REDCODE RAW to REDCODE RAW?

[Michael Mann]

Does REDCINE allow to (smart)render a segment of an REDCODE RAW clip to REDCODE RAW? This would be useful to shorten native clips.

[tj williams]

Previous postings seem to indicate that you can select in Red Cine, while the mag is attached to the computer. to render out partial clips to any codec.
If this is true as I currently believe then, there should be no need for this workaround. If it is not true it represents a great difficulty as for instance in a 40 minute continuously rolling interview, where only about 2b minutes will be used. We would have to render a 40 minute clip to use 2 minutes. Now that would be terrible!!!

[Stuart English]

No to REDCODE RAW to REDCODE RAW renders, but the desirability of trimming a clip before exporting it from REDCINE is understood.

[Nick Shaw]

I understand that it is not possible to render to the RAW codec, but what about using eg FCP's media manager to consolidate clips. If there is no re-compression cycle to go through, will it be possible to trim clips and end up with shorter clips whose media is still RAW?

[Stuart English]

I'll comment later ..

[tj williams]

Nick why would you want that? just another camera guy goin why why why...

[Michael Mann]

... the desirability of trimming a clip before exporting it from REDCINE is understood.
Good. Thanks.

[Don Woods]

I'll comment later ..

Interesting very interesting. Makes you think we might get to use RAW more then just recording

[Nick Shaw]

Nick why would you want that? just another camera guy goin why why why...

I would imagine there will be times when you may just leave the camera rolling, waiting for just the right moment to happen. This will create very large files on the RED-DRIVE, but when you are archiving the media you might be very confident that most of a particular file was useless, and you would only want to archive the short useful bit. I would prefer to be able to archive that small clip as RAW, rather than re-compressing.

[Michael Mann]

I would imagine there will be times when you may just leave the camera rolling, waiting for just the right moment to happen. This will create very large files on the RED-DRIVE, but when you are archiving the media you might be very confident that most of a particular file was useless, and you would only want to archive the short useful bit. I would prefer to be able to archive that small clip as RAW, rather than re-compressing.
Nick, that is exactly the situation I have in mind. We simply should be able to trim native RAW clips to segments that are worth to archive.

[Rob Lohman]

This has been discussed before. The response was that this currently is not in REDCINE. It is a feature we understand and might make it in a future software release either as a new tool or incorporated in existing software.

It is on my future wish list...

[Michael Mann]

Good to know, thank you.

[Simon Blackledge]

So this is a "read only" codec? otherwise could you not just cut the clip in quicktime as it's just a codec and save a self contained ? :-/

[Stuart English]

"I would imagine there will be times when you may just leave the camera rolling, waiting for just the right moment to happen. This will create very large files on the RED-DRIVE, but when you are archiving the media you might be very confident that most of a particular file was useless, and you would only want to archive the short useful bit. I would prefer to be able to archive that small clip as RAW, rather than re-compressing"

I'll give you two hints as to why this can be addressed in due course of time.

- Clips are recorded as multiple 2GB files. These files are held in a Clip Folder. So you could dump unwanted files when transfering to your archive.

- Each frame in each clip is encoded as an "I" frame. So if we did trim a file there is no re-encoding to do.

Of course you'd need to make sure that all the metadata links don't get broken. So as I said before, we understand the issues, more information later.

[Michael Hastings]

Doesn't the camera have a retroloop or prerecord buffer function? On my Ikegami editcams you can set a buffer (from 3 to 300 seconds) and the drive is always recording (kindof like TIVO) and only when the keeper action happens do I hit the record button then the drive saves not only whatever comes after it keeps the buffered part as well. In other words if I am waiting for the mountain lion to pounce I use maybe a 30 second buffer, once he actually pounces I hit record and I get the 30 seconds before plus all the new stuff until I hit stop. This is an extemely useful feature, so you don't get the large files that Nick describes, and should be easy to implement on any recorder that goes to easily rewritable media such as a hard drive. Ikegami has had this since the mid-90s, TIVO since the beginning, and DigiBetacams also have it (although a little tougher to implement since you have to dump the cache to the tape - I don't have digibetas so I don't know how they dealt with the time code.)

With all that said, some clip management of raw files for archiving will be essential for those of us who shoot a lot of stuff for stock.



I would imagine there will be times when you may just leave the camera rolling, waiting for just the right moment to happen. This will create very large files on the RED-DRIVE, but when you are archiving the media you might be very confident that most of a particular file was useless, and you would only want to archive the short useful bit. I would prefer to be able to archive that small clip as RAW, rather than re-compressing.