How will Adobe CS5 affect Red Rocket?

[Michael Totten]

I recently saw a very impressive video which outlined the ability of the new Premiere to playback/grade (in realtime) two R3D files stacked in the same timeline.

I'm curious, how will this affect the need for Red Rocket?

any thoughts?

[Tom.Wong]

probably not, a lot of people don't run premiere, especially in a professional post house environment as their main stream edit suite. Generally it's Avid or FCP for your industry standard in NLE's. So there will be a plentiful market for rockets. Debayer suites, SCRATCH systems, etc.

Premiere CS5 will just add another great option to the workflow, as for it ever becoming a industry standard (meaning for broadcast and a majority of feature film making), my money on is, not yet. Lot of factors go into a NLE being considered to be used, and used on everything you do, not just how many R3D's you can stack in a timeline and have real time playback.

[mikeburton]

I would have to agree with Tom here. That said, I had a chance to work with the new premiere myself recently on a 3D project and if we didn't have that tool in the tool kit we would have had a lot more time wasted waiting for dailies to be ready for editorial. I think if you are a post facility you should be using the right tool for the job and Adobes Premeire although not my favorite editor shouldn't be excluded because it's not widely used, yet. I think any pro editor and especially post facilities should have all the tools at their disposal and know when to use each one.
As far as Premeire effecting RED Rocket sales, I wouldn't be too concerned about that. Premeire can play back half res high in realtime but not Full Res high and there are still many that prefer to transcode for offline to work in Avid or Final Cut for longform projects. What premeire needs (like FCP received from Walter Murch) is an endorsment from a major film editor to really make people stop and look again. All that said, I wouldn't hesitate for a second to use Premeire on short form shows utilizing the Mercury playback engine cause it's fast and easy to go from camera to edit than any other editors right now utilizing the best possible image quality from the RED.

[Michael Totten]

probably not, a lot of people don't run premiere, especially in a professional post house environment as their main stream edit suite. Generally it's Avid or FCP for your industry standard in NLE's. So there will be a plentiful market for rockets. Debayer suites, SCRATCH systems, etc.

Premiere CS5 will just add another great option to the workflow, as for it ever becoming a industry standard (meaning for broadcast and a majority of feature film making), my money on is, not yet. Lot of factors go into a NLE being considered to be used, and used on everything you do, not just how many R3D's you can stack in a timeline and have real time playback.

Right, but if Adobe is doing it now then Apple will probably be doing it soon.

FCP with native realtime manipulation and playback of R3D files would make my Red Rocket not so special.

[Tom Lowe]

Don't be surprised if Adobe starts to eat a bit of Apple and Avid's lunch with CS5.

There is a lot of excitement out there brewing right now about CS5.

[mikeburton]

Don't be surprised if Adobe starts to eat a bit of Apple and Avid's lunch with CS5.

There is a lot of excitement out there brewing right now about CS5.

I've used it first hand and on a proper machine (ie Z800) you will thing twice about Avid or FCP for editing REDCODE.

Michael, I'm not so confident Apple will totally revamp FCP in the near future and free itself from being strictly Quicktime dependent. That's what it would take for them to be able to do what Adobe is doing now. Although, I hope I'm wrong here.

[RivaiC]

Ok, what about the editing tools ? Any better ?

[Tim Lüdin]

Yeah right. CS5 will kick ass for sure.
Obin told us a lot of good stuff already.
I hope that FCP will get it's stuff together and starts
improving. I heard that apple is writing it new from the
ground up. That would be great, because CS5 looks better and
better every day.
I dont want to jump ship. There are to many posthouses, directors, editors etc. using FCP.
Anyway, this year is gonna be a killer year for all us filmmakers.
The equipment wont the be the excuse anymore.

Tim

[Tom.Wong]

i wouldn't count on it interfering with too much of avid/fcp use. and it's gonna be tough for apple to match something along the lines of mercury playback engine. Adobe worked hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize with CUDA. Apple currently gears most of it's horsepower to work with ATI more effectively.

as for being a mainstream NLE, it needs some very very important things for it to be worthy of joining a broadcast and film entertainment environment. Media management, excellent deck control protocols, media management, stability, and uniformity. oh and media management...


avid and fcp already accomplish most of this. avid has better media management than fcp does, huge reason why a lot of ppl and networks stick with avid. fcp has better ease of use, faster updates, third party periphs. both have a uniform lossless codec. and can both provide excellent deck control with the necessary hardware.

i've had friends who have tried to use a xena card with premiere to offload to tape with a lot of trouble, premiere in itself doesn't have a uniform codec, and it's media managment is as lackluster as FCP. plus i've tried to use cs4 on many occasions. it's nowhere near stable enough for my taste...

[Santiago Marti]

I've been betatesting CS5. I've already have a quadro cx (same as quadro 4800), so it made sense. I want to upgrade to MX but i will pass the rocket offer. Right now, i don't need the 4K output. As far as performance or workflow goes, CS5 is hands down the best choice. It is like editing DV with a matrox rtx2, LOL. I've said it before here on reduser, i feel like i am using a really expensive computer, and is the same i bought last year! If plugins like magic bullet looks evolve and use CUDA on PPro, that would be revolutionary. I think it is possible. Right now, i put some effects and it plays realtime full quality (three way color corrector, gaussian blur, 3D motion, all at once, just to test). I use it on commercial projects now and people is starting to accept PPro for .r3d really well. The exports are fast, amazing. Right now, you can buy CS4 production premium + quadro 4800 + hp dreamcolor monitor for 4,200, i don't know how much the upgrade will cost but you could end up paying the same price of a rocket. I know, it is not the same, but being on the pc side of things, it is the best choice by far. Will see in one week, but i think it will be a simplifier of .r3d workflow right out of the box. No transcode, no render. I am tired of seeing the RED format misused with poor results just to cut edit time and save money. Maybe with this workflow this happens less often, we'll see.


Santiago Martí.
Red #4215 - RO3OT

[Hayhurst]

Happy to see the discussion here.

We don't think that Mercury is a replacement for the RED Rocket, more complementary.

If you want to stay native through edit and grading --- then Premiere Pro without RED Rocket is the cleanest workflow.

If you want to do a high quality transcode, and have the cash, I'd get the RED Rocket to keep my edit station free'd up --- the Rocket is fast for high quality debayers, so why not offload the station.

Same logic for previews --- if I'm just trying to look at the footage for preview / monitoring, not start the edit, then using the RED Rocket keeps your edit station free'd up so you can preview and edit more easily.

[Roberto Lequeux]

Hayhurst, perhaps you ca clarify something for me. In that video, were the three .r3d's being debayered at full quality?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hayhurst, perhaps you ca clarify something for me. In that video, were the three .r3d's being debayered at full quality?

HAHAHAAAAA... Full quality? Uh, no. The new Mercury Engine does look very nice and optimized. But playing back R3Ds at full resolution, full quality is something it does not do. I'm really hoping Adobe incorporates Rocket support into their upcoming software. Media Encoder and After Effects absolutely NEED IT, in my tiny little humble opinion. Rocket support is right there in the RED SDK along with all the other R3D functions. I'm not sure I follow Hayhurst's statement above. It reads as if Adobe is trying to avoid Rocket support and they consider it to be an alternative workflow, when in fact it could very well be a tool that could improve their own workflow.

RED Rocket is the perfect tool to give monitor output from native REDCODE files during the post process. And it can be used to accelerate final render in post or for pulling in full quality frames within AE for compositing work, etc..

[Roberto Lequeux]

HAHAHAAAAA... Full quality? Uh, no. The new Mercury Engine does look very nice and optimized. But playing back R3Ds at full resolution, full quality is something it does not do. I'm really hoping Adobe incorporates Rocket support into their upcoming software. Media Encoder and After Effects absolutely NEED IT, in my tiny little humble opinion.

Thank you Jeff. It did seem beyond the scope of the card's power.

Wish that video had been a bit less info-mercial and a bit more scientific. Not knocking anyone down here, just hoping to see an other video that goes into a bit more detail other than saying how amazing everything plays back on a capture.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I don't want you to think I'm knocking CS5 or anything. I'm just saying that I think it could benefit from supporting the Rocket, and the SDK tools to do so are right there in front of them.

I'm not a CS5 beta tester, but I have seen it in action a couple months back. Really impressive stuff. I'm anxious to upgrade.

[mikeburton]

The new Premeire can run at about half res medium
to half res high debayer settings. More than adequate for offline editorial IMO! Where the mercury playback engine shines is when you start adding filters or motion attributes etc that can effect playback. For our 3D job, we had all R3D 4K clips in the timeline scaled to 50%, stacked two layers for side by side preview, the left eye camera needed to be flipped and we had a color corrector on both clips. Never once did this effect our realtime playback.
But, I agree with you Jeff, Adobe should seriously consider adding Rocket support to accelerate full res high playback and just blow this thing out of the water. Nevertheless, it's still impressive! SpeedGrade has a similar incorporation with NVidia to accelerate the playback of Phantom HD files. I have a 4800 FX card in my dual 3.0 ghz processor PC machine and can play back 2K Phantom RAW files from SpeedGrade XR at 48fps without a hiccup! That impressed the hell out of me and that's the same power Adobe has implemented in CS5.

[Tom.Wong]

having half debayer real time playback and editing i think its a feat in itself though, little more time, optimization, updates, and new generation GPU's, with maybe multi GPU support via SLI, and I think we are there with or without rocket in PP. We aren't a long ways off... halfway there? ^^

[Santiago Marti]

Jeff, you have to see the whole picture, maybe de "HAAHAAHAAAA" was too much! lol. Some of us live outside the US, use PCs, and, maybe, had to wait for a RED DRIVE like 9 months, so a better solution is to use the things we have at hand. Right now editing at full debayer at half res in a dreamcolor monitor is the best choice, being a CS5 tester. When i switch to full res, believe me, there isn't too much difference on an hd monitor, and if you need it, after finishing you can export to original resolution really fast. My experience is with a quadro cx (4800), but i don't know how a quadro 5800 or two quadros 4800 can change performance. Anyways, right now rocket is best for transcoding in redcine-x or with a scratch system. So you could have both cards in a system and do exactly that depending your needs and projects. I must say that everytime i used scratch for color correcting the output would be 16bit 2k tiff or 2k dpx at 10 bit for the post house to start. So the ability to edit in 4.5k, half res full debayer at realtime with tons of effects and being able to finish in any size with equipment you already have is a good choice for me. I prefer that over FCP's log and transfer and clip finder...i get lost. Adobe could really use the RED SDK for rocket, the same way RED could use the CUDA SDK for redcine-x, you'll have plenty of cards to choose, lots of post houses already using quadros long ago. The good thing is we'll have plenty of workflows to choose depending on different budgets and producers won't be able to complain anymore.

[Tom.Wong]

I've been betatesting CS5. I've already have a quadro cx (same as quadro 4800), so it made sense. I want to upgrade to MX but i will pass the rocket offer. Right now, i don't need the 4K output. As far as performance or workflow goes, CS5 is hands down the best choice. It is like editing DV with a matrox rtx2, LOL. I've said it before here on reduser, i feel like i am using a really expensive computer, and is the same i bought last year! If plugins like magic bullet looks evolve and use CUDA on PPro, that would be revolutionary. I think it is possible. Right now, i put some effects and it plays realtime full quality (three way color corrector, gaussian blur, 3D motion, all at once, just to test). I use it on commercial projects now and people is starting to accept PPro for .r3d really well. The exports are fast, amazing. Right now, you can buy CS4 production premium + quadro 4800 + hp dreamcolor monitor for 4,200, i don't know how much the upgrade will cost but you could end up paying the same price of a rocket. I know, it is not the same, but being on the pc side of things, it is the best choice by far. Will see in one week, but i think it will be a simplifier of .r3d workflow right out of the box. No transcode, no render. I am tired of seeing the RED format misused with poor results just to cut edit time and save money. Maybe with this workflow this happens less often, we'll see.


Santiago Martí.
Red #4215 - RO3OT



how is the stability in cs5? I've dabbled with cs4 a bit just to see what the native r3d handling was like. I've always found PP to be a bit clunky (just my personal opinion) and crashes more often than I'd like. I've tried it on both a high end PC and my mac 8 core i7...

[Tom Lowe]

Happy to see the discussion here.

We don't think that Mercury is a replacement for the RED Rocket™™™, more complementary.

If you want to stay native through edit and grading --- then Premiere Pro without RED Rocket™™™ is the cleanest workflow.

If you want to do a high quality transcode, and have the cash, I'd get the RED Rocket™™™ to keep my edit station free'd up --- the Rocket is fast for high quality debayers, so why not offload the station.

Same logic for previews --- if I'm just trying to look at the footage for preview / monitoring, not start the edit, then using the RED Rocket™™™ keeps your edit station free'd up so you can preview and edit more easily.

I plan to stay red native throughout my edit, so CS5 is a dream for me.

Let me ask you something, Hayhurst. I would also like to keep all my Canon timelapse footage as RAW (native) as possible throughout my edit as well. Is there any chance that Premiere Pro could get the ACR importer for CR2 files, just like Photoshop and AE have now? I have been emailing Adobe about this for more than 2 years, and never heard back.

Alternatively, is there some way that I could easily transcode my CR2 image-sequence files to CinemaDNG or DNG sequences to at least keep those sequences "RAW" in my Premiere Pro timeline? Obviously, I would prefer to have the CR2s in the timeline, but DNGs might be the next best thing in helping me finish my film "100% RAW".

Thanks!

[Tom.Wong]

Adobe has a CR2 to DNG batch converter.

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4620

it was made cause they stopped supporting photoshop cs3, and ppl still using cs3 had no way of opening new raw formats. ie. 5d mk II etc. this was their solution as DNG is supported.

[Matt Fleming]

A big part of FCP success is due to Adobe neglecting Premiere many years ago. Apple jumped in there and and the rest is history. But they're coming back, or at least trying to! CS4 showed a lot more commitment from Adobe to make Premiere a contender to the champ and CS5 Premiere is looking like a major leap forward and above. All this to say...I'm REALLY excited about CS5.

[Stacey Spears]

Alternatively, is there some way that I could easily transcode my CR2 image-sequence files to CinemaDNG or DNG sequences to at least keep those sequences "RAW" in my Premiere Pro timeline?

If Adobe does not offer it, what about Cineform RAW? They have supported Adobe products in the past. It might work.

[Kujtim Ereqi]

One of the best things about RED Rocket™™ is its RED-iness. It will support new builds RED will bring in the future, much faster than Adobe. Some builds will present essential improvement in the whole RED workflow, and having a Rocket who support those new features will be a great help.. So if you have enough work, you're going to need a Rocket, not just for its speed..

[Tom Lowe]

I can export DNG sequences out of AE now, I believe. I don't know about CinemaDNG and what the differences are?

Anyway, I don't see why Premiere Pro does not offer the Adobe Camera RAW plugin when many of their other products -- Photoshop, AE, etc -- do.

[Eren Ozkural]

Mercury playback engine sounds fantastic, it's pretty much negated the need for a Rocket on my end (hey, I don't conform longform projects, I mainly do small TV shows and music videos).

The dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned is thus:

Adobe Media Encoder. This needs to become a bullet proof piece of software. I'm sick of waiting for it to respond when loading a premiere project. It's the reason why I've edited a feature on FCP when I had the chance to take it to the office and edit on premiere.

AE. I'm sick of waiting around for renders to finish when only 48% of my ram and a quarter of my processing power is being used up.

I've used Adobe products for years now, I like the company and the products. If they increase stability alongside performance I'm sure they'll be onto a winner

[Tom.Wong]

I can export DNG sequences out of AE now, I believe. I don't know about CinemaDNG and what the differences are?

Anyway, I don't see why Premiere Pro does not offer the Adobe Camera RAW plugin when many of their other products -- Photoshop, AE, etc -- do.


if anything u can create ur DNG sequences and to the send back PP. as of now, they link directly into one another, and i'm sure integration will be even better for cs5

[Tom.Wong]

Mercury playback engine sounds fantastic, it's pretty much negated the need for a Rocket on my end (hey, I don't conform longform projects, I mainly do small TV shows and music videos).

The dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned is thus:

Adobe Media Encoder. This needs to become a bullet proof piece of software. I'm sick of waiting for it to respond when loading a premiere project. It's the reason why I've edited a feature on FCP when I had the chance to take it to the office and edit on premiere.

AE. I'm sick of waiting around for renders to finish when only 48% of my ram and a quarter of my processing power is being used up.

I've used Adobe products for years now, I like the company and the products. If they increase stability alongside performance I'm sure they'll be onto a winner




AE will be 64 bit in CS5, all your ram will be used. As for media encoder... if it doesn't change much... i can always conform and render ur sequence out of AE...

[Roberto Lequeux]

I don't want you to think I'm knocking CS5 or anything. I'm just saying that I think it could benefit from supporting the Rocket, and the SDK tools to do so are right there in front of them.

I'm not a CS5 beta tester, but I have seen it in action a couple months back. Really impressive stuff. I'm anxious to upgrade.

Not at all. It seems like an amazing tool for broadcast considering the cost of the card used and that you can obviously render out in full debayer. I might have laid it on a bit thick, but I have to be honest, in the video it did feel like it was being forced on me. I didn't mean to sound like I was bashing and didn't think you were. The question was a tall order: Three full debayers, a key, and a more in RT.

[wshultz]

I also wanted to ask Mr.Hayhurst if the mercury engine is just as effective on both Mac and PC with the nVidia cards. And does it require the 4800?

[Rob Ruffo]

i wouldn't count on it interfering with too much of avid/fcp use. and it's gonna be tough for apple to match something along the lines of mercury playback engine. Adobe worked hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize with CUDA. Apple currently gears most of it's horsepower to work with ATI more effectively.

as for being a mainstream NLE, it needs some very very important things for it to be worthy of joining a broadcast and film entertainment environment. Media management, excellent deck control protocols, media management, stability, and uniformity. oh and media management...


avid and fcp already accomplish most of this. avid has better media management than fcp does, huge reason why a lot of ppl and networks stick with avid. fcp has better ease of use, faster updates, third party periphs. both have a uniform lossless codec. and can both provide excellent deck control with the necessary hardware.

i've had friends who have tried to use a xena card with premiere to offload to tape with a lot of trouble, premiere in itself doesn't have a uniform codec, and it's media managment is as lackluster as FCP. plus i've tried to use cs4 on many occasions. it's nowhere near stable enough for my taste...

This all depends on the prod environment. Many boutique prodcos now have in-house post and only use their own tapeless cams - RED, Sony Ex, a declining amount of P2.
That would describe us. We have no need for tape interface at all. When done, we output a Cineform or Prores 1080p, bring a hardrive over to another post-house, and pay for a tape transfer. Not worth buying our own decks.

I think in the near future that tape transfer might not even be necessary as I hear many networks will be running pro-res clips directly off hard-drives for broadcast. One can hope.

[Robert Horwell]

I recently saw a very impressive video which outlined the ability of the new Premiere to playback/grade (in realtime) two R3D files stacked in the same timeline.

I'm curious, how will this affect the need for Red Rocket?

any thoughts?

where is the video please?

[LarryMcPhereson]

HAHAHAAAAA... Full quality? Uh, no. The new Mercury Engine does look very nice and optimized. But playing back R3Ds at full resolution, full quality is something it does not do. I'm really hoping Adobe incorporates Rocket support into their upcoming software. Media Encoder and After Effects absolutely NEED IT, in my tiny little humble opinion. Rocket support is right there in the RED SDK along with all the other R3D functions. I'm not sure I follow Hayhurst's statement above. It reads as if Adobe is trying to avoid Rocket support and they consider it to be an alternative workflow, when in fact it could very well be a tool that could improve their own workflow.

RED Rocket is the perfect tool to give monitor output from native REDCODE files during the post process. And it can be used to accelerate final render in post or for pulling in full quality frames within AE for compositing work, etc..

This info is more along the lines of my thinking as I am still in the nascent (and seemingly ever changing) stages of a custom PC build for CS5. But how big is the Red Rocket and where does/should it fit? The new Gigabyte X58 UD9 (as compared with the UD7) needs specialized chassis (Mountain Mods always gets itself in there) but I was really hoping to get away with a Coolermaster Cosmos and a UD7 but I'm beginning to feel it may not have enough room for upgrades...