Basic system for editing RED with premiere pro

[TomHolland]

Hello all,

Bit of a noob question but I want to look at editing some red footage myself (just to dip my toe in) and I would like some advice on what system I will need to do this. Budget is an issue so I need a bare minimum setup where possible.

The footage is currently in RAW 4k so it will need to be transcoded (I assume) before I can edit in premiere. I am guessing a system to native edit will be rather expensive.

I won't be doing any grading or compositing; just need be able to view the footage and edit it.

I've looked at other posts on this forum but there is a wealth of differing opinion on this, so if anyone can recommend a complete spec OR a system they have purchased and used then that would be fantastic.

Thanks in advance

Tom

[Fred Beahm]

Premiere CS5 can edit R3D files natively. Just turn down the quality/resolution and you should be good to go. If you WANT to transcode, you can transcode to lower settings IE: 720p or something for your OFFLINE edit and then once you have picture lock you can export an EDL or XML and relink to the RAW files for color grading and final output.

[Doug Beatty]

Does the Mercury Playback engine speed things up noticeable with R3Ds? If anyone has done some tests with it enabled vs. disabled on their setup, I'd love to see it.

[joe hedge]

Premiere CS5 can edit R3D files natively. Just turn down the quality/resolution and you should be good to go. If you WANT to transcode....

A lot of the time it's not a question of wanting to transcode, but needing to. I just finished DIT'ing a 16 day 2-camera Epic shoot with lots of HDR, we were shooting 2 TB's a day on average, and ended up with close to 30 TB's total. To edit wit the raw camera files, you'd need to have all of that up and running while editing, whereas all the transcodes fit on (1) 4TB G-Raid. Also, how does editing raw HDR files in PP work?