Editing RED footage on an iMac

[Shawn Costa]

Hi Guys,

I plan on shooting a short film in the near future on the RED One. I would like to edit my short on my iMAC. I have final cut studio 2.0 installed so I have all the programs I need and they run fine. However, I don't want to buy another computer just to edit my short film, so I was wondering do you think I can edit the RED footage on my iMAC?

I plan on getting a 2 Terrabyte RAID external hard drive running at 7200 rpm and put my footage on that drive and use that to edit my short film.

My computer specs are as follows:

Processor: 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache per processor: 4 MB
Memory 2 GB
Graphics/Display: ATY Radeon X1600
Mac Display: LCD
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Depth: 32-bit Color
FireWire Bus: Maximum Speed up to 400 Mb/sec

I looked at the minimum hardware needed on the RED website and everything looked right except the RAM, which I'm going to upgrade to 4 GB anyway before I begin editing. If you guys can help me, I'd be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Shawn Costa

 

[Uli Plank]

While a RAID5 will give you increased security, it won't do much for speed, since you don't have a fast connection for it. The FireWire bus is going to be your bottleneck, and even the internal SATA drive might be faster. You might be better off installing a 1 TB disk internally for speed and boot the system from an external drive.

2 GB RAM per CPU is fine, and the graphics card is working with Color, but it's pretty slow. Another problem is monitoring, sinc you can't add any I/O card. What's the final result you're aiming for?

 

[JD Marlow]

Why shoot with Red then? You don't really have the proper hard ware to take full advantage of what the camera has to offer. You'll probably have to end up working in ProRes, which isn't bad by any means --- but it isn't much better than if you were to shoot 1080p DVCPRO HD at 4:2:2 -- (approx 13 MB/s data rate vs. 25 MB/s ProRes 422 HQ in 1920x1080 23.98)

 

[Uli Plank]

Well, DVCProHD will neither give you the DoF nor the DR a Red One can offer…

 

[JD Marlow]

DR perhaps....but wouldn't you be able to achieve comprable Depth of Field with a 35mm PL adapter on, say, a VariCam or HPX500?

 

[Kenn Michael]

Yes, but the resolution (even when downsampled to 1080 ProRes) is night and day from Varicam or HPX.

 

[Kaku Ito]

HPX does not give you over/under crank feature shooting in 1080, only in 720p mode. Red One can shoot 120 frame at 2K. Also 60p at 3K!
ProRes 422HQ is better than DVCPRO HD since ProRes 422HQ is 10-bit, but DVCPRO HD is 8-bit.

Also as Kenn mentioned, ProRes 422 HQ is 1920 x 1080 or could be 2K (or 4k even), but DVCPRO HD's 1080 is 1280 x 1080 anamorphic.

So if one can afford the rental of RED ONE, why not shoot with RED ONE and finish in whatever he can finish with, later, he can go back with better hardware to finish in higher quality.

People like Shawn is the candidates for purchasing Scarlet. They can rental RED ONE right now to find out more, then decides to purchase Scarlet and work with whatever hardware environment they have.

Shawn, you can consider connecting second display to your iMac or Matrox MXO to monitor better while you use FCP and Color (even Motion). And you need an external Firewire RAID drive like Caldigit, so you can edit in ProRes422HQ.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

As others have pointed out, your biggest obstacle will be the firewire 400 connection as your only means of attaching external storage. Honestly, I say you need to get a better computer somewhere. IMO, this is Apple's biggest design flaw with the iMac systems -- they give us less connectivity and expansion options than we have with a Macbook Pro. WTF? One redeeming thing about the 24" iMac is it has room inside for two HDDs. One can convert the second HDD bay into an eSATA port with little effort.

Hopefully on the next round of iMacs, they give us systems that have one (or even better, two) ExpressCard 34 slots. Then the iMac would rock.

 

[Alex Carr]

One can convert the second HDD bay into an eSATA port with little effort.

Copy That action! You may have a Hole on the back of your Imac! But you have a 5-Bay E-sata Raid!

 

[Kaku Ito]

No, I don't think Apple would put ExpressCard 34, but in a long run they will put either USB3 or Firewire3G.

 

[Kaku Ito]

By the way some iMacs have Firewire 800, so at least with those models you can do ProRes.