How to trim out bad footage, rename selects from long .r3d takes in RCX workflow

[Grayson Fahrner]

As wildlife photographers know, lots of time in the field usually gets culled down to a small percentage of shots that comprise usable footage. As red 8k shooters know, even working with just the usable bits puts considerable strain on a workflow and hardware system.

I'm trying to trim all the shaky/out of focus/non-eventful footage from my .r3ds from a recent trip to Africa. Many of these takes were quite long in 8k@60fps, with lots of moving/shaky/out of focus footage in the same clip as prime usable footage.

I would like to keep my original media intact and untouched, while trimming down just the usable parts of roughly 5 hours of .r3d footage into perhaps the 30-60 minutes that is actually edit-worthy. As I understand, RedCine-X is the only program that can create "trims" of .r3d files (without having to transcode). My goals are:

1) TRIM the long clips to just the segments I want to use
2) GRADE those clips with basic exposure/contrast tweaking in Redcine-X,
3) EXPORT the smaller, more numerous clips from RedCine-X onto smaller, faster drives that I can edit off of onto a Thunderblade 4TB 2800/MB/s Thunderbolt 3 NVME drive, or something similar (or break up on the smaller .M2 drives and ssds on motherboard)
4) RENAME those clips to something descriptive
5) IMPORT those smaller, renamed .r3d clips into Adobe Premiere for the stringout/rough edit process.
6) Make a backup, perhaps only 2-4TB in size of those .r3d "selects" which will save me 6-8TB trim off each reel and by the 3-2-1 backup system should save 10's of TB's in backup storage.


My PC setup is:
CPU: Intel 7900X
RAM: 64GB
Boot Drive: 480GB Intel Optane 900p
NVME #1: 512GB Samsung 950 Pro NVME M.2
NVME #2: 1GB Samsung 960 Pro NVME M.2
Video Card: NVIDIA 1080Ti
RAID: G-Shuttle Thunderbolt 3 24TB (32TB @RAID5)
NVME Raid: 4TB OWC Thunderblade
HDD: Two Seagate 12TBs (trying to decide if these should be backup or RAID 0'd)


Problem #1: As you can see, while I have smaller solid-state drives that are capable of being edited off of they are not nearly big enough to house even a minor portion of the overall footage, so that is why I am trying to break down the .r3ds so that I can basically fill my SSD's and NVME's with the footage I'm editing off of while staying in RAW.

Problem #2: I have read that trimming clips from the same master clip can lead to problems in Redcine-X, with linking issues and overlapping timecode problems.
I could give up and go proxy, but I'll still be wading through hours of footage and cutting the same clips, renaming clips, and it seems to make sense to do at the beginning to save drive space and to cut the overall usable media down to an amount that can fit on those fast, editable drives.

Problem #3: At what point can I rename the clips into something descriptive, or does the RED file format not allow me to do any renaming and I will just have to rename the clips during the 2nd phase of editing in Premiere?

Or is there a better way, as I'm an absolute post-production noob

[Robert Hofmeyr]

Hi Grayson. I use the trim function quite a lot with my footage. First I pull everything into Final Cut and create proxies so I can quickly scan through my shots (I find Redcine a bit cumbersome for selecting sections of clips). Once I've made my selections, I export an xml from fcp and import it into rcx. Then I run a batch trim. Where I've selected 2 sections of a single clip, redcine creates 2 RDC folders, one with "_S000" appended, but the r3d/rmd files are not renamed. I never change the r3d/rmd file names. Because there are now files with duplicate names, programs will sometimes find the wrong file when reconnecting media, but this will usually result in an error since the timecode won't match, so it's easy to manually reconnect to the correct file.

[Rui Guerra]

Hi Grayson,

Hi use the trim function all the time in RCX. I navigate to the folder where the big files are, and look at each inside RCX (usually at 1/4 resolution and sometimes even at 1/8, to have a faster rendering time).
Apply the grade you wish and make a pressed with it so in the next clips you just need to apply it with a single button press.
After rendering, hit payback and use the "I" and "O" keys (In and Out points) or the appropriate buttons below the main area.
After that, export it selecting "Clip in viewer", choose "R3D trim" and choose destination folder (the same as the original).
Since the original is still there, RCX will add "_S000", "_S001", etc. Using the windows navigator (or Finder in Mac) just delete the original clip and it's folder.

Regarding the "problem" of overlapping timecode, it does happen if you use the hour/minute/second/frame as your timecode in the first place. It will be kept across the multiple smaller clips.

To Robert,

Not sure if your workflow is faster then mine, but still is interesting the "batch trim" you mentioned. Can you elaborate on it? Also, with that workflow, can you make a grade so the new / shorter clips have some basic grading in them?

Cheers,

[Björn Benckert]

Resolve media management is excellent to do a r3d trim in.


Cut your proxies or use low debayer setting in resolve to see what shots you want. Then use the media manager to create a trim from the timeline. I do it a lot when traveling usually straight from the card onto my drives so bad footage does not even have to be copied.

DIT´s shake their heads... but I gain shitload of copying time and so far I have not regretted cutting some not wanted tails or bad takes away. Make it easer when getting to editing.

[Robert Hofmeyr]

Hi Grayson,To Robert,

Not sure if your workflow is faster then mine, but still is interesting the "batch trim" you mentioned. Can you elaborate on it? Also, with that workflow, can you make a grade so the new / shorter clips have some basic grading in them?

Cheers,

Hi Rui, I just find selecting portions of clips easier in FCPX, especially when I need to select 2 sections from one single clip. In RCX this requires duplicating the clip and selecting a different range on the duplicate but in FCPX I can have multiple selections on a single clip. I also find that using FCPX proxies speeds things up considerably (especially when working off slower external drives). Here's an outline of what I do:

Pull all clips into RCX, delete rejects, and apply a quick look (much like you do). Save RMDs.
Import all clips into FCPX, generate proxies (usually overnight).
Set ins and outs on all clips in FCPX, and multiple ranges in those clips that need to be split into multiple parts.
Throw everything into a project and export XML from FCPX.
Import XML into RCX and drag all clips from timeline into a bin.
Change to the export tab and batch export all clips in the bin using an "R3D Trim" preset.

The last step is the "batch trim" I mentioned, and yes, the grade is maintained throughout the process.

Rob

[Kris Tait]

Hi Grayson
Nice to see another wildlife cinematographer in here. Just curious, one tool I use to help me with the same issue is using Red’s pre-record function, have you tried utilizing this in camera? It almost entirely eliminates unwanted footage being captured downto the card from the start. Look into this feature if you haven’t yet, only the golden moments are captured. Ultimate tool in this trade.

[AndreasOberg]

Resolve media management is excellent to do a r3d trim in.

Cut your proxies or use low debayer setting in resolve to see what shots you want. Then use the media manager to create a trim from the timeline. I do it a lot when traveling usually straight from the card onto my drives so bad footage does not even have to be copied.

DIT´s shake their heads... but I gain shitload of copying time and so far I have not regretted cutting some not wanted tails or bad takes away. Make it easer when getting to editing.

1.
Björn, have you had any problems with trims silently failing? I had that happening a few times, which put me on edge. So basically the trim file would be empty. Now I always verify each trimmed file after.

2. I also used your method of trimming directly from the drive to reduce copy time for a while but I stopped. I had one red drive break while copying to my backup resulting in all media lost, probably due to a faulty cable, so I now I want to minimize the time the red file is connected to a computer as much as possible.

3. I plan on doing some more tests with splitting a file into multiple ones with trimming. It worries me that the folder and file name is different, but maybe it does not matter.

On another note of doing quick backups:
For Blue Planet Live i used a program called Hedge that lets you simultaneously copy to as many drives as possible. The way I set it up was I copied to 3 4TB SSD drives. Speed is a bit lower than normal copying but it is around 230MB/s vs around 300 and then the copy process is also verified. This still ends up much faster since I get all backups done at once.

Andreas