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Filed under: Cameras •Post Production •Production •

New Red Camera Adobe Support

For a few weeks now I have been checking out the new Red Camera Adobe Importer plug-in for Premiere Pro, AfterEffects, and Encore. For their first Adobe CS3 plug-in, they’ve done some excellent work. Their importer plug-in makes using the native R3D file type as easy as any of the other tapeless formats we currently support with CS3. As with our P2 and XDCAM support, importing is as easy as drag and drop or you can still use the standard File>Import dialog. The Plug-in gets installed in the Adobe Common MediaCore folder and is shared by all Adobe video applications. Yes, there are plug-ins for both Intel Mac and Windows. Windows users might consider using Vista64 so they can address more than 3.6 GB of RAM for the larger frame sizes(yes - currently CS3 can only address upto 4GB of Ram on Windows ** stayed tuned ** we’ll have a better answer - more on that later) Vista users, just remember to turn off all of the friendly Vista helpful messages like “Cancel or Allow?” )

The first beta works a little different than most Premiere Pro users would expect. Red needed to give us a quick way to set how the Importer would handle large frame sizes on less powerful machines. Since Premiere Pro is resolution independent, it can have both a “working resolution” that plays smooth on your particular machine and also an Export for outputting the sequence at Full res.

To get to the Red Importer dialog box, you simply double click on any clip in the Premiere Pro Project Panel and the Red Importer Dialog window will open (normally double clickin on the Project Bin sends that clip to the Source Window). There are various settings, but the one that you will use most often is the Global Settings. Here you select your Frame Size like 2048x1152 and then tell the importer how you want it to treat that video. You have various settings like Full, ½, ¼, 1/8, and so on. For my 17” MacBookPro , using ¼ for 2K and 1/8 for 4K as a “working res” was an excellent editing experience for a laptop dealing with 2K files. Remember, these are not proxies, since Red uses a different encoding method for their R3D files, scaling down the video still keeps the picture very clean - not the typical scaled artifacting you would normally see with other encoding methods.

For example, once you select “Apply Global settings” , this will tell the Red Adobe Importer that whenever it sees a 2048x1152 clip to treat it as 512x288. You’ll need to set up a Preset in Premiere Pro and set your frame size to 512x288. Again, when you export, you simply tell the Exporter to change the Frame Size to 2048x1152.

Premiere Pro as a Control Panel

Currently, in this first internal beta build, Premiere Pro acts like a Red Control Panel for setting the Global settings for all Adobe apps. Yes, whether you are only planning to use AfterEffects, you would need to still launch Premiere Pro to change the Global setting for your clips. You only need to do this for one clip. Once you’ve set it, the importer remembers the setting for R3D files of that size and will hold that setting until you change it again. You can set a different setting for each R3D type file. I have my 4096 x 2048 set to 1/8 which is 512x256. We all know this is not an ideal way to access the Global settings but it was a quick way to get the Importer working for the beta. REMEMBER, this an internal beta and not the public beta.  If it’s at all possible, I personally would like to see a simple Adobe Air Application (all Adobe Air apps are Cross Platform)  that brings up the Red Importer dialog box. Since these apps work like Widgets/Gadgets , you can call them forward at anytime. If you have not seen Adobe Air you should check it out on our main home page.

(Click here for more info about Adobe Air)

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