How To Upgrade My Current Mac System For RED Editing In Final Cut

[Jesse Tunison]

In a month or two I will have three new RED cameras. I have a mac and FCP3.
My Mac has 4 GB memory and I run quad core with a 2.8 GHz installed. What else will it take to get my system ready to edit a TV show in RED at 2K in realtime.

 

[Tom.Wong]

more ram never hurts, if ur talking about solely for cutting and not simply debayering you probably won't need a red rocket. however to transcode to pro res at lightning fast speeds you'll need fast raided drives and a red rocket.


for accelerated pro res cutting, super speedy raided drives, so esata card, or raid card, or fibre card if u've got the scratch, and a kona card to accelerate it too....

 

[JosephArthur]

RAM, more ram.

If using FCP and especially compressor, attempt to look at Qmaster to multicore or distributed rendering. Redrocket is an absolute dream (as i have seen it used on my macbook pro) but RED Rocket™ only processes r3d files - and displays 4k from the breakout box(I dont have a 4k projector yet).

- Summary, get more RAM and look into Qmaster (if you have more than one Mac Pro). But really your not editing in 4k. Your kicking around in 1080 right?

;

 

[Charles Angus]

Honestly, you could do it with what you have.

Do a ProRes offline/online workflow, and you'll be set.

 

[Torrey Loomis]

Jesse,

Add a RED Rocket card. Turn the files into ProRes files which will work in real time on your FCP timeline.

Increase the RAM you have. Going to 8 or 16 GB is pretty inexpensive these days. Going to 32 GB is still pretty expensive.

What is your shoot ratio for your show? Depending on how much you are going to shoot, you could get an additional 6 TB in your system with three Hitachi 2.0 TB hard drives. If you need more space, you'll have to get external RAID storage.

If you want to color correct your project, consider getting a Kona card and an external HD display that you can calibrate.

Torrey
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[Ben Holmes]

More RAM is a definite - but you have a quad-core, not octo-, so 8Gb will be fine.

Whilst RED Rocket is all fine and dandy, you would be much better advised getting a good video card (swing for a Kona 3 or Blackmagic equivalent) and a 1080p monitor (I use the JVC241LD, although the TVLogic monitors are great as well as other personal favs on here).

You will NEED these for proper CC and output to (say) SR for mastering. The RED Rocket will only provide (at the moment limited in terms of useable applications) faster transcoding, and believe me, working with ProRes versions, via L&T, then re-linking to R3D for grading is not THAT slow - you can always leave the odd batch import running overnight. You sleep, right?

You'll find all the info about the workflow you need on the whitepaper included with the RED FCS installer.

Once RED Rocket can be used inside NLE's, then colour me interested - until then, for small setups, you have better ways of spending $5000.