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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 :)

hardware needed to edit a feature

R

Ryan Bell

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Hey guys,

At the risk of sounding like a complete newbie I will ask this question anyway. We have a feature coming up that we are going to be shooting on the Red. Our team is new to the Red, as most of our previous projects (including two features) were shot on SD. Naturally, the jump up to Red can be a little daunting. All of our previous projects we have just worked on laptops or basic macpros using external drives, with monitoring done via a Firewire deck out to an LCD or CRT TV. So i guess my question is, what kind of hardware do you think we will need in order to complete as much of a film, shot on REd, in house as we can? Also what be the least expensive option to, as we are on a budget!

The film is a 95 minute action, which is intended to have a film out once finished. We are probably going to transcode everything to ProRes, but that may change once we get out Red and start testing. At this stage, we will be working on 3 Mac Pros (one for editing, one for transcoding and VFX, and a third for VFX only). The hardware for the editing machine is mainly the one i am interested in. On this machine we want to be able monitor out for grading and possibly dump back to betacam tapes. In terms of storage, we are looking into either a Caldigit HD element drive or an Editbox from ProAvio. Anyway, i know this all may sound a bit vague, but like i said, this is all very new to us and any help would be much appreciated!
 
Ryan,

It sounds all clear to me, I know what you're going through.

What's your final output? Film?
 
It was originally intended to just have an output to DVD which I am OK with, but it has since been a stipulation of the inverstors that it is to go to film.
 
The CalDigit internal RAID card is a pretty good buy, almost $200 cheaper than the Apple version. They give you the card cheap but then they gouge you on the element expanders. Going with 4 internal 1.5 TB drives in RAID5 will yield 3.7 TB total when formatted. If you did this to all three workstations and networked them together it would be enough for both the source files and a workspace. You may want to gang the Ethernet cards though...

Another thing to consider is tape backup. You cannot trust your entire shoot to spinning disks. You'll need LTO-3 or LTO-4 if you can afford it. Instead of buying external disks you could max out the internal, transcode all the files to a smaller format for editing, then only restore from tape the source files that are used in the final edit. If you have more time than money I'd take this approach.

Bob
 
Yeah i had considered adding extra harddrives on the internal drives. I will more then likley use the internal drives to store the pro-res transcodes on both the edit machines and then use external RAID for backup and access of the .R3D files. Unfortunately we have both little time or money, well a little more on the money side then time! So i don't think we really have the budget to back up to the LTO drives at this stage, but i have put a note in our quote about the possibility of backing up to tape. For now, i was going to just backup all the .R3D files and transcodes in triplicet.
 
I see, if that is the case, Dave Mullen has posted a thought after workflow.

The thread.

That will be the ideal way. Preserve 4K and master it for whatever currently targeting.

Otherwise, when your footage goes down to SD-DVD, it looses the resolution and clarity a great deal. If you are transcoding by yourself using DVD-Studio Pro or Compressor, then you should test many settings and different routes for the best result. I've been seeing some great looking RED footage becoming not so hot in SD. So you should establish the best way for your system.

You can add Matrox MXO or MXO2 to your system with reasonable RAID system to be able to handle uncompressed video quality.

MXO can handle up to 8-bit 4:2:2, so same or better than HDCAM.
MXO2 can handle up to 10-bit 4:2:2, so same or better than D5.

If you're going to keep your master or submit it to film recording later, these are the cheaper format.

Otherwise, keep your project planed how Dave explained and stay ready for the 4K or 2K with RGB color space.
 
I'd recommend an External 16TB Raid (16 1TB drives) configured as two mirrored 8TB (6.5TB) Raid 5's connected to one of your machines with a 16-channel RAID card and then use Gigabit Ethernet on all machines through a Gigabit switch. Make sure the hard drives in each machine are fast as they will end up being your primary bottleneck reading to and writing from your RAID.

-shooter
 
Give the machine for transcoding 16 GB of RAM.
 
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