Hi! I recently bought Adobe Premiere and Cineforms Aspect HD, with the intention of editing my HDV material. I also put together a computer with a Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 processor, 2 gig RAM, and three 300 GB 7200rpm SATA-disks. These are NOT raided.
I was under the impression that Aspect HD performes a lossless compression, or nearly lossless. This is what I have noted so far (after experimenting for a day):
1 Cineform really try to help as much as they can with documentation, updates and so on.
2 After importing HDV material using “HDV capture” (that is, not using the Aspect HD intermediate) timeline play is jerky and choppy. When, on the other hand, I import using “Cineform HDV Capture”, the material plays smoothly.
So far, so good. Now to the less pleasant things:
3 When using Aspect HD intermediate, simple effects that I add, like flipping the image (which is essential for me, as my material is recorded upside down because of my using an 35mm adapter during shooting) are not visible during playback, if I don’t render them first. This is an annoyance, as it demands of me to render all my raw footage if I want to study it in Premiere.
4 When using Aspect HD intermediate, after hitting space there is a playback delay of about 0.5 seconds, during which my preview monitor flashes. When I pause playback with another hit on space, the monitor does not show a still from the timeline, as expected, but is empty.
After all, the above are only small annoying things that makes working in Premiere less enjoyable. But the really scary thing (which made me write this to ask for help) is this:
5 Even though importing material using the old “HDV capture” gives jerky playback (because of the 7200rpm SATA limitation?) the image looks nice and the way I expected. As HDV has the 8-bit 7:2:0 color sampling, in certain scenes “color banding” is very visible, but I can’t do much about that. On the other hand, capturing using “Cineform HDV Capture” gives an apparent degradation of the material color-wise, far from the “losslessness” expected by me.
This difference is visible all the way into the exported test movies I made.
I’ll be happy to send stills to exemplify this.
I would like comments and to hear the experiences of others when it comes to Aspect HD. I imagine that some people don’t notice the color degradation if, for example, there is a lot of motion and action in their material, or if there is not smooth gradients in their images. In my case the camera is still, and films typically smooth gradient motives, like walls in an apartment.
Or have I got it wrong about Aspect HD degrading the material?
Please help.
I was under the impression that Aspect HD performes a lossless compression, or nearly lossless. This is what I have noted so far (after experimenting for a day):
1 Cineform really try to help as much as they can with documentation, updates and so on.
2 After importing HDV material using “HDV capture” (that is, not using the Aspect HD intermediate) timeline play is jerky and choppy. When, on the other hand, I import using “Cineform HDV Capture”, the material plays smoothly.
So far, so good. Now to the less pleasant things:
3 When using Aspect HD intermediate, simple effects that I add, like flipping the image (which is essential for me, as my material is recorded upside down because of my using an 35mm adapter during shooting) are not visible during playback, if I don’t render them first. This is an annoyance, as it demands of me to render all my raw footage if I want to study it in Premiere.
4 When using Aspect HD intermediate, after hitting space there is a playback delay of about 0.5 seconds, during which my preview monitor flashes. When I pause playback with another hit on space, the monitor does not show a still from the timeline, as expected, but is empty.
After all, the above are only small annoying things that makes working in Premiere less enjoyable. But the really scary thing (which made me write this to ask for help) is this:
5 Even though importing material using the old “HDV capture” gives jerky playback (because of the 7200rpm SATA limitation?) the image looks nice and the way I expected. As HDV has the 8-bit 7:2:0 color sampling, in certain scenes “color banding” is very visible, but I can’t do much about that. On the other hand, capturing using “Cineform HDV Capture” gives an apparent degradation of the material color-wise, far from the “losslessness” expected by me.
This difference is visible all the way into the exported test movies I made.
I’ll be happy to send stills to exemplify this.
I would like comments and to hear the experiences of others when it comes to Aspect HD. I imagine that some people don’t notice the color degradation if, for example, there is a lot of motion and action in their material, or if there is not smooth gradients in their images. In my case the camera is still, and films typically smooth gradient motives, like walls in an apartment.
Or have I got it wrong about Aspect HD degrading the material?
Please help.
