CineForm

Will there be a price reduction on Prospect HD and Aspect HD with the release of Serious Magic products?

I am about a month away from purchasing one of these, and it will be based mainly on price for me, as they both seem to do what I need.
 
I can't say enough about Prospect. I have DV Rack, too, but I don't have a powerfull laptop yet.
 
Green Hornet said:
Will there be a price reduction on Prospect HD and Aspect HD with the release of Serious Magic products?]

Green Hornet, Serious Magic products and CineForm products are more complementary than competitive, so price pressure is not really a factor. Aspect HD and Prospect HD have real-time editing engines for Premiere Pro, and with Prospect HD you get 10-bit precision. CineForm products also have myriad conversion utilities for deinterlacing, removing pulldown, enabling slow motion, up/down scaling, image flipping for M2 adapters, etc. CineForm's codec has excellent visual fidelity for a multi-generation workflow. If you need to use a multi-gen post workflow you should consider using a codec different than DVCPRO HD because it does not have good multi-generation characteristics: http://www.cineform.com/technology/HDQualityAnalysis10bit/HDQualityAnalysis10bit.htm. Because of the DI nature of CineForm files you can easily combine files from different cameras or rescale from different resolutions. If these features benefit your workflow then CineForm products are an excellent way to go. So a decision to go one direction or another really depends on your workflow.

By the way, CineForm products can convert DV Rack HD files, so you gain the convenient D2D recording capabilities for the HVX200 using DV Rack HD, and also use the RT editing workflow from CineForm products.
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The 9-15 update adds several features that I requested. Thanks!!!

Is there any way of converting CF AVIs back to MXF formats. Right now P2 cards are the only way I can portably display my finished HD videos.
 
I love cineform, don't get me wrong, I just feel it's too expensive, and I don't NEED it.

I can do what I NEED with edius, p2 genie, and 4 8gig cards.
I do however WANT cineform.

I buy things for the following reasons:
1) I love it.
2) I need it.
3) It makes me money.

For the price, I can't love it.
I don't need it because I already have a working workflow.
It really won't make me more money by getting it.

The main reason I WANT it is because I HATE edius.
I really only want to be able to use other editing applications.
I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way.

The new products coming out, give me other means to get me away from edius.
I really don't have a need to be teathered to a laptop, so I don't want DV rack for that.

If they get the codec running for 24pn, then I am sure I will spend the $200 for that.

Cineform is still overpriced for my workflow.
Yeah, yeah, I know all about what it does, and how that is different than what other software does....but thoes things are wants, not needs, and they don't make me money.
 
Hornet:

You should look at Prospect instead of Aspect if you are on the fence.

Aspect HD is a great product but the features of Prospect are far more impressive than Aspect, especially if you are planning to produce digital cinema pieces. Uprezzing and the 10 bit color makes the extra money well spent.

If you are lingering at Aspect vrs Edius, it's your decision. We both love Premiere and I'm gratefull to the guys at Cineform for giving me a solution I can use with my PC and Premiere. Barry likes Edius, but I think he went Mac on us, as did Jarred. There are other options for you in the same price range or less if you aren't interested in taking advantage of the Cineform solutions. Raylight, for instance, will allow you to edit in Premiere. Serious Magic also has a decoder that is a little less money. Neither of these products have the feature set that Aspect or Prospect have, but for two hundred bucks you can edit stuff from your HVX in Premiere.
 
GH, the cool thing about getting ProspectHD and the Xena card is the discount, making ProspectHD closer to the cost of AspectHD, with 10bit 1080 resolution. I am going Xena LHe for the card, as it has HD-SDI and Analog HD component I/O, so I should be able to use a cost effect HD component LCD TV to monitor, then hire in the HD-SDI CRT monitor for CC on a final on-line. I like the idea of editing from one SATA drive, 10bit 1080p24. No off-line, then on-line, just on-line from the start and the saving on disk arrays and data management should help me in the long run.

I am going ahead with this purchase and will implement all the components going into the new year, with a view to getting a low budget, direct to DVD, feature off the ground. At the end of the day, you use what tools you need and can afford. As I intend to do a lot of CC and compositing, I need to use DVCProHD as a HVX source only, thereafter CineForm ProspectHD appears to be a smart move for me <<*>>, with the Xena LHe. That is my theory... :D
 
ThePhage said:
The 9-15 update adds several features that I requested. Thanks!!!

Is there any way of converting CF AVIs back to MXF formats. Right now P2 cards are the only way I can portably display my finished HD videos.
Click to expand...

The might be the only reason someone might want to write data to P2 cards, given the cost of the media it isn't a typical distribution format. It is for this reason we haven't added P2 MXF export to our products, too few commerical applications today (so it may change in the future.) There are much cheaper portable ways to show your HD projects. For computer display there is WMV-HD and H.264, or even MPEG2 HD (the broadcast standard) works well. For display on HDTVs (while HD-DVD and BluRay are too expensive) there are red laser DVD players that decode WMV-HD to 720p or 1080i, they only cost $200-$300. I personally use a DVD WMV player which has a USB port, so I carry my HD projects on a $40 2GB thumb drive. Just some ideas.
 
David Newman said:
Could you email me or support a window capture of the log window. Sounds like that Velocity might need some update (DirectX 9 update maybe.) The 0x80070057 error code is a DirectSound error report -- never seen one of those.
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He found out it was a problem with his registry. Now it works! :thumbup:

"red laser DVD players that decode WMV-HD to 720p or 1080i, they only cost $200-$300. I personally use a DVD WMV player which has a USB port"

Which player do you have?
 
This is the network HD-WMV DVD player I have at home a Snazio Net DVD Cinema player. At the office we have an IOData AvelLink Player2. They are very similar.
 
I love cineform and I'm using it to edit the movie we're shooting using your advise and shooting 1080p then scaling to 720p. I can't afford ProspectHD yet.

If I keep the MXF files around can I still cut with the Aspect avi's then in the future when I have the money get prospect HD and and just replace the avi files I made with Aspect (they have the same filename right)

Does that make sense?
 
Yes, that will work. It is good to plan ahead like this, because the conversion from MXF to 10bit CineForm is a valuable step that only Prospect HD offers.
 
:beer:Good post! I was looking into this. This info will be useful to us all... but don't let me intervene please continue.:beer::thumbup:
 
I just installed the Connect HD trial, and it has crashed twice since I starting converting footage with it. (I was using the Aspect HD trial, but I uninstalled it when it expired and left the two decoders installed.)
I copied over a full 4Gb card with 720PN footage shot with a 35mm adapter, and tried to convert the whole thing at once. After it crashed, I checked the last clip it converted, and it seems to be there in full; I don't think it got cut off. So I restarted my computer, opened it up again and selected all the clips that were left. (No other programs were open, nothing else taxing the computer.) It got a few clips finished and crashed again. Again I checked the last clip, and it looks like it's all there.
It doesn't give me an error, just a generic Windows message, "We're sorry, would you like to send an error report, etc."

Any ideas?

I'm using the latest trial of Connect HD.

HD File Size: Large
Frame Format: Automatic
M2 lens mode
Resize: 1280x720
Keep Source Aspect Ratio
Split file on Scene Changes (I think this is irrelevant)

Windows XP Pro
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
Athlon 64 3500+
2Gb DDR400
GeForce 6800GT
250Gb 7200rpm
Soundblaster X-Fi
Premiere 1.5.1

Thanks in advance!
 
No ideas if Connect HD is doing but Aspect HD on the same PC wasn't. Very odd. Please file a trouble ticket at cineform.com/support.
 
joshtownsend said:
I love cineform and I'm using it to edit the movie we're shooting using your advise and shooting 1080p then scaling to 720p. I can't afford ProspectHD yet.

If I keep the MXF files around can I still cut with the Aspect avi's then in the future when I have the money get prospect HD and and just replace the avi files I made with Aspect (they have the same filename right)

Does that make sense?
Click to expand...

I don't Know if it only happens to me but couple of weeks ago, I edited a short feature with Aspect HD 4.2 trial, then David did give to me Prospect HD trial, when I instal and try to continue editing the movie, Premiere (2.0) crashes every time I play, so I deleted Prospect and reinstall Aspect and everything goes well.

any idea?

I finished my movie and trials expired , by now I'm in the 35mm blow up and have no time to play with premiere, but we are going to purchase AspectHD as soon as the we sell the movie to a local distributor.

The movie's name is: "La Partida"

We will post some material as soon as we can.
 
Please, report any issue when they happen with the support staff, it is the best way to address them. It may have been a simple install issue, no easy way to tell now. We have a lot of ASpect to Prospect HD upgraders, so there isn't a known issue.
 
David

I have found that if I import my Cineform converted clips (converted DVCPRO50) into a regular DV project I get the real time scrubbing I was looking for (I posted about this a week or so ago).

My question is- can I edit my piece in a DV timeline (since that is what is more efficient for me) and then copy the finished sequence into a Cineform project and still retain the benefits of working in DVCPRO50, namely 4:2:2? I am thinking I wouldn't lose 4:2:2 because nothing is actually being output or rendered from the DV timeline. I would simply be using it as a timeline. All rendering will be done in the Cineform project, not the DV project.

Thanks for your help.
 
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