Cineform and PrCS4

Blade Borge

Blade Borge

Well-known member
So cineform and cs4 don't really play together right now, so when will they? When cineform does start acting right, will I need to download some firmware update or something. I don't have cs4 or cineform right now, but what does it mean when people cs4 doesn't fully support cineform, I mean could I still use cineform in cs4 and be able to work okay?
 
Blade Borge said:
So cineform and cs4 don't really play together right now, so when will they? When cineform does start acting right, will I need to download some firmware update or something. I don't have cs4 or cineform right now, but what does it mean when people cs4 doesn't fully support cineform, I mean could I still use cineform in cs4 and be able to work okay?
Click to expand...

Cineform with CS3 works like DV.....fast.

Cineform with CS4 finally will allow you to edit at about twice as fast as AVCHD.
Most can not edit AVCHD, if you are one of them, then you can limp along with cineform, and also create a 720p preset that works.

(I tried a 720p custom preset with just AVCHD, and wow, that brought my system to it's knees when I pulled in a psd file)

What it means that cineform does not FULLY support CS4 is that you can edit,
you just will not get the benifits of speeding up the process.

With cineform, when it is finally working, will be the same as speeding up your system 400%.

With Prospect HD, you can also get 10 bit, great for color correcting and or effects, plus also great when you want a solid grey scale in shadows insead of the "wet plastic on your footage look" in the grey areas, and also get a speed improvement when it is fully supported.
 
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When CS4 was released, it originally did not have support for 3rd party stuff (capture, boards, Cineform, etc...) They didn't release the Software Developer Kits to the 3rd party vendors until two weeks or so after it was released. There were enough architectural changes to CS4 that a simple patch wouldn't have allowed 3rd party apps to work. As such, everyone has had to re-write a bunch of stuff from scratch.

If the Cineform codec is properly installed, then the codec should work with CS4 fine. So Cineform Neo Scene isn't a problem... but you don't get the benefits of real time playback. However, Cineform Prospect HD, which replaces the CS render engine with it's own for real time playback, won't work yet. It works fine with CS3, but they have had to re-write the code to get it to work with CS4, which they are still working on. Cineform is supposed to release Prospect HD v4 soon... but without the render engine at first. If you do not have v4, and haven't purchased v3 in the last couple of months or so, I believe they have stated that you will need to purchase the upgrade.

And to make it perfectly clear... Prospect HD WILL NOT work with CS4 yet. At all.
 
Mike Harvey said:
And to make it perfectly clear... Prospect HD WILL NOT work with CS4 yet. At all.
Click to expand...


This is False....


Prospect HD WILL work with CS4 NOW, just no speed improvements.

I have been using CS4 and prospect HD since aspect HD had been discontinued.
In the first release after the change, CS4 would crash, due to the main concept encoder that Premiere cs4 wants to use all the time.

The work around was to either disable the main concept codec in premiere, or remove the speed engine of cineform from loading.

It was even worse if you used core codec because Premiere ONLY wants to use main concept codec.

Then Cineform came out with an update that searches for core codec before it does anything else, if you have it, it will use core codec to do the decode, as it is the most reliable and fastest with programable options for using 0-255 color levels, or 16-235 levels, how to deblock, how to deinterlace, and what to output to (e.g. YUY2, UYVY, RGB32, I420 etc), if you don't have core, it will use main concept or what ever you have installed.

Then Cineform came out with another update that allowed you to use cineform files in CS4, still no speed engine.

It looks like they basically done the same thing as disabling the plug in, but only disabling the call within the program instaed of within Premiere.

So YES, Prospect HD does work in CS4, you just don't get the speed improvements (which is the main thing prospect HD is over the plain jain neo scene)

Neo scene makes the same file as Prospect HD.
This is done through a program called HD LINK.
You select your files you want to convert, and the options such as size, frame rate, remove pull down etc, then HD link spits out a file in either MOV wrapper or AVI

This file is the same
in both applications.

The difference is Prospect HD WILL have speed improvments when it is working, untill then it is just neo scene that you paid more for.
 
Okay here's what I'm thinking of doing,

Wait til CS4 and Cineform act right...

I still have CS3, I want to bring in my HV30 footage and my HMC footage, I guess as 1280x720 24p footage cineformed using neo scene, but crap, CS3 doesn't have a 24 720 preset.
 
Blade Borge said:
Okay here's what I'm thinking of doing,

Wait til CS4 and Cineform act right...

I still have CS3, I want to bring in my HV30 footage and my HMC footage, I guess as 1280x720 24p footage cineformed using neo scene, but crap, CS3 doesn't have a 24 720 preset.
Click to expand...



I don't have neo scene, but Prospect HD does have a 720 24p setting if you want to spend a little more.

I came from aspect HD, and it gave a preset. I am not sure if you can export the presets, or maybe you can do a trial of Prospect for CS3 and it may give you the preset that way...not sure.
 
I've got an AJA Xena card, prospect hd literature says it has support for monitoring through this card, does the monitoring work right now in CS4, or only with CS3? Does anyone have any experience with this monitoring solution? Does it work well?

Thanks.
 
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