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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 :)

Will Scarlet X require a Red Rocket?

Norman B. Miller

Norman B. Miller

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I will be doing a feature length, documentary that utilizes allot of fine art in it; and thus the need for a quality image. This is a personal project so its being done on a shoe-string budget. I only work on personal projects that don't have deadlines, and can afford to spend a little extra time to save money. (As long as it's not inordinate) I have a dual 2.26 quad core Intel Xeon Mac. Can I get away without getting a Red Rocket... This may be a deal breaker for me if I have to buy one.... Thanks in advance for your input.. searched this topic but could not find any info..
 
If you edit in prores compressions or proxys and then just do a 4k online edit once you are done. How much RAM to you have? I built a pc for little more than a grand that can do 4k realtime playback at full res.
 
Norman B. Miller said:
I will be doing a feature length, documentary that utilizes allot of fine art in it; and thus the need for a quality image. This is a personal project so its being done on a shoe-string budget. I only work on personal projects that don't have deadlines, and can afford to spend a little extra time to save money. (As long as it's not inordinate) I have a dual 2.26 quad core Intel Xeon Mac. Can I get away without getting a Red Rocket... This may be a deal breaker for me if I have to buy one.... Thanks in advance for your input.. searched this topic but could not find any info..
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Real world example happened to me today:

We have, at work, the same Mac Pro you do. Our Red Rocket was off at a shoot. I had to transcode 38 clips.

I started at 9AM. By 3PM, only 9 clips were finished.

The Red Rocket returned. I stopped the transcodes, and started them back up, this time using the Rocket.

I checked back 45 minutes later, and the remaining 28 clips were done.


If you're not used to standard workflow with Red files, in general, the standard operating procedure is that you would transcode to ProRes, edit edit edit edit, conform back to the Reds for grading, and then do a final export of the project. If you're using Adobe Premiere, you can actually work straight with the Red files instead of transcodeing. You'd take a bit of a hit in workflow, but nothing too severe, and if you do, a better Graphics card (NVIDIA with a CUDA engine and Mercury playback) will help out a TON, allow real-time playback, and be, tops, half the cost of a Red Rocket.

I'm not as up to date with Avid, but I believe there are some tools there for working with Reds directly? Especially now that Avid 6 just came out, they are making a huge push toward being better with formats, Red included. Someone else with better knowledge, please chime in.

Final Cut, though, unfortunately, just ain't there. You're only hurting yourself if you don't transcode to ProRes first. Believe me, we've tried. Ain't pretty.

You may have the option, depending on your timelines, to rent a Rocket, transcode what you need to transcode, and then rent it again when you transcode the color grades (or not even; we don't use the Rocket for our color grading. But we're also outputting :30 second commercials, not feature documentaries).

In the future, hopefully every program and hardware setup will work with Reds natively. For now, transcoding to RroRes is the standard policy for editing in FCP on a Mac. You can do that without a rocket. It just takes longer. Very, very noticeably longer.
 
Norman B. Miller said:
I will be doing a feature length, documentary that utilizes allot of fine art in it; and thus the need for a quality image. This is a personal project so its being done on a shoe-string budget. I only work on personal projects that don't have deadlines, and can afford to spend a little extra time to save money. (As long as it's not inordinate) I have a dual 2.26 quad core Intel Xeon Mac. Can I get away without getting a Red Rocket... This may be a deal breaker for me if I have to buy one.... Thanks in advance for your input.. searched this topic but could not find any info..
Click to expand...

You should rent one once you've got your footage. It'll take ages to transcode if you don't have one. Personally, I think it's mandatory, but that's just me. :-)
 
You can buy 3x4gb ram sticks for around $70 so you might want to beef it up a bit with that and the extra ram will help.
 
Dylan Pingitore said:
You can buy 3x4gb ram sticks for around $70 so you might want to beef it up a bit with that and the extra ram will help.
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On a Mac Pro you'll want to upgrade your ram in pairs (specifically, certain slots are paired up) and ideally, have the same kind of ram in each slot. Yes, both of these things make a noticeable difference in performance. 8x2GB ram isn't that expensive though, so it's not a huge hit to the wallet.
 
Yup, same here. Built a PC with lots of memory & internal drives for under $1300 (AMD Phenom II X4 processor). I use Adobe Premiere & After Effects CS5 to edit 4k R3D files in realtime, with no problems at full res playback. No unnecessary renders, no proxies, etc -- just the original R3D's imported in!

Dylan Pingitore said:
If you edit in prores compressions or proxys and then just do a 4k online edit once you are done. How much RAM to you have? I built a pc for little more than a grand that can do 4k realtime playback at full res.
Click to expand...
 
Doug, a while ago, I directed/edited 2 music videos -- one shot on Red One and the other on 5DMKII. Took between 5-6 hours to render the R3D edited music video (http://vimeo.com/24181952) and about 2 hours for the 5D vid (http://vimeo.com/23352948) in Media Encoder. Not a side by side, but perhaps might give you an idea?!


Doug Beatty said:
Has someone done testing with CS5+ Adobe Media Encoder render times for R3Ds? It would be cool to see a side by side comparison of HD h.264s from Canon DSLRs vs. 4K R3Ds.
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Prince Bagdasarian said:
Doug, a while ago, I directed/edited 2 music videos -- one shot on Red One and the other on 5DMKII. Took between 5-6 hours to render the R3D edited music video (http://vimeo.com/24181952) and about 2 hours for the 5D vid (http://vimeo.com/23352948) in Media Encoder. Not a side by side, but perhaps might give you an idea?!
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That's good news for Scarlet folks worried about having to spring for a Red Rocket! I'm assuming the same output was used out of AME, so seeing as how the R3D video is around 2.5x as long as the 5D video and the render was 2.5-3x longer in time, it doesn't look like you're taking much of a render time hit.

Definitely way over simplifying things here, but it's encouraging! What are your system specs, Prince?
 
I might not be 100% accurate on my render times but I know for certain it took less than 7 hrs for the Red video render in AME, although we did various versions of it (i.e. different color passes). But yes, editing realtime/rendering R3D's isn't a challenge at all in Premiere.

Cannot recall the exact system specs but the PC has a AMD Athlon II X4 3.1ghz (?) with around 8GB of ram, internal eSata hard drives, etc.

Definitely never had a need for Red Rocket for 4k editing for my projects -- might be a different story on a 5k feature film for example.


Doug Beatty said:
That's good news for Scarlet folks worried about having to spring for a Red Rocket! I'm assuming the same output was used out of AME, so seeing as how the R3D video is around 2.5x as long as the 5D video and the render was 2.5-3x longer in time, it doesn't look like you're taking much of a render time hit.

Definitely way over simplifying things here, but it's encouraging! What are your system specs, Prince?
Click to expand...
 
Interesting - as a long time Mac user (and hackintosh) after switching from PC's in like 2001 I'm very curious about the new 8 core Bulldozer/Zambezi AMD Processor combined with some brutal Nvidia graphics card running Cs5.5... I wonder what its like sharing a media pool between Macs and PC's these days... Time to get testing I suppose...
 
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