Advantages of converting AVCHD to Cineform?

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Phil1076

Well-known member
I have an HMC150 and a very powerful computer (dual quad core Xeon 3.0 Ghz) so editing AVCHD is doable, but it's still far from as smooth as I'd like it to be.

My question is, is it worth it for me to spend the $130 on Neoscene and transcode all my AVCHD footage to Cineform prior to editing? Are there any advantages other than easier editing? I know Cineform is 4:2:2; would this improve the color quality of a clip originally recorded at 4:2:0 AVCHD?

Thanks
 
Phil1076 said:
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My question is, is it worth it for me to spend the $130 on Neoscene and transcode all my AVCHD footage to Cineform prior to editing?
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What version of Premiere ?

If you have CS5 and a compatible cuda graphics card it will be very smooth sailing

Are there any advantages other than easier editing? I know Cineform is 4:2:2; would this improve the color quality of a clip originally recorded at 4:2:0 AVCHD?
Click to expand...

In CS4, yes, there are other advantages . CS4 has an AVCHD decoding bug, an interlaced chroma issue - you can search it has been addressed in several threads

10-bit can help with color correction and grading (less banding) , even when derived from an 8-bit source

Transcoding to 4:2:2 does not improve the color quality, it's interpolated from 4:2:0 . You don't gain more from what you started with. In fact you lose a bit of quality because cineform is minimally lossy.
 
I'm curious about this neoscene. I'm looking at their site and it's pretty cool. So, they're all plugins to convert videos into an easier format to work with. Am I correct? And if so, how can that be without losing a great amount of quality?
 
If you have CS5 and a Cuda card you do not need Cineform, it handles avchd just fine.
On the other hand CS5 load a Cineform project much faster than a avchd project as former is uncompressed.
Cineform is lossy codec but visualy lossless.
 
Please excuse the relatively basic question, but I am trying to get up to speed with AVCHD before my AF100 comes in. We are currently building a new PC workstation to handle the footage from this camera. I have ordered the GTX 4700 card, so it should be compatible with CS5 (the reason for the upgrade to CS5 is for the new camera).

When you say that Cineform is lossy, I thought it was not as compressed as AVCHD. Is it like the graphics equivalent of Jpeg vs Tiff? Each time you open and resave to a new file, a jpeg will degrade... Does Cineform help to prevent the recompression and therefore loss of quality. I know it makes it easier for the editor to work with... is this because it changes it from long GOP to intraframe?

Thanks
 
Cineform is lossy. Every time you convert you're losing a bit of quality. But the idea is that you don't lose a significant amount of data. There's some very fancy math involved so it's not just as simple as converting Long GOP into intraframe; the most expensive Cineform product will actually upconvert footage to 10-bit as well so that'd help. There's a test somewhere on the Cineform site that shows a comparison between an 10th generation compressed Cineform file (that is, a file that is compressed over and over) versus a standard HDV file and the difference was obvious. Whether this is useful for you or not is another matter as most films will not go through that kind of rigorous post-production process. I recently sold my copy of Cineform Neo4K because I realized that editing the native footage works just fine and the footage rarely goes through more than a single compression cycle anyway.
 
Ann Bens said:
If you have CS5 and a Cuda card you do not need Cineform, it handles avchd just fine.
On the other hand CS5 load a Cineform project much faster than a avchd project as former is uncompressed.
Cineform is lossy codec but visualy lossless.
Click to expand...

The Cineform codec is still highly compressed. Uncompressed HD at 1920 X 1080 would be about 120 megabytes per second. If you need to do a lot of chroma keying going from 4:1:1 to 4:2:2 color space would be wise but for the most part minor color correction works OK with native AVCHD using Premiere Pro CS5.
 
I'm in the process of building a 64bit system to upgrade to CS5 in prep for the new camera. I have gotten the GTX 4700 card so far, but haven't decided on a motherboard.
Thanks to everyone for their help.
 
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