Red One Editing Workflow

Hi. I'm about to start editing a short film that was fortunately shot with the Red One cam. The project is almost 400GB, and some takes are at least 6GB each. First, I'm planning on getting a new external hard drive- at least a TB and FW800/400... I checked out some brands such as G- technology... I'm upgrading Ram from 2 to 4 GB. So basically, does anyone have any suggestions for a manageable workflow? A good external drive to work off of, and anything else I should think of? I have a Mac Book Pro, OS 10.4, 2.4 Ghz, and so on. Oh, also FCS 6.

Cheers,
Sarah

I haven't done a Red show, but I've studied the workflow in anticipation of my first one. I think the more-or-less-accepted state of the art is:

1. Either take the camera Quicktimes or, if you want to change the color space or apply a basic look, create new ones in Red Alert.

2. Batch them through Compressor to create ProRes proxies.

3. Cut the proxies into a ProRes timeline.

4. Export an XML of your timeline.

5. Use Crimson Workflow (a program that costs around $120 or so if I remember correctly) to export DPX sequences from your R3Ds based on your XML via Redline.

6. Conform your timeline with an XML or EDL, and grade those DPXs in Color or Lustre or whatever.

What Jeff said.

I don't know when but an upcoming release of FCP should support 1K proxies natively in FCP-- on a MacBook Pro! This enables live cutting of direct 1K-to-2K proxy clips on the laptop. This is based on a public user group New York demo I attended last Fall. Very exciting stuff, involving REDCODE, developed by Graeme Nattress and his team.

- Loren
Today's FCP keytip:

Play from In to Out with Shift - \ (Backslash) !

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Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Sarah -

Under the "anything else I should think of" department: In moving to HD 1080 (and presumably to Red as well), one thing that seemed to make my system a happier camper all around was to have a separate drive (eSATA in my case - but I assume FW 800 would work as well) dedicated to just render files.

I have no metrics on that suggestion- just a subjective impression of smoother time line operations and playback.

Ian Graham