Best workflow in Premiere for logging 16 TB of R3D

[Mark Cernosia]

Hi there-
Question about the best way to manage lots of .R3D media. This past year, most of our in-house filmer's got the Scarlet. Everyone has been very pleased with the results and the cameras have allowed us to produce some amazing content! Our filmers shoot 9 months of the year and then send us the footage. So we deal with quite a bit of media all at once.

We have run into a bit of trouble with managing all of the .R3D media. In years past, we have had all of our media in ProRes and logged the media via file names (AA_A+_LOCATION_ORIGINALFILENAME.mov). This allowed us to search the media quite easily via Finder. Since we know about the strict file structure with RED media, we aren't going to mess with the file names and have decided to log all of our footage in Premiere. We are currently working with 16TB of footage. The pain is that every time we need to search for a certain logged clip, we need to load Premiere, allow the program to load all 16TB before we can even search. Now I know this is also a question for Adobe, but I was hoping to hear from someone on REDUSER about the best way to log and handle this amount of .R3D media. Premiere works fine for our DSLR & HPX footage, but struggles when having to load all of the .R3Ds.

Are we left with Premiere as our only hope? At the very least, we would like to be able to log: Actor Name, Location, Scene, and Kind Of Shot.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
-Mark

 

[Karl Soule]

Sounds like you need a good media asset management system to add to Premiere Pro - there are a lot of different MAM partners that work with Premiere, and some of them even feature a plug-in panel for Premiere. This enables you to browse your assets inside any Premiere project and see your logged shots, search on all the parameters you mentioned, etc. without having to load all 16TB of information.

Since we're talking native R3D files, give me a day or so to sort out some partners that do native R3D in their MAM solutions. CatDV, for example, has RED workflows, but they rely on the QuickTime proxies for internal playback, so I don't want to recommend it as a solution until I understand how they resolve/relink to the R3D files when importing to Premiere Pro. (here's info on their integration with Premiere: http://www.squarebox.com/premiere.html)

 

[Mark Cernosia]

Hi Karl-
Thanks so much for the reply. I'm very curious to see what you come up with as a solution that could be paired with Premiere. I investigated CatDV, downloaded the demo and it seems like it could help with searching Metadata from Premiere. By exporting my project as a FCP XML file and importing that to CatDV, I can search the assets & metadata very quickly. I was able to turn off the creation of proxies, so that I could just search the data and not have to wait for proxy creation. Once the project loaded and after I searched for a term, I could export all of those clips to another FCP XML and import that to Premiere. It would definitely work for searching and finding clips relatively fast, but would be a pretty long "round trip". If there was something that integrated well with Premiere, it would be great.

CatDV does offer a plug-in, but you need to get the CatDV Professional software along with their server based software for it all to work.

Thanks again for your response and I look forward to hearing back from you!
-Mark