With the introduction of AMA support for RED media in Media Composer 5 it has become a easier to edit RED footage in MC, but it’s still not a finishing solution for many jobs. Avid’s DS product, on the other hand, is a great RED finishing tool.
AMA is great, and while the RED performance in Media Composer could still be better, it now provides a very quick path from shoot to edit if necessary. But not everything has caught up – most obviously the standard workflow options out of Media Composer to DS and other finishing products, AAF and AFE, don’t work with AMA media.
The First Steps
If you’re happy to work with a lower-quality image then it’s possible to edit in “draft” (Yellow/Yellow or Yellow/Green) mode directly from R3D RAW material – assuming your system can do the heavy lifting – processor and drive speed can be significant factors, memory and GPU also.
In this approach it’s possible to AMA link to a large number of R3D RAW files and get to editing almost immediately. The footage tends to look reasonable for offline purposes in the application’s monitors, although playback on a client monitor is not stunning.
The alternative approach is to transcode selected rushes to an Avid-native format for editing – performance and image quality will be drastically improved, but there is going to be a significant transcoding time to take into consideration.
For this method you can AMA link to RAW media, then put selected clips (or all of them) into a bin for transcoding. Double check the debayer options in the ‘Media Creation’ settings [CTRL + 5] and then select all clips and Transcode to the desired clip resolution – DNxHD36 being an excellent option for offline.
Getting The Edit Out
Here’s where it gets a little tricky – traditionally from this point, once and edit is locked off, you could export the edit data as an AAF or AFE to Avid DS or another finishing product, but here is where MC5 has jumped ahead a little. Neither format is able to cope with AMA clips – only native Avid media.
If you’ve transcoded all the media at the start of the process, then everything will be fine – as it’s all now Avid media it should export fine to an AAF or AFE. But the complications aren’t over. As part of improved metadata handling in Media Composer 5 clips now track additional timecodes and source information – it’s quite possible that the information in the AAF will not be quite what the finishing suite is expecting to find. In my initial testing with Avid DS 10.3 I found conform from AAF of transcoded media to fail as DS wasn’t tracking the correct source information.
If you have chosen to edit with AMA clips then you’re in a tricky situation at this point – a transcode is required before AAF or AFE sequences can be exported. If time is a concern then this might not be ideal. You could change the debayer preference to it’s lowest quality in ‘Media Creation’ settings to speed up the process, but there will still be some waiting. And in the end you may still end up with an exported file that’s tracking information that you don’t expect.
The Alternative
At some stage it will presumably possible to export AAF edit data from an AMA sequence, and ideally other applications will correctly locate all the data they need from it, but in the mean time it is a little problematic.
What does work, definitely for DS, is an EDL. It’s old and simplistic, but that’s probably why it works – there’s not a lot to go wrong. The EDL Manager that comes with Media Composer 5 has been updated slightly – it will correctly track source filenames in AMA-based clips and treat them as reels.
With the “File 16″ EDL format (it’s just a CMX3600 list with 16-characters for the source name) the source filename of a RED file gets appropriately truncated to match what DS will create when scanning RED media (A001_C003_0423AX rather than A001_C003_0423AX_001).
Another consideration with the EDL is the timecode. In Media Composer 5 the AMA-linked clips will be assigned Time of Day timecode (I believe, although it may follow camera setting), the secondary timecode data is then tracked with the Aux 1 timecode. Your EDL will usually default to ‘Start’ – the main timecode, it can be set to ‘Auxillary TC1′ to track the Edge Code from the source files.
DS Conform
DS will sucessfully conform from EDL to RED media – the only problem I’ve encounted in testing was timecode mismatch if the wrong source timecode was being tracked, however this can be locked to either ‘Absolute’ or ‘Edge’ to match your EDL in the initial RED import settings dialog box.
The Future
It seems likely that the workflow from Media Composer 5 into other applications will improve, but in the mean time the EDL functionality should be sufficient to transfer basic edit data to other systems. Already DS 10.3 appears to support the importing of RED look data from AAF/AFE files, although I don’t think that data can be written to those files yet, but it demonstrates a clear path for RED finishing from Media Composer in the future.
While basic CMX EDLs are largely unused in our current processes, it still exists as a functional and simple method to transfer edits.
