.

The "create new folder" in RedCine works but you need to enter the name of the folder you want to create before pressing the button.

As a graphic card you should go with a better one than the Radeon X1300, 64meg is a bit low for what you want to do. We have the 8800GT on our MacPro and its just rock solid and fast. I let other people who have experience with the Radeon comment on this one.

Good luck with your project,

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I
Quicktime wrappers cannot be used in Compressor.

Funny ... I have 4 or 5 Macs transcoding Redcode Quicktime wrappers in Compressor at this very moment ...

 

[Christopher Grant Harvey]

I am sure you have the right to say what you want but to introduce yourself here with this post is well...errr... I dunno.:sad:

I think at the moment the guys at Red are trying to get all their applications and gadgets to work so that in a few months time they can rework all of them in a systematicall approach. When that is done they will start on Scarlet and Epic and whatever else lurks in the catacombs of Red.

I don't think they anticipated the support and the amount of people buying their products. It seems they are overworked and understaffed and need a break, but if they take a break there will be world-wide riots and mass suicides.

Cut them a break. :tongue:

 

[john]

I should clarify...

I should clarify...

Sorry. I saw this as an opportunity for a cathartic release. I just let it out.

Granted, once I research the solutions to these problems, I'm sure I'll come up with some solutions, but when someone sits down at a program to use it, the obvious things should at least be the ones which have been handled by now.

If the RED Quicktime plugins now work, then my apologies. The last time I tried was a few weeks ago, and it drove me nuts that Compressor would crash, but calling Quicktime via Applescript and automating conversions would work. I am glad it works now.

I wanted to do some of the transcoding on an Xserve because it makes sense to leave the editing systems with the fancy video cards and displays free for editing, and use the machine which is mostly idle and hardly ever has anyone sitting in front of it to do the processing. I can't even imagine how one might write a program which could screw up the display... Regardless, though, I don't think it's fair to assume that everyone who wants to transcode RED material has a few spare workstations sitting around. This should be a distributable thing, and it should also be something which can run on headless machines.

Thank you for the feedback. I'm learning already

John

 

[john]

One more thing...

One more thing...

Perhaps there's a place to officially report bugs, but I'll just throw this out there.

REDCINE is written with some bad assumptions. For starters, it assumes that the user running it is an admin with write permissions to /Library, at minimum, and won't launch if a non-admin user tries to run it. This is something I'd expect from AVID, but not from other programmers.

Thanks,
John

 

[Cail Young]

For starters, it assumes that the user running it is an admin with write permissions to /Library, at minimum, and won't launch if a non-admin user tries to run it.

It will function after the first run under an admin user, however this is still unacceptable.