Odd Workflow (PC to Mac for personal projects): Suggestions?

[Rob Anderson]

I have both Apple and PC workhorses in the shop, but for obvious reasons, my main RED work horses are now PC (overclocked Main Gear Shift boxes with Rocket cards).

That said, I need to find a better workflow between them. When I'm doing commercial work, I try to stick to the REDCINE-X to Premiere (CS6 on PC) path. But for personal projects, I prefer to work with Final Cut Pro X (FCPX). I'm not an editor and my strengths are in shooting, creative, and post-fx. FCPX is much faster for me to work with than Premiere for personal stuff.

I want to use the grading, visual fx, and rendering speed of the PC, but then I want to work on my edits on the Mac. Knowing full well this is slowing down my workflow, it's just my personal path for small projects.

What workflow and codec would you guys recommend for 4K and 5K FF (beginning R3D) on the PC, and then play-ready transferring over to the Mac?

Thanks for your input!

[Rob Anderson]

Any input on this? Thanks again guys.

[Bob Gundu]

You could transcode to lower rez using RedcineX and edit in FCPX for the edit. Then generate an XML file and use it to open in Redcine again for first pass grading, or use the XML file to open in Premier. I/m pretty sure the mac generated XML should work in the PC Premier.

[Rob Anderson]

You could transcode to lower rez using RedcineX and edit in FCPX for the edit. Then generate an XML file and use it to open in Redcine again for first pass grading, or use the XML file to open in Premier. I/m pretty sure the mac generated XML should work in the PC Premier.

If I can use the XML edit from FCPX to import into a Premiere session for final, I would absolutely love that. Nice suggestion. I'll definitely give this a try. Hope it works!

[emil tanem]

You should use exfat formated disks because that will read and write on both pc/mac. XMLs will get you far, but not everything is working perfectly there.
But no matter what you do, it will not be save you any time at all compared to just learn how to use Premiere. It´s just better in so many ways. I used to say it´s a matter of opinion, but that was before CS5.5 & RED ;)

[Axel Mertes]

We work with CineForm, as its cross-platform and wavelet base, plus its much faster than RED CODE (roughly about 4-7 times). So transcoding the CineForm gives you the speed of RED ROCKET without a RED ROCKET. And you can use the DPC file format (aka DPX-C) for doing VFX work in e.g. Fusion or Nuke, as this is CineForm single frames - same compression scheme, no transcoding required.

We do heavy 4K post recently and it runs flawlessly.

If you are interested in detail, you may contact me directly.

Cheers,
Axel

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Premiere CS6 will open FCP7 projects as well, just skimming through this thread I didn't see that little tidbit mentioned, if it helps. IMO, I think you should just keep practicing in Premiere. It's very similar overall to FCP and is quite a bit faster, especially for R3D workflow, once you wrap your head around all of it's little details and tricks. Even if you're slower in Premiere, I have a hard time believing that a transcode to proxy, edit in FCP7 and re-conform for color/finish is still faster for you than going direct into Premiere, and round-tripping through SpeedGrade, AE or EDL/XML output for Resolve.

This is where FCP7, being EOL, is starting to really show its age. It can't utilize any current hardware like multiple cores, 32bit memory sizes, it chokes on odd frame sizes like 3K, you have to interface everything through QuickTime... Many people still prefer it and work faster through it than newer tools because it's what they know. But as time goes on, it's just going to become more and more dated and will eventually lose compatibility with systems/ OS and other software tools. Offline workflows are not the future.