Cutting RED footage on retina MBP?

[Kingsly]

Booked a gig shooting some commercials next week with a pretty quick turnaround (shooting on Red One MX - delivery in 1080).
I budgeted in a new MP to replace my Early '08 that's been bravely limping along, but the month wait to get a MP would completely ruin our deliver schedule. Plus I will be traveling some during the editing process.

So, can anyone recommend the base model 15" retina MBP to work reasonably well with hi-res footage like that? I'll edit off of a TB drive if that helps.

Future uses for it would also include DIT station for Red and BMPCC footage. And email.

 

[kylevorbach]

I recently cut a 15-minute short shot on the Scarlet in 4K on a Late 2011 17" MBP with external drives holding the footage. Premiere CC worked wonderfully, though I was not able to keep the playback window at full resolution. I also had some pretty complex After Effects sequences that did not kill the machine.

I would imagine the base 15' rMBP would be comparable if not better than my fully-spec'ed machine (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

 

[monokakata]

My son just finished cutting a feature-length film shot in 4K Red (or Scarlet?) in a 15" rMBP, but not the base model. He used the top i7, 512 ssd, 16g ram, using a TB G-drive and 2 x27" 1080 Dell monitors. He cut in Pro Res LE, transcoded from 4K by the rMBP (took a couple of days, he said). Avid MC7.

This was a low-budget operation. A cMP or nMP was out of the question. An iMac would probably have been better than the rMBP, but the rMBP was already on hand.

 

[e1me5]

Right now I work as a data wrangler on a virtually no-budget feature film, shooting 4k RAW with a RED Scarlet. My main job is to transfer the clips from the camera to two 3TB ThunderBolt Hard Drives ( if you need to do that I recommend the Double Data app, it is specifically design to handle the special R3D files and to perform checksum verification at the end of the transferring), but I also have to deliver the dailies on a DVD for the director to see. I am using Final Cut Pro X to do that and I've discovered that FCPX handles the RAW files very good. Sometimes I am asked to edit some scenes right after they are shot, so the director and the DoP know that they cut well and they have no problems, and I do that very fast with FCPX on my MBP just with the RAW files, straight from the camera, without the need to generate proxy files (no time and money for extra Hard drives). Most of the time it plays back smoothly, although sometimes it skips a couple of frames because it is transcoding for the DVDs on the background.
My MBP is the 15' mid 2012 classic, with 2.6 i7 650gt nvidia with 1gb vram and 16gb ram plus an 1TB SSD and I am pushing it to the limit with this.

So I recommend you not to go for the base rMBP model, choose the 2.3ghz at least. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M and the faster CPU will be just enough to handle the RAW files and exporting to 1080p will be faster (since you said you need to deliver fast). Also use the fastest option for external hard drives (2 Thunderbolt HDDs configured as RAID 0 is the best option for me).