Minimum system requirements for working with Red footage

[Bryce Lansing]

I'm DPing a music video with the RED soon, and I'd like to be the one to handle the raw files before I hand them back to the producer. If I were an editor, I'd probably upgrade my RAM to be able to work smoothly with 4k files. But I just want to be able to tweak the raw files for this project, and avoid having to buy more RAM. Will my system work for these purposes?

Mac Pro Tower, Dual 2.66 GHZ processer. Only 1 GB of Ram.

[Von Thomas]

As a minimum, I'd buy another 3GB or ram (giving you 4GB), and if you are serious a minimum of 8GB would be the ticket.

[Bryce Lansing]

I downloaded a sample 4K .r3d file and played around with it on Red Alert, and was able to render it. The rendered .mov wouldn't play smoothly, but I don't really need it to since I won't be editing it. Will my working on a slow system effect the actual footage at all? Will it play fine on another faster computer?

[Brandon Fraley]

i work with red stuff all the time on my 3 year old Macbook Pro. 2.3ghz core duo, 2gb RAM.

Takes a lot longer to render, but the point is you can do it with practically any intel mac.

[Craig Parkes]

Assuming you are not transcoding the footage, then there is no reason to get new RAM - just load them up in RED ALERT, tweak them in RED ALERT, save the RSX file and communicate to the editor that is the look you want them transcoded with.

If you are wanting to do the transcoding (doesn't sound like it) then you shouldn't have any issues (unless they are doing a workflow that doesn't take into account the RSX file - but that would be a communication issue between set and post more than a hardware/technical issue.)

[jimhare]

Sounds like you ARE transcoding, but no, it won't degrade your footage to have less RAM, just take longer.

If this is your only project, just go for it. But if you plan to get into this more, you will want more power.

I use an old Mac Pro 2.66 as well, but have 6GB of RAM and it works pretty well.

[Jonathan L. Bowen]

Wow 1 gig of RAM though, probably time to upgrade anyway, lol. I have a 3-year-old Mac laptop that has 1 gig of RAM and I retired that. Even this laptop I'm using has 4, my desktop has 10. Pretty much 4 is a minimum. I'm surprised you can open a Web browser with a gig of RAM frankly. LOL, j/k