Typical transcode times in REDCine?

[Julio Ibanez]

I'm just starting to put test out the workflow for RED using Avid. So far, I've managed to bring some raw footage into REDCine and create and output a simple timeline. But that 1 minute timeline took two hours to transcode into DNxHD files! I'll have to double check my system specs, but I'm fairly certain it's nowhere near that old or slow.

So I guess my question is, what are the usual transcode times for folks on a PC who are engaged in this sort of workflow? Is this par for the course? Or am I overlooking something obvious?

In any case, I'm looking forward to participating here in the future. It looks like a very helpful forum so far!

Julio Ibanez

[MichaelP]

Are you using a full or hapf debayer when transcoding? That will have a big impact on times.

Michael

[Julio Ibanez]

That's a good question. Where do I check for that setting? Also, if I step down to half, presumably to save time, what's the tradeoff?

Julio

[MichaelP]

There are several posts on that - if finishing for HD, then the 1/2 debayer high quality would probably be great for most footage - if the footage has lots of details and high frequency, then a full debayer might be needed.

Michael

[Julio Ibanez]

Fair enough. I'll retry my test with a lower debayer setting.

Thanks for the advice!

Julio

[Greg Gelber]

We just tried transcoding a 5 second clip on the Symphony/Nitris and it took 45 minutes. The Mac down the hall went about 10x faster for the same clip. Transcoding a 4k 1080 23.97 file down to 720x486.

Mac Specs:
Dual Quad core 3.0 8GB RAM


Avid Symphony/Nitris Specs:
HP xw8200 Workstation
Dual Xeon 3.40GHz processors
2.5GB RAM

Would maxing out the RAM on the Avid make any difference or are the dual Xeon processors outdated for this technology which is something I thought I read in one of the Red threads?

[Frank Mirbach]

Transcoding on our 8core MacPro needs an eternity :(

[David_D]

Transcoding times in RedCine can also be affected by the monitoring quality you've set in RedCine, as strange as it sounds. From what I can figure, if you are running a full debayering, you should have your monitoring quality set to Full, half debayer, set monitoring to half, etc. The render times and this seem to go hand in hand in some way. I can generally get a transcode time down to about 20 to 1 (20 minutes or so of render for 1 minute of footage) for a full debayering and scale to 1920x1080 in DnX HD, which is the best time I've seen full Hi Res. This is about comparable to say using monkey extract to render out hi res DPX files, which is pretty good (all things considered).