Avid has finally stepped into the real world in regards to Red Camera workflows. Check out their new PDF booklet . Avid is coming late to the table in promoting their RED support. Sure, Avid’s Michael Philips has been very active on the Red User site since the beta days, but that doesn’t come off as “official” company support. Personally, I’m glad to see the company finally get behind this effort, even though they have a ways to go to really support Red.
To me, the ability to access the native RED files is the only description of a true finishing platform for RED. However, Avid can lay claim to the best metadata tracking for offline that I have seen with what appears to be all of the RED information coming along for the ride, even color data. This will prove ever more valuable in the coming years across all of the digital camera platforms.
I do take issue with the very first bullet point from their webpage though:
“Easy import. Ingest picture, sound, and metadata from the RED ONE camera.”
In spite of that claim, you can’t ingest from the RED ONE Camera. You can ingest a converted file but that is another step and doesn’t count as ingesting from the camera. And it is actually 4 steps to import into Avid:
1: Convert the file to another format like DNxHD
2: Create an ALE with those files
3: Import the ALE
4: Batch import the files
That doesn’t qualify under the term “Easy” in my book. That aside, this is a big step for Avid and should help with their perception in the indie film space.