Newbie RED Postproduction Questions

[Colin Rootz]

Greetings all!

I'm new to RED Workflow, and I'm getting my head together so I'll know how to outfit myself when the time comes. What are the recommendations for a post production suite for the RED camera? I gather it may be split across several machines, i.e. Editing Station, Coloring Station, Motion gfx station etc.. What are the specs of (a) machine(s) ideal for these tasks - machine specs, software specs and add-in card/peripherals specs?

Thanks,
Colin Rootz

 

[Dominic Cochran]

I never thought I'd be saying this in a million years but get Adobe Premier for your edit software. At least for now its the most painless way to edit Red footage. This will almost certainly not be true in a few months, but for now it is.

It might already be untrue since I haven't much looked into post offerings at NAB yet.

 

[Colin Rootz]

Thanks Dominic,

Fortunately, Premiere is my NLE of choice. Is there any additional hardware I would be well advised to get? Like add-in cards and such? I know there's a whole class of such products for HD by AJA and Blackmagic etc. Any for RED? Also - is there a particular machine (PC) or machine spec that I should work towards, or do I just get the most muscle (multiple quad cores and 24GB of RAM etc.) available?

Colin

 

[Cory Monty]

Hey man, have you checked out RED Rocket? (announced at NAB).

As far as the muscle, it depends if you want 2K streams in real-time or if you're happy with downresing your footage for an offline. For the former, you'll probably need a good 8-core with a sizeable amount of RAM, and a RAID array. And even if you want to transcode, you'll probably want multiple cores for faster transcode times.

 

[Colin Rootz]

Thanks Cory,

I'll check it out. My next bit of research will be into offline editing. Anywhere you can point me to for some info?

Colin

 

[Dominic Cochran]

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/supportedformats.html

Scroll down to the RED section and get the PDF, also here on Reduser look in the Red Workflow forum in the Adobe section. On my 2.8 GhZ Dual Quad core(16 GB Ram, but only 8 is required), Premier instantly imports the R3D files (NO transcoding whatsoever) and you can edit in real time natively. Super painless, super easy, no dealing with proxies.

We've been an Avid shop for 12 years but this is tempting us to switch! Not really since hopefully Avid will have something similar soon, but man, it's REALLY easy.