Experiences with RED R3D: in CS5 and in general?

Question

I'll be posting my first spot with footage from a RED One this coming week. I've only played with a few clips, and not tried anything "real" with it yet.
The footage is being shot in 4K 16x9, I believe at 23.976. Final delivery will be 720/30p for broadcast/cablecast. Fortunately, no sync sound to worry about in this one. I'm getting the RED drive full of footage tomorrow afternoon, so I'll have a little bit of time to play with material.
My system seems to be OK with the 4.5K clips I've been testing. I kick it down to 1/4 Playback and 1/2 Paused resolution, and things seems snappy. My system is an i7-930 @ 4GHz, 24GB RAM, GTX 480, 4-drive RAID 5 off mobo that serves as my primary editing drive.
I'm looking for any general advice for dealing with this material in general at the OS level, just in case there are any best practices, and any gotchas as far as CS5 is concerned. I'm trying to determine what the best sequence setting to use would be; do I want to use a matching RED preset, or post at my destination frame size/rate? My usual approach with my own 1080p material (DVCPROHD, primarily) is to edit in a full raster 1080p sequence, and then export directly to 720p for deliver. I'm thinking I'll take the same approach here, working at 4K and exporting to the final, but I'm open to suggestions. Working at a smaller frame size would obviously give me reframing options.
I may do a bit of light AE work on this; nothing too much as I've got flip this pretty quickly. I'm hoping to make this one shine--the producer is terrified of RED (of course, he's the one that usually shoots 35mm and has it telecined to miniDV), and if this goes well I'll have plenty more regular spots to do like this... and I'll get to raise rates!
Thanks in advance to you seasoned REDitors

Answer 1

Hey Colin,
I've worked extensively with R3D in PPSC5 and REDCINE-X.
First note--don't bother with Cine-X... Now that CS5 (as of 5.0.3) supports the new color science in build 30, there's no need to use Cine-X as an intermediary. In my experience it's both very slow and also VERY unstable. If you start doing too much, it crashes. And that's not just my system, word on the street is that Cine-X is unstable both on the PC and the Mac, period.
So, use PPro CS5 for everything you do with R3D.
If you're going to reframe, then yes, go ahead and edit at 720. There are RED presets for down in the lower ranges, too, so I'd use a RED preset at 720p30 in order to stick in the RED presets for editing. It may not make a difference, but I just look at is as best-practice... Either way, stick in a RED preset.
RED works beautifully in PProCS5... I've got a 920 with a three-disk RAID-0 and the GTX285 and I put it at 1/4 and full rez for paused and it works beautifully up to four layers. I've not worked past four layers, but it was still smooth when I hit four.
Note for you with the clip settings dialog for the RED... You can save presets, so go into your first shot from a specific setup, get it the way you like it, and then create a preset for that. Then just select the rest of the clips in the bin from that shot angle and apply that preset. Repeat for different shot setups as needed.
Adobe's done a great job building in really fluid, seamless support for RED, and with the 5.0.3 release, they've got support for the Build 30 color science as well.
Editing R3D has been a great experience for me...