Playtime is over

[georgewde]

Playtime is over for me, I need a solid workflow and I need it now. I havn't been able to get Recine to work at all on PC and its not for lack of trying.

Is it it time to buy a Mac?

Basically we shoot 3k/50 and then convert to 1080p50 and edit in HD in Avid. Export 16 bit TIF or DPX and then import a DNxHD 10 bit Avid file. No going back to R3D files (for the most part). How long does it actually take to load a 1 hour sequence 3k/50 in Redcine and render to TIF? Is it wise to do shorter renders clip by clip? Does it run reliably over night? Crashes - no? What is the state of affairs right now?

 

[Noah Kadner]

That would be the simplest solution. RED makes no secret that while it respects the PC world and is working at parity across the applications support, they use Macs more... Certainly some 3rd party support you're missing out on- Crimson Workflow, etc.

Putting the religious Mac vs. PC fight aside as it's irrelevant. You've already invested 10s of thousands of dollars on your camera, why not another $5K for a computer to use with it? It's just another box of hardware.

Noah

 

[Lucas Wilson]

Playtime is over for me, I need a solid workflow and I need it now. I havn't been able to get Recine to work at all on PC and its not for lack of trying.

Is it it time to buy a Mac?

Basically we shoot 3k/50 and then convert to 1080p50 and edit in HD in Avid. Export 16 bit TIF or DPX and then import a DNxHD 10 bit Avid file. No going back to R3D files (for the most part). How long does it actually take to load a 1 hour sequence 3k/50 in Redcine and render to TIF? Is it wise to do shorter renders clip by clip? Does it run reliably over night? Crashes - no? What is the state of affairs right now?

George - have you posted a logfile? Sent an email to support at RED? Talked to Kevin? etc, etc...

Lucas

 

[Christian Berg]

I´m having huge problems too. On one IntelMac we get freeze frame when exporting to QuickTime and on a nother mac we get the first frame but the rest is digitally messed up. Like intelaced but with ghostimages in triple.

Please Red, remake redcine or just make redalert work with a timeline or multiple clips in a projectstyle workflow. Thanks!

 

[Wayne D]

hi georgewde - i had the most success doing shorter clips as the precessing needs a good graphics card in the mix.

we are using WINDOWS XP (not a mac in sight) and never missed a beat. do you have more than one PC? i spread the load over a few boxes and do smaller clip outputs.

and remember...all computers do the same thing......crash!
i like to refer to them as having "proximity chips" - the closer you are to them, the more they will crash.

 

[Tim Sutherland]

If you want to get a mac and still edit avid, you're at least going to have to use compressor or mpegstreamclip (www.squared5.com) to batch convert quicktimes BEFORE importing and doing offline, or render out redcine like you already do.

The real advantage imho in going MAC is to use it with final cut, which is a great way to do offline, then use Crimson workflow to go back online. Saves space and time, and you can cut as soon as you download the footage.

Should you do this? It depends, but it is a great option.

 

[laguun]

The real advantage imho in going MAC is to use it with final cut, which is a great way to do offline, then use Crimson workflow to go back online. Saves space and time, and you can cut as soon as you download the footage.

We have OSX installed on our PCs, bought FCP years ago as well as crimson 1 or 2 months ago.

It is a good tool, but FCP and Crimson have several important limitations:
a) RC / Crimson will not work on a full feature project - you have to split into several pieces. Thats works but be aware of it.
b) crimson (as of now) isnt R16, but only R15 compatible - ian however seems to be on it.
c) FCP cannot online redcode at its full quality and not in its full color: FCP is limited to 8bit RGB, no XYZ and doesnt support 4K resolution. You can trick FCP up to more than its 2K (by using cineform, hacking the xml) and with gluetools you can trick some rgb 10 bit data in it, but still FCS is limiting resolution and colordepth. For typical 1080p & YUV (especially TV) however this is less an issue than for cinema releases and film prints.

What everybody needs is
a) compability, Avid, Autodesk, Adobe, Quantel, DVS, Iridas etc are, for good reason, the *huge* majority of the installed DI and on-line suites, and many of them turn down red projects or recommend producers to go another way as they dont want to learn/use workarounds. A stable basic EDL in Redcine would solve this at once for all of them.
b) Sound. RC and RA support for sound is non-existing / minimal making them problematic for standard offline
c) File access. Right now, the huge mayority of VFX artists and 3D Animators are locked out of redcode - especially as most applications use windows and/or linux.
d) faster and multiplatform and multiapplication workflow. cineform shows how this can work.

Red announced several times that the planned april SDK has moved to end of this month, so this will allow 3hrd parties to finally close all the remaining huge gaps in the postproduction workflow for anyone.

The red camera is a great tool, and it certainly deserves a *much* better postproduction workflow than the wild collection of tools, different applications, platform-limited jobs (online native only windows, offline native only osx).

While the camera itself is easy to learn and offers many of the best concepts of the proven and existing good solutions (Arri PL, S35 etc) the postproduction workflow does the exact opposite - the common standards dont work (no edl in rc/ra), it lacks basic support for long achieved comfort (easy syncsound audio) and requires a lot of additional expertise not common to editors/vfx artists etc. For "i can stand the steam, i like the kitchen" people as most of us here, no problem - but the many scared away postpro supervisors as well as producers really should be pacified with the postpro workflow asap.

Should you do this? It depends, but it is a great option.

FCP & crimson are, especially for smaller projects and non-4k work, good and also inexpensive tools. However, quality, workflow and performance wise they are simply a class below one-step one-machine online systems (as discreet smoke i.e.), which on the other hand so far do not officially support redcode native. The announced release of the SDK in the next weeks allows a larger variety of tools.

 

[georgewde]

success with build 16 footage

success with build 16 footage

I just got 3k/50 footage from our new built 16 cameras and Redcine in Vista works just fine. No black frames. The problems I was having were with older footage I downloaded, i.e. the shuttle launch clip and Silverado footage.