Aha says the tick tock man, time to deliver to the client!

[tj williams]

So I fire up the RED on a job for an outa town producer. I record 1080P 24 on the RED Digital Magazine. During lunch I download the first two mags to the PC and at the end of the day the second 2. I typically shoot 1.5 to 2.5 hrs per day.

Just for math ease lets say I've shot 1 hour of footage.

NOw I need to render this out into a format for delivery for online in final cut
ie the Panasonic HD 1080 Format. (will others be different rendering times?)

Of course everything is in flux. but given a vanilla duo with a gig type typical machine. And for those of us who are less than computer experts. I'm not looking for some exact answer just trying to see in the RED will enable me to deliver the client in a timely way.... ie before the end of fedex that night.

A. Will I be able to render this out in near real time?
B. Will my 1 hour of footage take 8 hours to render?
C. Will I be done in 10 minutes.
D. What will be the difference between this and other possible codec outputs?

[Jim Exton]

I am hoping that you just turn the footage over to the client in Redcode form and it is they who use the Red Cine software to convert it however they want.

I would hope that the Red Cine software is available to everyone at a cheap price. I would think it would be to Red's benefit to make it that way to help make the workflow accesible to everyone in order to sell more cameras.

As far as your question goes, it is going to be a really tight fit to get it all processed and FedEx'd to them the next day. They might have to wait an additional day. Assuming they don't mind waiting.

[Michael Schrengohst]

This point is something I bought up before the reservations opened up.
To hedge my bet I have reserved a camera and hope now that the software will be very expensive to purchase!

[Don Woods]

Or you can always just charge for the processing and that is just part of your rate.. I don't think RED CINE should be over priced but I don't think it should be free. Now the codec that could be something that would be helpfull. But as stated before that is for recoding not an actuall formatt... So who nows how the market are going to go.

[Wade McDonald]

Personally, I plan to deliver footage on an external hard drive in their format of choice, having processed it through REDCINE myself after the shoot.

In my experience, most out-of-town producers who hire DPs or own/ops rent a deck when they get home ($300-500/day) -- so if they can connect the hard drive straight into their NLE without having to sit and capture tapes (read: no logging labor/"editor doing busy work" cost), they'll not have any problem trading the cost of renting a deck for the cost of buying an external hard drive and paying you a little extra to process footage (and they have a nice digital backup of their footage to stick in a closet).

[tj williams]

Jim, I'm afraid most of my clients will not have RED CODE. Maybe jim is ready to give out free seats like quick time player, but I've not heard this. Also my clients probably are not ready to learn new software. They already have a codec they use. I'm their freelance employee and I need to fit into their working system.

IMG, Certainly I will set my rates to include my processing just as I now make money selling tapes, and include the fedex delivery in my day.

Wade, What you propose is just about what I intend to do also. Most of my clientele either own an HD deck (Sony/Panasonic) or use a post facility that owns them. Therefore I want to get my footage ready to import into their systems by the most expeditious (to them) means. because they usually own the deck, which is for them a sunk cost. I figure on charging a use fee for the disk drive similiar to the cost of HD tapes. I don't feel I can charge more as this would tend to make me uncompetitive with shooters who use HD tape cameras.

Which brings me to the heart of my original question:

A. Will I be able to render this out in near real time?
B. Will my 1 hour of footage take 8 hours to render?
C. Will I be done in 10 minutes.
D. What will be the difference between codecs ie files that look to the editor
on an external hard drive, like: Panasonic/Sony/jvc tapes. or easy to use
and common files which will intercut on their systems as perhaps DPX etc.

Looking for the computer guru here!!!
Thanks TJ

[tj williams]

Quite aside from the rendering time to get my output into a codec which the post house can accept I've come upon another small problem.

A very nice man on the cow forum gives me these numbers for distributing my days shooting to my client on hard drives using DPX files. DPX according to him is widely acceptable by post systems, uncompressed, 444color. He says 1080 24P is about 8.5 megs a frame and 720 24P is about 3.7 megs per frame. Red Cine does output this.

At the end of the day I shoot and deliver on a portable hard drive. Usually we shoot about 5 HD tapes a day average. 40min ea or about 200 minutes.

So(someone check this math!:)

8.5 X 24fps=204 X60sec=12.24Gig per min X 200minutes=2448.0gigs
3.7 X 24fps=88.8X60sec=5.328Gig per min X 200minutes=1065.6Gigs

So now I'm lookin for a 3000Gig portable hard drive to loan out?????
(gotta go long some days, and of course drive overhead)

THIS NEEDS A CODE WIZARD!!!!!

Hey basically this won't work. what should I do???
Is there a chance that you will free distribute a RED player so I can just send the stuff in RED Code as suggested by Jim above!!!

[Stephen Gentle]

I think it would be really good if REDcine was free. It would make it a lot easier to process footage if you just rented the camera, or in a situation like the one above.

Just my $0.02

[Evin Grant]

I believe the Redcode codec will be freely available (someone from Red correct me if I'm wrong) Redcine is another matter, although it will have unlimited seats when it comes with Red, so maybe you could include it with the drive? If that dosen't violate the licencing agreement. All in all it makes little sense to charge, or at least charge much for Redcine, after all it really just makes shooting (and selling) Red that much easier for the producers.

[Nick Shaw]

I know I keep saying this, but I really think the situation is no different to what we have currently with tape. Production conpanies have no problem with being handed a box of tapes at the end of a shoot, even though very few have an HDCam or even Digi Beta player in their production offices. They need to rent one in or get it transferred to something they can play. Handing over a drive full of REDCODE rushes would be just the same. In fact the parallel also works for film.

I have no issue with REDCODE being a format you need to buy a 'player' for, just like any other.