Avid has advanced its support of RED here in the last few days. While it was always possible to actually use Avid software to cut your RED job it did require some specific set-up in order to get the Avid software to properly track the timecode and other metadata from the RED files. I guess you could say that Avid support of RED is now “officially” supported since there is a new section on Avid’s website dedicated specifically to the RED workflow. There is a detailed pdf document available there that walks the user through the Avid specific RED process. Now it seems as Avid will take this one step further. Today the company announced that it has signed a deal with RED to use the software development kit that RED provides. This is good news since it could take Avid’s support for RED a step beyond the current level of metadata tracking and actually give Avid applications the ability to natively read the RED .R3D files. In fact that seems to be what everyone is wanting their NLE to do and it’s something that most NLE manufacturers are looking to do as well. We’ve seen recent announcement from Quantel, Adobe and even a mention from Apple about native RED support. How will Avid implement this? That remains to be seen but it’s a step forward!