Any companies/people for rendering to ProRes 422?

[Alex Donkle]

I've hit several roadblocks getting red footage rendered on a student film (starting with my PC hating red, then my school, then a render farm that needed several thousand to transcode 3 hours of 24p 4k into ProRes 422.)

Now I'm looking at renting a Mac Pro loaded with FCP, with the minimum rental period of a month. Which seems like it's going to work, but it's still right around $1k to do plus driving 3 hours to grab the computer. So, does anyone know of a company that transcodes footage?

Or anyone willing to be a good friend for a fee?

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

FYI, a macbook pro could handle that task in 48 hours, more or less...

 

[Cail Young]

Where are you?

 

[Alex Donkle]

West Lafayette, Indiana (Purdue).

 

[Ben Holmes]

I'm surely missing something here, but you need a system with FCP on to edit in ProRes. So why can't you use that to transcode? Otherwise, if you're editing on a PC, transcode it into another PC friendly format - ProRes is not the only codec available.

 

[MichaelP]

(starting with my PC hating red)

It's not the PC's that hate RED...

Until RED releases QT components and REDline type functionality for the PC, there will be fewer available tools from third parties. This may change once RED releases REDCINE X and we will find out what it can do on a PC when it releases - but encoding to Pro Res on a PC will still have a limitation since there is no QT component for encoding to ProRes on a PC - and that is an Apple limitation, not RED. One can only decode ProRes on a PC.

So between the two, the PC is behind as to what is available on a Mac. As mentioned, since you are going to edit in Final Cut, that only runs on a Mac, so do the transcoding there. Or if PC is the only platform available, look to working in Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, or Avid. Premiere and Avid provide free trial downloads and all of them work with RED files in one way or another.

Michael

 

[Dominic Jones]

If you're cutting on a PC, you really don't want to transcode to ProRes422 - that's a Mac (in fact, FCP) specific codec, so be careful.

There certainly are plenty of facilities that will offer a "digital lab" solution for transcoding rushes, producing dailies, etc - but not necessarily cheaply... Perhaps you could try to find a Red owner near you who uses PC systems and pay them a (probably fairly small per hour) fee to produce your offline files for you, if you're on a tight budget?

Just a thought...

Hope you get cutting soon,
All the best,

Dom.

 

[Stefan Scherperel]

Honestly, if your on a PC allready, and looking to spend a little bit of cash, why not invest in the student version (since it sounds like your a student) of CS4. Edit red footage natively within premiere (no transcoding) and now RAW color adjustments can be dowe right inside the editor. It is also a very flexible editor, I can edit 4k at half resolution on my Core i7, or I can edit 4k at 1/8 resolution on my laptop, all in realtime and without ever having to change project settings.

 

[donatello b]

"you need a system with FCP on to edit in ProRes"

i edit ProRes clips in Vegas 8 & 9 .. ProRes codec reader is included in QT player 7.6 & higher ..

you can download the trial versions of Vegas 9 & premiere ... play with them ..drop r3d clips into their time lines ...
you can drop a r3d clip in any Vegas TL ( sd, hd, hdv,2k, 4k or make up your own settings )

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, ProRes can be handled on Windows -- it's just read only. For PC I would not recommend ProRes for RED workflow. But rather go with Vegas9 or Adobe CS4 and work directly from the R3D files.

Whether Alex is going to edit on a PC -- looks like a PC, I have to echo Stefan's suggestion. A student edition of Adobe CS4 is the way to go. And in the mean time, CS4 can be downloaded in trial form where it's fully functional for 30 days. I edit a lot of stuff right off my nearly 3 year old Macbook Pro and it works great, also works good on a similarly configured HP laptop. I highly recommend a faster external drive to work from.

Alex, I really don't think transcoding is a solution that will help you, but if you want to send me the R3D files on an HDD with enough room to hold the transcoded files, along with return postage, I'll convert them for you.

 

[Dominic Jones]

Oh, didn't realise you could read PR on a PC - that's good to know.

Still, a read-only format is far from ideal for editing.

Thanks as ever,
Dom.

 

[Alex Donkle]

Thanks for all the tips. As to why I've been looking at PR instead of working off my PC...

My school does have Mac Pros, but doesn't want to risk installing Red plug-ins on them (hence they still handle regular ProRes just fine) so that means I can't do anything with the raw red files on them directly without converting them first.

And so far my computer (HP dual-core laptop), it hasn't been able to handle Red footage at all through RedCine as of yet. It crashes every time giving some error due to my graphics card. Tried wiping my HDD and doing everything fresh, but the same result occurred.

I hadn't considered trying the CS4 method with a demo yet, but that's certainly worth trying.

I also got some helpful advice through PMs though, so thanks to everyone that replied and I've learned a lot about my options here.

Thanks.