Article on RED Filmmaker Magazine

[Esteban Sosnitsky]

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/fall2008/redone.php
A friend of mine wrote this.
He didnt know I had a RED.
I somehow share his views, simple and objective.

Cheers.

[sbrookens]

The workflow is getting there. We just need to be patient.

[Steve Sherrick]

Using multiple formats and multiple frame rates has always been problematic for any editing system. They have improved over the years with dynamic timelines, but problems still come up.

[Patrick Tresch]

These are no NEWS!

When did he write his article? In May?

RED workflow is not Soooo difficult any more.

Patrick

[Kevin Wild]

Not difficult?? Really? I think it depends on what you're doing.

We've had a LOT of issues working on a large corporate video that had a ton of interviews that were all 20-30 min in length.

#1-There is no workflow to use RED Cine to only do partial clips of the interviews. If you only use :05 from the 30 minute interview, we are locked into exporting the entire interview. (Crimson will NOT work on long clips...known issue.)

#2-RED Rushes & RED Cine crash regularly. We have 2 different Intel Macs. One of them is brand new, very clean, all latest software, 8 gigs of RAM...still crashes A LOT. It's hardly the "leave it overnight" scenario we thought it would be. It hasn't done an overnight render yet on these long clips. We have resorted to only doing 3 clips at a time in RED Rushes...hardly the "batch" type process it was meant to do. Oh, and the crashes on these long clips happen, as luck would have it, after you've waited 2 hours...

#3-The working build 16 still, as far as I know, puts out proxies that are fully green. We tried 2 different machines...everything is green. So...to find a clip you have to RENDER, RENDER, RENDER just to look at what footage you want to bring into the timeline. VERY frustrating...

So...maybe everyone has great workflow experiences in working with short clips, but RED has a ways to go for interview-based stories. This stuff has been very frustrating. I've posted MANY times looking for answers, of which most have gone unanswered from anyone from RED. But I could always check the manual...um, oh yeah...none.

I LOVE the RED so far, but the workflow sure seems like it RED has thrown it out there for users and 3rd parties to figure out. I hope they put some energy into this soon.

[MikeHedge]

crazy!!!!! ATDS ATDS www.asthedustsettles.com (http://www.asthedustsettles.com)

[Chris Parker]

Not difficult?? Really? I think it depends on what you're doing.

#1-There is no workflow to use RED Cine to only do partial clips of the interviews. If you only use :05 from the 30 minute interview, we are locked into exporting the entire interview. (Crimson will NOT work on long clips...known issue.)


what if you used redalert to set in and out points of the :05 that you need of the 20-minute interview, and then use red rushes to only render the rsx in/out points? seems like a viable workaround so you can avoid rendering half hour clips when you only need 5 seconds out of them....

[Chris Parker]

or monkey extract with the settings to only render the clip's in and out points, and not the whole clip?

[Rocco Schult]

is a solution, but doesn't really make it easier.
Having a 3rd party software and later finding out it doesn't work, better take another one ?
Or pre-steps before the painfully batch conversion can start ?
And everything gets renewed, every now and then, but never out-of-beta-lyzed.
Yes, frustrating.
REDline is the most stable converter so far.
A pity it is only command-line. REDrushes in a stable state would be it.
And multi-platform for the other side of the river.

[Steve Sherrick]

is a solution, but doesn't really make it easier.
Having a 3rd party software and later finding out it doesn't work, better take another one ?
Or pre-steps before the painfully batch conversion can start ?
And everything gets renewed, every now and then, but never out-of-beta-lyzed.
Yes, frustrating.
REDline is the most stable converter so far.
A pity it is only command-line. REDrushes in a stable state would be it.
And multi-platform for the other side of the river.

Have you tried Clipfinder?

[conrad gaunt]

Or set an in and out in Redcine, for 5secs, although..

... after working flawlessly on my clean new imac 4gig ati 3ghz for several months, its decided to periodically produce garbage now and then. Red alert to the rescue.
The major difference between the two seems to be the use of the GPU, but it ain't helping having a realtime interface, and no output. Redcine on the same machine, but under bootcamp, running 32bit XP, cannot produce any ungarbled images, of any kind, although footage can be scrubbed in either operating system. Sometimes what you see is what you get, and sometimes the output is more like a Warhol than the preview. The fact that the preview is often good, makes me wonder how the chain can go so awry, right at the end, before a DPX/TIFF is written, although I realise the preview is only 24bit.
This is frustrating, but at least Red Alert (which I've used little, because ironically I like the realtime responsiveness of Redcine, with its GPU accelerated interface!), hasn't let me down yet, fingers crossed. I'm sure it'll all work out in the end. I can't afford an alternative solution right now, but dipping my toe into the dual boot Mac pool was definately the right decision.. spread your eggs, er, not your legs?...never surrender!

[Colin Hubick]

or monkey extract with the settings to only render the clip's in and out points, and not the whole clip?

Monkey Extract is awesome, we've used it quite extensively with much success.

[James Press]

What about Mark Toia/Mike Seymore's "piss easy" workflow using QT proxies (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=19019)--especially given you're distributable is video ie not cinema??

[Kevin Wild]

JimPress-RED Alert does fix that partial clip issue, though I would rather use the better correction tools of RED Cine. But it doesn't solve the batch issues we're needing for doing a ton of these long clips. But thanks for that. I honestly forgot that RED Alert now has audio and can do that.

I'm also going to look in to Monkey Extract, so thanks for those suggestions. Crimson was a no-go on using the FCP generated XML doc for long clips...maybe Monkey is different.

[Stuart English]

The working build 16 still, as far as I know, puts out proxies that are fully green.

Thats probably not a camera issue. Make sure you are using a recent version of the RED QuickTime Codec - v3.5.0 for example.

[Esteban Sosnitsky]

These are no NEWS!

When did he write his article? In May?

RED workflow is not Soooo difficult any more.

Patrick

Its not so difficult? maybe.. but it aint easy just yet.
For me the point of his article is that no matter the size of your production, the workflow solutions are not up to the camera's high standards and groundbreaking breathtaking capabilities. When you shoot its awesome, when you cut, not so much. We will have to deal with it until the major software companies like the ones that produce FCP or Premiere decide to read the files natively. Editing with proxies suck, prores from the log and transfers arent r3ds, and transcoding takes forever. There are a lot of people who are resourceful and optimistic, but reality is that the workflow needs much more work than the camera at this point.

[Kevin Wild]

Stuart-We had all green proxies on the latest everything. Brand new computer, so everything was freshly loaded. Green proxies everywhere. It was a HUGE pain on these long interviews that we had, as we couldn't see picture at all until the entire thing was rendered.

Kevin

[Patrick Tresch]

Its not so difficult? maybe.. but it aint easy just yet.
For me the point of his article is that no matter the size of your production, the workflow solutions are not up to the camera's high standards and groundbreaking breathtaking capabilities. When you shoot its awesome, when you cut, not so much. We will have to deal with it until the major software companies like the ones that produce FCP or Premiere decide to read the files natively. Editing with proxies suck, prores from the log and transfers arent r3ds, and transcoding takes forever. There are a lot of people who are resourceful and optimistic, but reality is that the workflow needs much more work than the camera at this point.

You got me... :sarcasm:

Patrick

[Petros Nousias]

Redrushes crashed everytime I tried to render a big list of R3Ds. The solution, suggested by Stuart English was easy and I have been using it every day in a feature film Im doing: Export a script from RedRushes, execute it from terminal.

[Kevin Wild]

Petros...can you elaborate on how to do this? I'm not familiar with scripts...

Kevin