Is there any way of opening Red proxies in MC without having to import them first. I have been given 100 hours of footage and I don't have the time to convert it to Avid media.

Cheers

No.

You can use Final Cut for that.

You can convert the red files with redrushes, metafuze or several other apps, to edit with MC, but it will take some time...

No not yet though with any luck the AMA should eventually allow something like that kind of instant access inside the MC. For the moment it's a long transcode from R3D to DNxHD.

G.

What's the difference between importing/transcoding R3D files and importing the quicktime proxies?

If you do a straight import of the QT camera proxies then Avid will transcode them into whatever flavor of DNxHD you have chosen. This will take a while as Avid won't access all cores of the CPU during transcode (not sure if this is still true with v3.5) You will also loose all TC info and possibly even some extra metadata doing an import this way.

When you use RedRushes to create the DNxHD QTs and an ALE file Avid will do a fast import (move and re-wrap as Avid MXF). RedRushes transcode to DNxHD should also be faster as it can access multiple cores.

G.

Also consider that Assimilate and BaseLight have products that will playback R3D in realtime. The BaseLight BLT will even render DNxHD mediafiles from R3D in slightly more than realtime. These are more costly options, but faster than the cheaper options. (You know the drill: good/fast/cheap, pick any two).

I can confirm that the Baselight/BLT option works very well. Just finished my first project through this process it worked flawlessly matching back to and grading off the original Red files. The processing was very fast. BLT has 16 processor cores to render DNxHD MXF files that you simply copy to your HD.  No need to even import!

In general, when you import the proxies, you will also not be seeing any of the camera data that the DP may have used to color correct.

When you consider the difference in quality of the scenes as well as the ability to use another machine to conert the RED to DNxHD, using RedRushes or MetaFuze (on PC) is the way to go.