Transcode Yourself or Have a Vendor Do It?

[munchausen]

Hey Red Dudes,

So I'm an indie producer with a project that we just wrapped. We are facing the issue that we must transcode the raw Red files in order to edit them.

So the question is: should we just turn to a kick-ass vendor to do it (like Off Hollywood) or, since we are SO MICRO BUDGET, should we just score a big, bad Mac Pro and try to do it ourselves.

Is there anybody out there who has successfully navigated the latter route, all the way to an HD-CAM festival master? If that's asking too much, I'd love to hear from anybody who managed successfully to transcode a feature-size cache of footage internally.

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!

-T

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

My Macbook Pro was able to transcode 300Gb of Redcode to Offline RT in about 5 hours and I had it chugging away every night for a week on footage. Fried my eggs on it every morning.

Timing on transcoding to Pro Rez or most other formats should be similar. It's really not that bad.

 

[Nick Gallegos]

I've had to do offline renders out in the field on a MacBook Pro in the past (for me, they serve a dual purpose as dailies), but it's not something I would enjoy doing with multiple terabytes of R3D. My Mac Pro 3GHz 8-core does the same thing 3-4 times as fast.

 

[ThomtheEditor]

We have a small post house and we do all of our transcoding internally. I'm working on a series (not a feature, but more than a features worth of material) that we shot RED for. B/c of time constraints we did not have time to do an offline/online workflow so we did a first light in redcine & transcoded all of our footage on the same machine that i've edited with, done vfx on, did color correction on, and laid off several episodes to HDCamSR masters for broadcast with only minor, non RED related QC issues coming back.

Two of my associates are working on a feature shot all RED we did offline transcodes via RedRushes the only problem being those green flashes in the render files because of RR's Beta status, they're still fine to edit with and will be worked out when we online via crimson/redcine (or thru color if/when that functionality becomes available before we finish).

So yeah, long story short, a single macpro tower can do a lot for you, but 5 are better!
~T