Peculiarities of RED files in VP11

megabit wrote on 11/19/2011, 1:15 PM

I'm dealing with RED material for the first time in my work, and it so happens that they are part of a 10-camera music project I started on Vegas Pro 11. While all the other clips - after placing on their T/L tracks - have had their waveform files generated with the usual speed, the 140 .R3D clips take ages! Well, literally hours are needed to generate the sfk files!

Is this normal with the .R3D clips? Or is it another VP11 infant illness?

Piotr

PS. BTW, apart from the R3D files which are readable by Vegas and contain both video and audio, there are some .MOV files in each directory of the project I got for editing. These do NOT display any image in Vegas - but have the sound, and are very small in size; perhaps I could use them somehow?

Also, while generating the 146 sfk files for the RED clips, Vegas is totally unresponsive - not being able to do anything on my project, I have to wait :(

Comments

megabit wrote on 11/20/2011, 1:12 AM

OK, so I'm bumping up this thread as I badly need your expert advise, guys!

It so happened that - due to my neck spine illness and surgeries - I couldn't participate in actual recording of several last our projects, and I'm ending up with editing them now without having any influence on how they were realized. And here I am again, facing a mix of so many variables:

- 10 cameras of all kinds (mostly EXs, but also one Canon SDLR and one RED)
- some of the clips do not have timecode or sound (!!!)
- using my new PC for the first time (I wrote elsewhere it's really flying, but still I'm not 100% certain it will not act on me in the most unexpected ways)
- using VP11 for the first time for such a complex project (I know, I know - it's not 100% stable yet - but I do need the CUDA acceleration).

Last night I had to wait several hours (sic!) for Vegas to complete generating fsk files for the RED clips. As I wrote in the OP, during that operation Vegas was totally unresponsive, so I couldn't even check the RED C files properties... Now I know they are RAW files of 3840x2160 resolution!

I never ever dealt with REDC Raw, so please advise:

- what kind of proxies should I create to them, considering all remaining material is 1080p?
- I understand now the MOV files that accompany R3Ds in each subfolder on the disk I got are low res proxies - but how do I use them, if they do not display picture in Vegas (sound only)? Also, they are strangely small in size?

If anyone has any experience with RED Raw, please advise. TIA,

Piotr

essami wrote on 11/20/2011, 11:48 AM

I can only comment that I cut a music vid from RED footage on Vegas 9 and I didn't use any proxies. I just put the raw files on the timeline and edited, cc'd and synced it there. I edited on a Core2 laptop so I was really surprised how well Vegas handled the 4K footage. Even got full 25p preview (on preview auto).

How much material do you have on the timeline? I think building audio proxies does take a long time with some formats. If you have hours and hours of footage I wouldn't be surprised if it took two to three hours to build all of them. It's not just with R3D files.

Sami

megabit wrote on 11/22/2011, 1:21 AM

Hi Sami,

May I ask you (and others) for some further advise? I'm a complete newbie to the RED formats, and only got a ready project on a HDD, with folder structure and content created by somebody else. Seeing plenty of xxx_01, ... (up to xxx_40) R3D, 2GB files in each folder, I have simply copied all of them to my project's media bin, and then placed on the T/L. But upon inspection I can see all files of a given directory contain the same coverage! This is confirmed by TC in/out values in the Project Media detailed view.

What is strange to me is:

- why as many as 40 files off-loaded when each of them has the same content? Even if "3D" suggests well... 3D, why so many of them?

- apart from all those (up to 40) files of 2GB length each, there are single shorter files of the same prefix name in each directory; now - I checked their TC in/out and they show exactly the same as their larger, 2GB counterparts!

As you can see, I know nothing about this format :) Please tell me - is it safe to just use a single file per directory, without losing some coverage? I'll appreciate your help indeed; thanks

Piotr

farss wrote on 11/23/2011, 2:50 PM

Never worked with RED footage myself but I have worked with SI2K footage.
Different approach but both cameras are similar.

R3D files contain RAW camera data, all the processing done in most cameras is shifted to post so one logically has to assume they require considerable resources to decode. The deBayering, White and Black point calculations etc are all being handed by the CPU / GPU as you try to play them back. Putting R3D files into a multicam T/L has got to be asking for trouble.

The camera also records lower quality proxy files, I think they're the other files you found with the same name but different extensions. Your other questions I have no answers for.

What I would do is identify which R3D files you need and convert them to something easier to deal with using Vegas with maybe some batch conversion script to avoid going crazy in the process. None of this is something I would contemplate doing under time pressure.
In the midst of all this you may have been bitten by the dreaded 'Vegas replaces my files' bug. Good luck sorting that out with that many tracks and files in a multicam shoot.

Bob.

megabit wrote on 11/24/2011, 1:35 AM

Thanks Bob.

I have tried to use the Import->Media->RED option hoping that the original structure of the folders will be somehow recognized by Vegas, and I'll be led by hand in picking the right file out of the 50 in each folder - to no avail. Still can pick any of them - and even though it's only 2 GB, I have over 40 mins event on the timeline! But:

- I have empty space on my track (as if some other file should also be present - I don't know which)

- the MOV files (large), which probably are proxies of lower res and contain the full take unlike the spanned R3D files, still only plays audio

One thing I did find out this way is that now - under right-click on media file in the bin - I can access the RAW file controls (RGB control, LUT, denoising, LPOF, and many others).

Also - and this is a more general finding - I found out that it's NOT the track of RAW high-res R3D files that - when contained in my 10-camera multi-track -slows down playback dramatically (from 25 to 5 fps). It seems to exist a limit of 8 track (no matter which format), below which I'm getting full 25 fps even at Best/Full. Add a single more track - even a lower res - and the 9 or 10-camera multi-track crawls at 5 fps, even on my new fast HW!

Anyone noticed that?

Piotr