I couldn’t let the day get by without giving the new native RED .R3D import and editing function a quick test. My first thought after playing around with this functionality is that this is by far the best implementation of native .R3D editing and it blows the Final Cut Pro support out of the water. I won’t go into a lot of detail on setting it all up as all the info is available other places and in a document that comes with the RED Adobe CS4 installer. There’s also some initial reactions from Noah at Twenty398 as well as the best way to learn about this new workflow: a 30 minute video on AdobeTV.
It’s basically what has been asked for in most NLEs for a long time, the ability to drag and drop an .R3D file on to the timeline and edit. It works. There are some hefty system requirements as you scale from quarter resolutions sizes up to 4K so you have to work at what’s appropriate to your system. I’ve been working on an 8-core 3GHz Mac Pro, 4 gigs of RAM with the .R3D files residing on a spare internal hard drive. I can get very smooth quarter-size 4K and half-size 2K playback in the timeline with the occasional stutter and frame drop as it play across a transition, title or color correction effect. If you do a lot of editing on different machines with different software and different media formats then you know you can feel how well media is working in your edit timeline as you scrub around, trim edits and such and on my 1024×512 timeline (a more than acceptable resolution for offline editing) it feels very good. There was one clip out of the 20 or so clips that I was working with that caused more dropped frames than the others but when that clip was eliminated it worked very well.
The heart of making this work is the Source Settings dialog box that is universal for Premiere Pro CS4 4.0.1 with the RED plug-in installed and can be accessed by a right click on an .R3D file in the project window and choosing Source Settings:
All your settings for how Premiere Pro handles the clips are set here. It first took me for a loop since I had mixed 4K and 2K files but once I watched the AdobeTVÂ video I understood that you set your desired setting for each different format, 4K, 3K and 2K in this dialog box and then and footage of the corresponding rez will change to match. In my case I wanted it all to hit the 1024×512 rez of the timeline so 4K is quarter, 2K is half and then all of my footage is at 1024×512:
If you then change all of the resolutions to their full native sizes in the Source Settings dialog box, save and reboot PPro then the footage is displayed at the native resolution:
If you look closely you see the .R3D files are native 2K and 4K but the edit sequence is still 1024×512 so all of the footage now appears scaled way bigger than the frame so you have to make a new sequence of the appropriate size and copy/paste the edit into that new sequence. This is detailed in the video on AdobeTV. I wish there was a column in the bin to see what the native resolution of each file was when you are scaled but I couldn’t find one. You can right click on a clip and choose Properties to see the file details:
It would just be nice to see some of this metadata in a bin column. And there are a helluva lot of metadata columns that can be displayed in a PPro bin so it might be in there but I couldn’t find it.
How much horsepower does it take to decode the .R3D files for realtime playback? Taking an idea from the AdobeTV video I opened up the Activity Monitor and watched the CPU usage and the timeline played back. For most clips the CPUs seemed to still have quite a bit of overhead:
The peaks came, surprisingly, when I had dropped a clip on Video 2. That pegged the meters out!
As for playing across a title, dissolve or effect, the CPU usage was somewhere between with an edge toward the high side. I think the moral of this story is that if you are going to edit the .R3D files in Premiere Pro CS4 4.0.1 or above then the faster the machine the better! You can open your PPro projects in After Effects so that adds a whole new level of possibilities.
But there is one thing that is missing. Part of the joy of working with raw RED .R3D files are all of the parameters that you can change for things like ISO, exposure, contrast and all the other settings that you have in most applications that can access .R3D files. The Apple update to Color added a new RED tab just for these settings:
I don’t see these parameters anywhere in PPro CS4 or After Effects CS4. A little research around reduser.net revealed this thread that says “at the moment you cannot control any decoding parameters other than the ones in the global preferences dialog (decode resolution, quality, etc.). Other settings like ISO and white balance will be made available soon. For now it uses whatever the default was that was set in camera.” Okay, I hope they get that in asap as that is such great control to have when working with native .R3Ds.
This Adobe CS4 workflow took a long time to reach the masses but it looks like they’ve saved the best for last. While there’s still a lot of reasons to offline in Avid or FCP and finish on a variety of other systems this CS4 workflow is now a great option for many … and this is just the first release. It seems like Adobe may be up for making this even better.
