Should I get the Nitris DX for RED?

[theatereleven]

Does anyone know if there is any advantage that the new Nitris DX will have for RED footage? I saw one of the Avid engineers using some RED software on a Nitris DX system at the Avid event.

Prepping for a RED feature shooting later this year (Sept) and on a warpath to get my system specs where they need to be.

As of late I've just been cutting film based stuff with the MOJO. This RED feature is going to bump my system up to a newer one, and if the Nitris will help then that too I guess. Plus I need some way to monitor the content for playback for the director and myself.

THANKS.

[Dylan Reeve]

The Nitris will have better finishing tools I believe, but will be limited to 1080p at best, I believe. If you want to finish at 2K or 4K you will still need to use a DI system like SCRATCH or Baselight. If that's the case, then you could offline on Avid MC Software only, or with HD monitoring with a Mojo DX (using DNxHD 36 or something).

[Greg M]

You should take a look at Smoke, the finest edit system on the market...and soon to have Red Raw support.

[Dylan Reeve]

I personally found editing in Smoke to be frustrating and a bit 'clunky' - it's got great finishing tools, and a much more complete editing toolset than many other comparable apps, but I wouldn't want to actually cut on it.

Personally I think I prefer Avid as a cutting tool, and for basic finishing. I think it's pretty much unbeaten for straight up editing - that's it's strength and what I like it for.

[Mark Crabtree]

You owe it to yourself to properly explore Cineform's Prospect 4K. I stumbled upon it at NAB and was trully blown away. I would never have even considered Cineform because my mindset connected them with HDV. But I was knocked over by their technology advantage in the intermediate real 4K format that let's you edit 444 4K in real time.

[Greg M]

I personally found editing in Smoke to be frustrating and a bit 'clunky' - it's got great finishing tools, and a much more complete editing toolset than many other comparable apps, but I wouldn't want to actually cut on it.

Personally I think I prefer Avid as a cutting tool, and for basic finishing. I think it's pretty much unbeaten for straight up editing - that's it's strength and what I like it for.

You obviously havent used it in awhile. No doubt Avid is a better editing tool, but the latest version of Smoke is far from clunky, and for finishing nothing is better.

[Dylan Reeve]

I haven't been in front of a Smoke for about 18 months, or longer. There was lots of room for improvement then.

[Greg M]

I haven't been in front of a Smoke for about 18 months, or longer. There was lots of room for improvement then.

We have had 3 major version releases and multiple minor in that time, Smoke 2009 just released and the improvements are significant.

[Dylan Reeve]

We have had 3 major version releases and multiple minor in that time, Smoke 2009 just released and the improvements are significant.

Sadly the uptake costs of Smoke are a little prohibitive in my current place of employment, but I'm sure I'll get a chance to play with it again sometime.

[theatereleven]

thanks everyone...so from what I can tell, the Nitris DX (or MOJO DX) will do nothing for me in "RED land" other than allow me to monitor HD...

or will it allow me to import and transcode with a DNxHD codec? i don't need to finish...i'm just an editor and not a colorist, etc. i'm fast on Avid and would rather not abandon my NLE of choice if possible.

i'm just trying to figure out if I should just used MC software only on a hefty new MAC or get the Nitris DX for this feature.

[Dylan Reeve]

I believe software only Media Composer supports all existing DNxHD resolutions. Although without hardware you won't have a way of monitoring on a proper monitor. Mojo DX seems like the best option there, if I understand correctly it should be similar to the existing Adrenaline HD system, allowing for SD and/or HD monitoring from an HD project. With a standard Mojo you'll need to be working in an SD project to support monitoring.

[theatereleven]

cool - thanks. sounds like I need to get an Intel MAC PRO as I'm Windows now and there isn't much from RED for Windows yet. =|

that's okay...i've been wanting to try a mac myself for awhile.

[Dylan Reeve]

We've been sucessfully offlining RED footage on Avid Xpress Pro 5.8 in OS X on a Octo-core Mac for a while now. Once we get the footage in on the Mac we can use it on any Avid too.

[theatereleven]

We've been sucessfully offlining RED footage on Avid Xpress Pro 5.8 in OS X on a Octo-core Mac for a while now. Once we get the footage in on the Mac we can use it on any Avid too.

oh really? so....if I didn't get a blown out Macpro but just a macbook pro and used it solely to get the RED footage in the right format, could I then edit that in MC 3.0 on Windows???

also, how is the Avid world monitoring RED right now? anyone monitoring with anything besides an Adrenaline? i guess i could get that new mojo dx, but if i'm only file based that doesn't make sense.

i need to kick stuff out to a studio monitor AND an HD display for the director.

[Dylan Reeve]

We're doing our editorial at SD, so we monitor with a good old Analogue Mojo - although, to be honest, given that we're finishing from DPX in a Baselight, Pablo or Color, I'm not too fussed about monitor, the computer monitor is fine for what we're doing. The HD Adrenaline would give us HD monitoring, if we wanted to do that way (we don't have an HD Adrenaline) - or the Mojo DX when it becomes available.

Boy, I wish I could use my Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme with Avid :(

[theatereleven]

We're doing our editorial at SD, so we monitor with a good old Analogue Mojo - although, to be honest, given that we're finishing from DPX in a Baselight, Pablo or Color, I'm not too fussed about monitor, the computer monitor is fine for what we're doing. The HD Adrenaline would give us HD monitoring, if we wanted to do that way (we don't have an HD Adrenaline) - or the Mojo DX when it becomes available.

Boy, I wish I could use my Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme with Avid :(

I just read on the Avid forums that you CAN use declink and matrox with Avid for HD monitoring. there is a whole thread in there about it:

http://community.avid.com/forums/t/57653.aspx

[Dylan Reeve]

Not quite the level of support I'd like, but it's something I might explore sometime. If I run Avid with the desktop spanned 'onto' the Decklink card I might be able to get fullscreen playback to work like I want. Interesting.

[Igor Ridanovic]

Does anyone know if there is any advantage that the new Nitris DX will have for RED footage?
THANKS.

No advantage over DS Nitris because Nitris DX does not work in full RGB. You can only finish 4:2:2. I'm not sure if this is a hardware limitation or the new Symphony Nitris DX will have 4:4:4 implemented in later releases.

Let me just sort ot the confusion to those who may not be familiar with the Avid's latest nomenclature. "Nitris DX" is a hardware box. "Nitris" is also a hardware box. "DS" is Avid's high end compositing/finishing software that runs on "Nitris."

DS Nitris is quite capable of conforming DPX files. You can generate DPX files in RedCine, conform and do 2k or 4k DI in DS Nitris and output DPX files for a film recorder. Or you can do versioning for Digital Cinema, DVD, etc.

Here's one Avid workflow for RED (http://www.kappastudios.com/?page_id=19). I'm currently working on a RED DI in DS Nitris. I'll update this (outdated) workflow as soon as I can.

[theatereleven]

that's cool, but I can't purchase a high end Avid box.

is that the only way to finish 4K RED stuff? what about the Final Cut route? I despise the idea of editing this in Final Cut, but I don't have a Nitris DS either. my assumption is that you'd have to have some high end piece of hardware for final cut too....at least to finish.

[Dylan Reeve]

FCP can't finish 4K. You can conform 2K DPX in Color but it's not ideal by any means - in my experience the EDL support is flakey, and it can do transitions or anything, so you still need FCP for that. You could take 2K DPX to Color I guess, then render uncompressed QT to FCP (with handles) for further handling.

Short of apps like SCRATCH, or Avid DS, or Smoke there's no obvious solutions for RED finishing at greater than HD/709 quality.

But I'm still pretty much a believer in offline/online workflow anyway - edit on Xpress Pro on your laptop in SD, and rent time in a Smoke or Avid DS to finish. You certainly don't need to purchase it.

[theatereleven]

Sycophant:

when you edit offline with RED footage, do you transcode to a DNxHD format or what? i'm totally for offline editing as well...film workflows are so nice! if I can get declink or matrox to work i'll just jump to the MAC, get MC 3.0 and then do an offline edit on RED - but maybe still an HD DNx codec if that is possible...

[Jason Diamond]

You use metacheater to generate an ALE from your RED footage
then Batch import that footage into the Bin the ALE import creates.
you can either transcode the proxies on import to the desired resolution or don't tie up your machine and use compressor to batch them all to the desired DNx res then fast import them when you are ready to work.
after that its just shooting an EDL to scratch or another "finishing" program to maximize you CC and other finishing issues.

We are working on the AVID side of Crimson with ian so we'll be running it thru its paces as soon as hes ready to go and we'll be using MC 3.0 so we're ready for the transition when it starts shipping.

[theatereleven]

okay....wow, that actually sounds really simple.

question: compressor...this is a mac program yes?

if I were not to use compressor, and had a new quad core mac with say at least 8GB of RAM, would it be realistic to let Avid do the proxy conversion?

and one last question jedi (sorry): when you say proxy...I only know that term from IT relating to a server. what is a proxy in this scenario exactly? i'm not dumb, just spent more time with ethernet and windows server than video concepts at this point. =)

[Dylan Reeve]

Sycophant:

when you edit offline with RED footage, do you transcode to a DNxHD format or what? i'm totally for offline editing as well...film workflows are so nice! if I can get declink or matrox to work i'll just jump to the MAC, get MC 3.0 and then do an offline edit on RED - but maybe still an HD DNx codec if that is possible...

I've only been using SD resolutions - DV25 actually. But I did import a proxy file as DNxHD120 early on I think, it looked pretty good, but I had no HD monitoring option in Avid at the time, so I didn't really take a good look at it. If I get a chance I will try again with our Decklink, and the Panasonic 26" HD monitor we're trialling at the moment - see how it looks.

[Dylan Reeve]

[QUOTE=theatereleven;206417and one last question jedi (sorry): when you say proxy...I only know that term from IT relating to a server. what is a proxy in this scenario exactly? i'm not dumb, just spent more time with ethernet and windows server than video concepts at this point. =)[/QUOTE]

I'll take this one... :)

The RED One generates a set of 'Proxy' files (this can be done with RED Alert too) - basically they are Quicktime Reference files that point at the original R3D files and, using the RED QT Component, do a quick demosaic and debayer on them to generate a standard video stream that any Quicktime-aware application can deal with.

So in the Avid scenario, on a Mac, you can either import the media directly from one of the Quicktime proxy files, or you can use an intermediate step (like Compressor or REDCINE or RED Alert) to generate self-contained Quicktime files with the media.

My approach has been to import the proxy files into Avid directly, batch importing them against an ALE file generated by Jabez's excellent Metacheater application.

[theatereleven]

sycophant:

sorry - i've been off the forum today. thanks for explaining. got it.

initially, it sounds like the direct import that you do would be the easiest and even more accurate than trying to hop through another application.

on that import you can do SD or DNxHD from what it sounds....nice. why would anyone do anything else? I don't get it.

[Dylan Reeve]

on that import you can do SD or DNxHD from what it sounds....nice. why would anyone do anything else? I don't get it.

It's certainly the quickest option with Avid. But it will only work on an Intel Mac. Anyone with only Windows Avids has to use REDCINE to make conversions.

Also, importing the proxies you have no control over the clip geometry - the proxy clips don't fit perfectly within standard frame sizes, so the Avid has to perform scaling on import, which will degrade the image quality slightly.

But for an offline that's not a big deal.

[theatereleven]

what type of processing power is required if I convert in REDCINE first and edit in Avid on Windows?

i've currently got a Dell 690 with a single 3.2GHz dual core Xeon, nVidia 3500, 4GB RAM (i know - useless on 32bit XP). my feeling is that RED will kick this thing's butt.

plus the single import sounds nice...if you use an HD codec on importing the Avid resizing should still look good right? I want the director to be able to view on a 720P HD widescreen tv if possible.

(BTW - thanks for all these answers!)

[Dylan Reeve]

We can convert with REDCINE on our XW8200 workstation, which is less powerful than that, but it's not fun or fast.

On a 4K clip, you get proxies at 4096px, 2048px, 1024px and 512px (I believe). In the SD import we use the 1024px one tell it that it's 601-sized (which it's not) and we get a full frame anamorphic image. To get the aspect correct in the 16:9 monitors I also have to add an additional vertical resize to letterbox it slightly.

Experiment with the different proxy sizes into different HD resolutions and see what works best I guess.

You could make a nice pattern test image in Photoshop at the various RED proxy resolutions and import that into Avid to get an idea of how the image gets altered.

[MichaelP]

In case you missed my article in Studio Monthly on how to use RED with MetaCheater and Avid:
http://www.studiodaily.com/main/searchlist/9261.html

The next issue will have a more detailed view of MetaCheater. Keep in mind that it supports SD workflows as well if you don't want to offline in HD. Avid can handle multiple timecodes during editorial - 30, 24, 25, etc.

Michael

[theatereleven]

Dylan - good idea on the photoshop part. maybe i'll just get a Macbook pro and use that to run REDCINE, and then edit on Windows. that sure would be cheaper...how long does it take you to convert say a 1 minute take (or use any example - i just don't know exactly what 'painful' entails!)

MichealP - sweet, didn't know you'd written that. i'll check it out. (btw - good to finally put a face to the name at the avid event at uni. thanks for all your help on these forums...editors like me would drown without it)

[MichaelP]

You're welcome. Things are always changing with workflows, and they are getting better... stay tuned.

Michael

[Dylan Reeve]

Dylan - good idea on the photoshop part. maybe i'll just get a Macbook pro and use that to run REDCINE, and then edit on Windows. that sure would be cheaper...how long does it take you to convert say a 1 minute take (or use any example - i just don't know exactly what 'painful' entails!)

Yeah the test image thing was a sudden brainwave on my part, I haven't tried it. I don't have Avid at home (not even sure if my Laptop would run it) so I can't test it this weekend.

In my opinion, the best way to get the images into Avid is to import proxy files directly on a Mac Pro with Avid Media Composer or Xpress Pro on it.

Audio is still an issue. Avid can't directly import the media from the camera-generated proxy files (something to do with 24bit audio in a 32bit track). The RED Alert generated proxies don't even have audio, and neither RED Alert or REDCINE support audio export at the moment. In fact, if you lose the camera-generate proxy files I don't believe there is currently any way to get the audio out of the R3D files (aiiieeee).

[Michael Bach]

Dylan,

The easiest way to get a PC Avid working is to use Redline to generate H264 Proxies of the original R3Ds. You still need a Intel Mac to do the conversion but it is much quicker than Redalert or Redcine.

Then the normal Metacheater ALE generation and Avid import (very slow tho) can occur in the PC if you want. We use a "spare" MC Software only to do it directly to our Unity...but you could simply do it to an external drive if you wanted. If you have an HD system H264 will give you a reasonable HD image or as we do you can simply import the proxies into a SD project.

As far as I can tell there are no Audio issues doing it this way.

I want to try DNxHD but so far Redline does not support that Codec. In theory a DNxHD import into Avid should be very quick.....Michael??

Cheers

Michael

[Dylan Reeve]

Dylan,

The easiest way to get a PC Avid working is to use Redline to generate H264 Proxies of the original R3Ds. You still need a Intel Mac to do the conversion but it is much quicker than Redalert or Redcine.

If you have the Mac to run REDline on, why not just import the proxies directly into Avid on the Mac? A single Avid license can be installed on multiple machines (Mac and Windows), you just need to move the Dongle around.


As far as I can tell there are no Audio issues doing it this way.

Yeah, the limitation seems to be with Proxies, nothing except the camera can generate proxies that include audio. I haven't tried, but I assume that the media exported from the R3D file to a QT file directly includes audio.


I want to try DNxHD but so far Redline does not support that Codec. In theory a DNxHD import into Avid should be very quick.....Michael??

As long as you have the correct import settings when you bring it in it will 'Fast Import' - this is true of DNxHD generated from REDCINE.

If you want to add another step, ffmpeg has native support for DNxHD. Perhaps REDline -> Uncompressed -> DNxHD (from ffmpeg) might be efficient?

[Michael Bach]

Ok...fair point...trouble is that I can't run Avid on a New Octo macpro which cannot run 10.4. We are stuck with 10.5 so until Avid release a version that will run I am screwed:)

Have you managed to make DNxHD work?? If so which settings?? Maybe I can get Deanan to take a look at including the Codec in the next ver of Redline.

Cheers

Michael

[Dylan Reeve]

Ok...fair point...trouble is that I can't run Avid on a New Octo macpro which cannot run 10.4. We are stuck with 10.5 so until Avid release a version that will run I am screwed:)

Ahh, fair point. Media Composer 3.0 is slated for Leopard support I think.


Have you managed to make DNxHD work?? If so which settings?? Maybe I can get Deanan to take a look at including the Codec in the next ver of Redline.

DNxHD works out of REDCINE (assuming you have the Avid codecs installed), but you don't get the options dialog, so you have no control over the output settings. I believe it defaults to DNxHD 185 for 50Hz formats.

For REDline it's a little more complex I believe, I think the codecs it supports are hard-coded (it's not interfacing with QT to determine which codecs are available). Avid does licence the DNxHD format, and it's also now a SMPTE format (which is why ffmpeg supports it).

[theatereleven]

what is REDLINE? Don't see it under support on the RED site.

hey...so if the proxies cannot reference that audio on Avid import that sucks! i might as well have production use a normal field recorder instead now, as they were planning on doing sound in camera to save a step for editorial.

[Michael Bach]

Redlne is a command line utility which you get with your Redalert download.

It allows a number of functions to occur on a batch basis to R3D files without a GUI. It is much quicker and so far a more reliable way of extracting proxies of various types and sizes from the original files.

Check it out...it is our preferred way of extracting both proxies and final dpx sequences.

Cheers
Michael

[Corey Culp]

Boy, I wish I could use my Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme with Avid :(

Tell me about it.

[Peter Moretti]

I would seriously take a look at Avid's DS Assist Station. It's a software only version of DS that cost "only" $10k, and there is a 45 day free trial. You can also download from Avid the training software for unlimited use to get used to what DS can do.

I have not gone this route yet. But after a fair amount of research, I believe it could be very promising.

HTH :)