Mike Curtis talks a little bit about RED post
By S Simmons. Filed in Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid editing, Blogs and links, Final Cut Pro, from the net, RED |
Over at the Pro Video Coalition, Mike Curtis has posted a piece talking about … wait for it … the future (including Final Cut Pro) of the big 3 A’s (Apple, Avid, Adobe) and their RED support. This is the most detailed information we have heard about what’s in store for Final Cut Pro and its RED support. I would go so far to say that hell may have frozen over without our knowledge as Mike seems to be talking about a future version of the product.
According to Mike, the demo showed a new functionality to the Log and Transfer tool that rewraps RED’s .R3D files while copying the media to your Capture Scratch folder. Currently you re-encode the media through Log and Transfer to ProRes (one of several other options for getting media into FCP). Re-encoding takes time and affects quality as the footage takes a hit. Mike also makes a good comparison to shooting RAW still images with a DSLR and then working from a JPEG and not the RAW. The same thing happens when you encode to ProRes and never touch the .R3Ds again. I’ve speculated before that a large majority of RED projects transcode to ProRes and never touch the .R3Ds again so this new Log and Transfer functionality will be a good thing. But let’s be honest, anything that FCP adds to better support new and emerging media formats is a good thing. Mike also talks about upcoming support in both Color and Final Cut Server. Thanks to Mike for posting this information since we so very rarely ever get a glimpse of an upcoming version of Final Cut Pro.
He also mentions Adobe’s support and Avid. We’ve seen the Adobe implementation that works directly with the .R3D files and it looks promising. And Avid has publicly voiced and demonstrated support for RED so we can expect regular advances in their support as well. So from what we’ve seen publicly Apple’s support for Final Cut Pro looks to be catch-up at this point. Apple so rarely talks about future products it’s hard to know. Avid has great native support for MXF. Adobe is working on native support for .R3Ds. Final Cut Pro has native support only for QuickTime. Something is better than nothing but as these new formats continue to advance FCP is again falling behind.
