Fast import?

[Zach Hilton]

Has anyone successfully exported from Redcine to DNxHD and then was able to do a fast import into Avid? All tests that we've done have been negative. Would be interested to know if there are any success stories out there.

[MichaelP]

We are looking at issues with "fast import".

Michael

[Zach Hilton]

So I take it, it currently isn't possible with Redcine exported footage? Good to know.

[Jason Diamond]

i think the workaround would be to generate new "proxies" with REDAlert! for now.

[Anders Holck]

Big Problem with RedCine (Besides the obvious instability) is the basic Quicktime settings.
So it's impossible to set the correct options in the Avid codecs.
When rendering to Avid DV in PAL it's not possible to set the color sampling to 4:2:0, so it defaults to 4:1:1. And then Avid will recompress at import.

[Seth Larney]

Anyone had any luck with fast import going from Scratch to Avid?

I'm having the same issue. Scratch doesn't have QT export options to set the datarate of the DNxHD exports.

I've tried every import and transcode setting in both 720p and 1080p in Media Composer that there is without luck..

Cheers!

[Seth Larney]

Hi Michael,

Wondering if you have had any luck with the 'fast import' issue from Scratch to Avid?

It would be great to know if it's just me doing something wrong, or if there is no way to do it currently .. or ..

If we can 'fast import' DNxHD's from Scratch into Avid, then our offline/online workflow with Scratch is complete.. at the moment it's kind of a thorn in our side :/

[MichaelP]

It is an issue we are tracking down - it is not something you are doing wrong.

Michael

[Seth Larney]

Hey Michael,

Thanks for this! I just write a note in the other thread before I saw this.

Any clues on when we might know?
Sorry to be a hassle, I know you guys are on it!

Thanks again,
S.

[fiendish]

I had some success with fast import when I was testing back in February. This was with build 90, v1.04. I was rendering 25fps which gave me DNxHD 175. After some experimenting, I worked out that if used a 1080 50i project (rather than 25p which you would expect) fast import would work. This was along with selecting 709 colourspace and also the 'use source resolution' check box. This fast import import did seem slower than usual though.

[Seth Larney]

Hmm.. thanks for the tip. Only problem is we are in 24fps for which there is no interlaced mode. I wonder if this would still work for PAL though (being totally ignorant to what the underlaying problem actually is).

[fiendish]

Well it would seem to be that given that Redcine is not allowing any user control over selection of DNxHD that it's choosing the 1080 50i 175 codec rather than the 25p version.

As to working for PAL are you talking creating SD dailies? A quick test you can do even with some 24fps r3ds is to just to change the fps to 25 in Redcine and export. The quality of this conversion is excellent.

[Dylan Reeve]

This has been an issue for a while, REDCine offers no way to access the QT codec options control, so you can't set the bitrate. I believe it will use a default set for each given framerate it's presented with. I have done very little experimentation myself.

I would have thought the easiest option would be to have an 'Options' button in REDCine, but that hasn't happened as yet, so I assume there's somehow more to it.

Opening the resulting file in QT and checking out the properties might at least give you some indication of what the resulting file actually is.

It is important, to get fast import to work, to use 709 levels and source resolution. That's always the case.

[MichaelP]

There is more to it and we are working with RED to access the QT header for each resolution directly.

Michael

[Dylan Reeve]

Sounds good Michael