Re: Pretty amazing Thunderbolt demo.

We hire a DIT with a MacPro and a Red Rocket to be on set. The day after the shoot we're delivered 2 hard drives with duplicate footage on each - raw R3D files and ProRes transcodes. We copy the ProRes files to the server, archive the rest, start editing. We only go back to the 4K files for reframing or to fix major color issues (rare). Why edit 4K when we never finish in it - often finishing in SD, even!

Plus, having a mobile Red Rocket wouldn't help in our shop. We'd need 3 Red Rocket cards to make cutting in 4K worthwhile since we often have 3 editors working with the same footage. That would be a $15,000 investment. Much cheaper to pay for transcodes and use our MacPros to reprocess a couple shots than try to work in 4K the whole time. Faster renders, more timeline responsiveness, less cost in the long run.

Really, editing 4K is a cool demo. The majority of the time it's unnecessary.

Do you guys finish in 4K?

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Michael Hancock
Editor