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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

CS5 Workflow (what I need)

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LesDavis

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Hi all,

I'm new so please be gentle, I have been all over this forum and it has been really helpful but I just wanted to get a few things straight in my head and to make sure on a couple more (that’s my OCD kicking in)

Firstly: Hardware:
The equipment I have access to is:
Window 7 64bit
SD HDD 120GB (am not sure what extension I have on that, I know there are some USB 3 external drives about, will look closer into that.)
2x 6core Xeon so 12 cores all together.
12GB of RAM
Quadro FX 4000
Is this sufficient to get me started? Is there some other hardware extensions I should look at? I have been reading about these 'Red Rocket' cards, are these a must or can you get buy without one?
Any advice in this area would be great but please bear in mind that we are a small studio and have a limited budget.

Secondly: Software:
We are working with CS5.
PPro for editing and AE for compositing and grading.
Adobe CS5 claims to be able to work with RED natively without the need for any plugins or making proxies.
Is this the case? Can I literally just take the RAW footage and just open it in PPro and start editing?
I was reading about REDCode but I believe this is integrated into CS5.
Is there any plugins or software I should consider?
I would love to see somebody's workflow (I know a lot of people done like to share their secrets) from Camera to Post on a windows machine using CS5 if this was possible.

I really appreciate your time and patients, thanks in advance.

Les Davis
 
CS5 supports native RAW editing. It is the easiest system out there to edit Red footage.

As for your PC, it looks fine. The main needs are lots of cores (which you will have), lots of RAM (I'd choose an Nvidia GTX470 over the Quadro and spend the savings on the RAM) and finally, lots of hard drive space! Get 2-4TB of regular HDDs and a fast SandForce controller based SSD for your OS and you'll be singing!

HTH

Cheers from Tokyo and welcome to Reduser!

Paul
 
That's great news, thanks very much for getting back to me. I'm gonna start to test the system with some stock footage, am still waiting for our footage to come in. I'll have to have a closer look at our new machines and see what exactly is in them too. I don't have much experience with RAID but am sure can figure that out. Am sure I'll have more educated queries in time. Thanks again. Les
 
I'm running on a similar system with an i7960 instead of Xeon and GTX480 with the hack instead of the Quadro card. I don't have a Red Rocket here either.

Premiere is a brilliant piece of software. Just drop your files into a bin and start cutting. From what I understand from reading the Adobe forums, the one thing that often chokes Premiere is drive bottlenecks. The systems that score the best on the benchmarks all have big fat RAID's connected to them. I have 5Tb in RAID-0 (for speed not security) internally but you can make it even easier and get an external eSATA or USB3.0 RAID tower from NewEgg. Stuff it full of drives and let 'er rip.

Good luck.
 
LesDavis said:
Is this sufficient to get me started?
Click to expand...
You'll only know what you really need from experience. That system blows away what I'm working on.

Double your ram if you can for AE. For red footage it's more than you'll use. Get the fastest harddrives you can. At minimum 7200rpm spindles or SSD drives. That will be your biggest performance factor for editing and transcoding.

Workflow is something you create on your own for your needs (see answer to first question).

This really isn't even a valid question: workflow with CS5. Edit in premier, open in AE, render.

However to answer the question in a broader sense for posterity, I've been working on several for a while depending on the project. Here's what I'm working with:

- Raw files edited in vegas, Export AAF, Export Sound track
- Import AAF to Premier, save as project file
- Import project file to AE for color grading, titles, compositing; export to finishing codec (x264 f/ web, mpeg2 f/ dvd, etc)
- Finish sound design
- Mux files

Each of vegas, premier and AE work directly off the raw files. AAF is similar to an EDL. If you edit in premiere, start at step 2.

If your system can't handle 4k files, or you want to grade before editing or simultaneously (with another person), even cross platform I have this work flow:

- Raw files graded (if desired) in RedCine-X
- Export Avid DNxHD (either w/ built in mxf codec or free avid quicktime codec, I use the latter; at either 1080p/36mb for quick temps or 175mb for final)
- Edit DNxHD files in any NLE
- Simultaneously grade files if desired (in any color app; Redcine-X, Color, AE, etc) and output 175mb versions, if not already done
- Replace 36mb with 175mb versions
- Render to finishing codec, or plug into compositing workflow

The above process allows one to work with multiple people across multiple OSes and NLEs. Cineform is another codec that provides a similar, better feature set, but costs a little more.

As you can see there is a multitude of flexibility to move your data around anywhere you want it. Focus first on figuring out what you want to do; then in the course of doing it, you'll discover how to do it.

Cory
 
Last edited:
Great, thanks.

The only thing I have to workout is the storage, am pretty sure I have some USB3 drives about so will be doing it externally.

Also is it the same with After effects? Can you just work with RAW footage in AE also?

Thanks
 
There's one thing to add into the CS5 workflow discussion: It is not only possible to color grade R3D-files in Redcine-X, but one can also export an EDL from PPro CS5 and once this is imported into RCX, RCX will automatically open the files from the PPro timeline into the RCX bin. This is very handy and useful if one has a large number of R3D-files.
 
LesDavis said:
Great, thanks.

The only thing I have to workout is the storage, am pretty sure I have some USB3 drives about so will be doing it externally.

Also is it the same with After effects? Can you just work with RAW footage in AE also?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Yes, I affirmed that I am doing this.

The thing about technologies like USB3 and SATA and whatever; these are interfaces that have a very high top rated speed. However your actual speed is limited to the spindle or flash read speed in the case of an SSD. The USB3 interface supports a top speed of 625mbytes/sec. However if you just bought a random USB3 drive; you're likely to get a 5400rpm speed spindle which means you'll be reading at about 25mbytes/sec. Since harddrive speed is going to be the single biggest factor for editing on the system you laid out, I recommend paying extreme attention to this detail.

Cory
 
I hear ya Cory, will take a very close look at that. I know we have the USB3, I have just checked the drives and they are only 5400rpm!
 
I don't know if even a 10K RPM drive will keep up the way CS5 may need, especially if more than one layer of Red video is on the timeline. A simple external tower like http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...b3_external_hard_drive-_-16-111-149-_-Product or http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Produc...b3_external_hard_drive-_-16-111-145-_-Product would do the trick. Those little towers have USB3.0 and eSATA for whatever works best for you. Just slap in a bunch of 1Tb drives and the tower will take care of putting them into the RAID array you want to use. There are smaller and cheaper drives available but these are nice size and price.
 
I think am beginning to understand, the RAID has a bigger bandwidth and speed because it can write to more then one disk at a time?
I think we have some drives and towers here so we can RAID no problems

Also what sort of GB per minute would RED footage be. The longest thing we will be working on is about 15 mins.

Thanks

Les
 
The issue isn't reading the Red files per se, since they are realtime at around 40MB/s. The issue is the debayering of them in realtime for you to watch. The main HDD bottleneck is jumping between multiple clips in realtime (SSDs are the best way to store your edit files for this reason) and then the rendering process if creating DPXs etc.

For Adobe (without a RedRocket) it's your CPUs that will be used to debayer, so a twin CPU hexacore system (12 real cores, 24 threads) is going to kick arse in that department compared to say a regular quad core CPU. The GPU in PPro is used for effects acceleration etc, NOT R3D debayering.

Obviously RAM factors in at this point in order to move large amounts of debayered video data around.

HTH

Paul
 
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