Cineform $199 to upgrade...discontinued Aspect HD

[Green Hornet]

Many Cineform users were happy with Aspect HD, untill Premiere CS4 came out, and made it not work so well.

Now they have discontinued Aspect HD.

I think the Prospect HD is worth the $200 upgrade, but should previous Aspect HD customers get a better break than $50?

(ASpect HD owners can upgrade to Prospect HD for $199)

I have mixed emotions on this one.

[Huy Vu]

I agree. To be honest I'm rather ambivalent about Cineform. I've been using Aspect since Premiere 2.0 and now on to CS3, and I've encountered plenty of issues even when I've switched computers. Render previews doesn't work properly, the codec itself isn't compatible with Quicktime Pro, when preview it shuts down everything that's not a Cineform effect so that I can't even preview a simple title scroll, there's no High Quality/Draft preview available, gamma changes during previews etc. Technical support for me seemed to be ridiculously slow; last week I got a reply to a tech support question...two months after I put in the ticket!

And I haven't noticed any noticeable render or editing improvement either. If anything Cineform project file seems to be more unstable than regular HDV project and render time is about the same. The only good thing I can say is that Cineform makes a decent archiving codec; it's relatively lossless at a good file size.

I guess I'll have to update to Prospect to stay current, but I'm not too happy.

[Green Hornet]

I like Cineform when it works.
For me, it worked more than not.
I hated the whole regester process, that leaves you at the mercy of them to turn you back on.

So what will happen to anyone who wants to stay with Aspect HD, when they build a new computer and want to transfer ASPECT HD to the new system? Will that not be allowed?

Will you still be at the mercy of them, or will they offer a solution for you to use it without regestering anymore for it to work...since they no longer support it.


I can understand the upgrade process, but I just think they should support the software
they currently have.

I like the idea of Cineform as an archival format, EXCEPT the fact that if they no longer exsist, we may not be able to transition the footage to something else to use.

All that said, on avi files, it works pretty well, when it works.

Knowing that quicktime hasn't the same reliability, I think I will steer away from saving files as such.