Hi There,

I'm new to Avid. Actually I'll be migrating my 4 workstations on Avid Symphony in the coming weeks. I'm still on FCP7 now.

My question is the following :

I read that the REDRocket card was NOT usable with Symphony / Media Composer when using a network storage.
The RED AMA plug-in guide (http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/User_Guide/en367201?popup=true) says that the R3D files have to be stored on a local storage for the REDrocket card to function properly. But this article only mentions earlier versions of Media Composer and Symphony.

As my company works with an EditShare server, does anyone know if that limitation has changed since MC/Symphony 6? And if not, does anyone know if Avid or Red plans to make it compatible?

Thanks a lot for your help.

I've occasionally been using a rocket on my PC Symphony, also attached to LanShare (bit no SCSI card). Had the R3D's on local drives, though. They did not test it, and you may run into a lack of slots when on shared storage (Rocket requires to be in x8 to run at full speed IIRC). Also, it sort of works, but it's not as fast as usng the Rocket woth RedCine-X. Also, I don't thnk it laus nice on Mac, only on PC, but never tested that.

Important: the Rocket only works during transcodes (not playback), and only when set to Full Debayer (located in Media Creation).

I very much doubt much research was spent on the Rocket for v6. It's a bit of a try-and-see.

Why would Avid restraint compatibility to local storage? Do they want to impose their shared storage?

They just tested limited setups with the Rocket. Not supported means just that. Doesn't mean it won't work, means that if it doesn't, they won't be able to help you out.

http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Compatibility/en366195

If you're depending on this, try before you buy.

Ok thanks Job!

So sad Avid doesn't offer a better solution for RED support...
The ProRES/DNxHD transcode process should be a choice, not a barrier.

Hope this will be "fixed" soon....

Can't speculate on that, as it is against the terms of use.

That said, in general, it seems that transcoding outside of Media Composer is faster than inside it. Without the Rocket, at 1/2 or 1/4 Debayer, you get decent transcoding speeds, but I would still prefer RedCine-X as it is the fastest way, in my experience (with or without Rocket). Also gives you tapenames rather than Source File names, which makes things like roundtripping to Resolve easier.

Not sure how popular a 5K Rocket card is among Avid users. More something folks run on dedicated systems. Plus that on really fast systems (8-core, 12-core), the price may not be worth the speed difference. See http://www.hdhead.com/?p=166 for some speed tests. Igor from HDHead (also an active user on these forums) got to faster-than-realtime.

But I went for the Rocket before MC supported it, and used it first with MetaFuze, then with RedCine-X and Media Composer. It's paid for itself, more or less, in two years time, and it was fun pioneering with that stuff.

These days, the DIT usually transcodes R3D to MXF-DNxHD for me, and recently, I'm seeing more and more Alexa stuff coming in.