Hi folks,

I recently entered a contest on Vimeo, 'Beyond the Still', some of you may have heard of it. I got the opportunity to shoot on the RED One for the first time (was going to shoot it on XH A1 and Casio DSLR).

I found it immensely difficult to take the footage from the RED and put it in a format that my PC could handle. I realise the footage is intended to be edited with machines far more powerful than my own, but a much lower resolution was sufficient for this particular project toward compression that would suit viewing on Vimeo.

In the end, I had to export lower res Quicktime files (h.264), then import those files into Quicktime player and export them again into smaller quicktime 1920 x 1080 res files (h.264). That worked, but it was laborious. Also, I found that perhaps the multi-compression method didn't do the final footage justice.

I also found that after I coloured the final edit, CS4 crashed over and over. Finally I had to export 30 seconds at a time and piece them together for yet another export...

Anyhow, my final result was this:
The Story Beyond The Still: The Mob - The Story Beyond The Still on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/groups/beyondthestill/videos/9391778)

I also found I had to use neat video plugin to reduce the noise in a lot of the scenes.
Does anyone have a smoother workflow for working in this way?

Thank you,

Kris

Well H.264 is a delivery format, that takes a long time to encode, a long time to decode, and is in general not very practical to use when editing, only for final exports to web, ext.
You should use a intermediate codec, which means it is intended for use during video editing, and not intended or practical for end user viewing. The benefit of an intermediate codec is that it retains higher quality than end user codecs while still requiring much less expensive disk systems compared to uncompressed video.
ProRes 422 could be a keyword here.

ProRes 422 could be a keyword here.

Not in CS4 it isn't.

On a Mac, he's got plenty of choices for an intermediate codec. On the PC, things are quite a lot harder. Still doable, but still harder.

Had it been me, I would have created proxy files, then cut those. Afterwards I would have conformed back to the original RED footage and rendered out. MUCH better results, MUCH easier editing.

On the PC side, Cineform is the only intermediate I'm familiar with. What about the Blackmagic MJPEG codec? Can RED be captured through one of their cards? Can the Matrox MXO accept RED footage and convert it to their MPEG2 codec?