It was mentioned the other day on the blog that Adobe will soon be supporting native RED files in its Creative Suite of applications, including Premiere, After Effects and even Encore. By saying “native files” that means playback of the actual REDCODE .R3D files not just the Quicktime reference files created by the camera or RED software, though it will support those too but there’s not really any reason to use those when you have native support. FreshDV has posted a link to a couple of Quicktime videos produced in-house at Adobe that outlines this workflow though the software is still in beta. There’s a 2 minute quick introduction and a much more in-depth 20 minute version. This ability to playback native .R3D files revolves around a plug-in and an import options dialog box:

After watching the 20 minute preview a couple of things come to mind. First is that Adobe is about to leap frog everyone in their support of native RED files for all forms of editing. You’ve got your creative offline in Premiere Pro as well as the ability of do online finishing with Premiere Pro and any number of uncompressed hardware cards. You have After Effects as an industry standard for compositing and effects creation. And you even have the ability to drop .R3D files into Encore and author those clips to Blu-ray. That’s a total package. Dynamic Linking, which is one of the strongest assets of the Adobe Creative Suite for a one-stop-shop that does all of their editing, effects and finishing out of one package, seems to work in the video between After Effects and Premiere Pro. Those who work with RED know that you have the odd 2K and 4K frame sizes and Premiere Pro’s implementation of RED footage will allow you to scale down the large frame sizes for edit and then scale them back up for finishing. There seems to be an odd relationship between Premiere Pro and After Effects and Encore for this kind of scaling which requires you to go back to Premiere and open the RED RAW Import Options dialog box to change the resolution in the other apps but this is a beta demo after all so it might change when this is released. With the RED files in an Adobe Premiere timeline they do have the red render bar displayed. The demo seems to play back in realtime on a Macbook Pro 2.6 GHz with 4 gigs of RAM but it will remain to be seen how this performance will slow as you add more .R3D files to a timeline, stack video layers on top of video layers or do the normal things you have to do in the course of an edit.

While this is just a preview it is impressive. I think what’s more impressive that anything is that Adobe has seemed rather quiet on the whole RED support. The Apple and Avid forums had seen a lot of action at reduser.net with Adobe lagging a bit behind. But if they really do beat the other 2 big “A’s” to the punch with this support then the Adobe Creative Suite might become just as prevalent as Final Cut Studio when talking about RED post.