Archive Adobe Premiere

Dec 12 2008

Even More on the RED Adobe Native Workflow

More random observations working with RED and Premiere CS4. Some of these might be obvious issues for folks who work with Premiere all day long, for me it’s been a while. Now on the Quad Core with 4GB of RAM(still below the reported min requirements but this is more machine than most folks have already).

1- Performance needs to be tuned carefully. Got a nice little G-RAID feeding footage and still seeing a lot of dropped frames with all quality settings set to defaults. With resolution set to Quarter, Quality to Medium, Chroma DeNoise Off, Debayer set to Leading Lady(might want to change that to something a bit more understandable in terms of quality) and OLPF Compensation off- I get nice smooth frame rates and the footage looks pretty solid.

2- 16:9 Performance suffers a bit more. 16:9 has always been a problem for REDCode playback because it doesn’t scale nicely down from 4K the way 2:1 does.

3- Load times for complex projects can be long. I’ve got one project with about 2 hours worth of .R3D files that takes forever to load if it loads at all. It’s a little scary to see the progress bar sit there at almost loaded, forever.

4-The unsupported format warning is a little bit annoying. Essentially you drag your entire RED folder into CS4’s project window for a quick import. It sorts through, pulls out the .R3D and ignores the other files in the folders, such as the digital magazine profiles. However it then complains about these being unsupported formats. The option to never warn me about this again would be greatly appreciated.

5-Spanned clips are not marked. For example, if I have one long take that the camera split into several .R3D files, each shows up in the project as a separate clip. It’s smart enough to join them back into a single take but it would be more useful to automatically either- only import the first .R3D of a spanned take or make an obvious note in the project window that a clip is spanned.

6- It seems reasonably easy to crash CS 4.0.1. For example if I have one clip open and I bring up another and scrub through it that will give me a SPOD and then hang. Brings back those somewhat scary memories of the old Premiere which I spent years on and battled crashes and hangs every step of the way… but this is different. Right? More later….