Split R3D

[JonathanF]

I know it's been in the works for some time, but I wanted to check in on this as we're close to having a complete edit on our current project and I would like to be able to send just one drive over to the colorist instead of sending down tens of drives.

What would be nice is a utility that would allow FCP to spit out "split" R3D files that could be conformed to a single drive to ship out of house instead of having to manually pull all the clips and assemble the lot.

The cool part of this feature would be the removal of any head or tail on the original takes and the writing out of cut specific R3D files from the originals with no head or tail (unless we have a transition).

Any eta on such a beast or SDK support for such a thing so we can hack it ourselves?

Thanks!

:J

[Jimmy Christensen]

I don't think you'll ever see this function until it becomes a part of the SDK. I already did the application, but got threatened to get sued unless I removed it. Claiming I used the SDK to reverse engineer the R3D format (which I didn't btw.). The format is not hard to re-assemble into new files, it's a quite logical format.

To me it seems that they don't want this feature unless they make it available.

[JonathanF]

Well, if we had an SDK forum for people we could have an open and frank discussion about this, but we don't so I'll refrain from making any comments that might violate my NDA.

Hey Stuart, how about getting us a SDK forum so we can have a place to discuss some of this stuff amongst the people who have the SDK? I can only benefit the community for those of us making tools to have a place to discuss our ideas.

Back the the point, we might have just done this internally to solve the problem but because this _IS_ on the roadmap we've not done it. The logic being why spend money to put a feature in we may get for free soon.

It seems this would be a pretty simple feature to get into the SDK but I suspect the Rocket stuff is highest priority... I guess what I'm asking is what would be the time estimate for this SDK feature?

:J

[Rainer Fritz]

Use Monkeyextract to consolidate your footage by a EDL or XML.

http://www.rubbermonkeysoftware.com/

best,
Rainer

[MichaelP]

Well, if we had an SDK forum for people we could have an open and frank discussion about this, but we don't so I'll refrain from making any comments that might violate my NDA.

I think it would be great to have a mailing list for all signatories of the SDK and am surprised this hasn't been done yet. Only good things would come from it - like consistencies in image look, metadata, etc. I thought there might have been a developer meeting at the RED Super Meet at NAB but that did not come to pass. We can only suggest it again. It would be a win/win situation for all involved.

Michael

[MichaelP]

Use Monkeyextract to consolidate your footage by a EDL or XML.

I think this is a great feature in Monkey, but is still restricted to the entire original clip regardless of how much or little was used. Eventually, if spans were supported, you need a user defined tolerance value to decide to divide it or takes it in entirety.

Right now it truly is like a piece of film where you want to pull flash to flash, but film has a real good reason why you don't want to do that - in 35mm it's destructive to the adjacent frames. In the world of digital it is not.

Michael

[JonathanF]

Yes I can do that already as I have an xml parser that makes a list of the footage and copies it to a consolidated directory and then modifies the paths in the edl accordingly. That's the easy part.

What I'm hoping for is the ability to cut the 30 minute r3D files that have been cut into smaller pieces from interviews, time lapse, overcranked footage, etc. all into only the necessary lenghts for the final conform.

We have some long interview takes that are 30+ minutes that have 2-3 min of footage in the final edit. I'd rather not have to schlep that to the final 'out of house' DI as it will mean more drives and consume more space for the them as well.

It's also a great feature if you're doing docs because you could easily build a directory of cutaways using such a feature and that would make finding the right clip from one thumbnail previews in the UI a lot easier.

:J