Macbook Pro minimalist...

[Videoskate]

Keeping it short and sweet.

The rental house I work for has never worked in post but ever since we got the RED's clients are asking for help with transfer of footage from RED drives to editable clips.

We want to use a simple and cheap Macbook PRO on location with clients for tech assistance and conforming their clips to a Hardrive so they can be ready to edit.

We have done only a few tests but found very slow results.

Simply what can we do to speed up the transfer process? RAM? external drives?

Been reading about the Matrox mxo2 but will it speed anything up?
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2/

Thanks for any help.

 

[John Tissavary]

Keeping it short and sweet.

The rental house I work for has never worked in post but ever since we got the RED's clients are asking for help with transfer of footage from RED drives to editable clips.

We want to use a simple and cheap Macbook PRO on location with clients for tech assistance and conforming their clips to a Hardrive so they can be ready to edit.

We have done only a few tests but found very slow results.

Simply what can we do to speed up the transfer process? RAM? external drives?

Been reading about the Matrox mxo2 but will it speed anything up?
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/products/mxo2/

Thanks for any help.

RAM and external RAID will help a bit, certainly the increased i/o speed of a RAID is a benefit as you're reading and writing a good bit of data, but the debayer is cpu intensive, and it's going to take what it takes to process it.

The only thing you can do is throw more computing power at the problem, and that means more computers with faster processors. There's no way, imho, to efficiently transcode .r3d on a Macbook pro.

cheers,

jt

 

[Trevor Meier]

Agreed: Mac Pro, minimum, if you're transcoding.

Some shows are comfortable editing with the proxies, in which case the Macbook Pro makes a great data transfer station. But transcoding requires a lot of horsepower.

A digital lab in our town has set up a service similar to a film lab, where you bicycle in the mags (or a transport hard drive with dupes) and they do a render and QC. They go to HD dailies, which to do so requires a stack of Xserves...