The next AE update includes Cineform? Is this my answer to manageable 4k raw?

Kyron

Kyron

Well-known member
From Adobe's blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2014/09/after-effects-cc-2014-1-13-1.html

native encoding and decoding of movies using GoPro CineForm codecs

After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Encoder can natively decode and encode QuickTime (.mov) files using the GoPro Cineform codecs on Mac OS and Windows, meaning that you do not need to install additional codecs to use and create such files.
At the higher quality settings, this codec is an excellent choice for intermediate files—i.e., files that you create from one application in a post-production pipeline to pass to the next application in the pipeline. Movie files encoded with the GoPro Cineform codec at the higher quality settings include an alpha channel.

I don't quite know how to interpret this news update. Are they saying Cineform is now included in creative cloud (effectively saving me $300 by not having to buy GoPro Studio? Or is something less glamorous like they've added support for the codec to their rendering engine to be more efficient?

Lately I've been thinking more and more about storing 4k for future proofing (Even if finishing a project in HD.)
Is Cineform my best bet? I saw Mitch hinted at an imminent announcement about 4k prores which is probably the easiest "in-camera" solution, but for arguments sake - what if you wanted to shoot raw for all those benefits, but finish and store the 4k in something more manageable once it's had a primary grade applied? Is it silly to go down this road?

Imagine you were shooting a narrative film, not corporate or ad work.
 
I've been routinely transcoding 4K via log to Cineform 444 12bit as my mezzanine codec since 4K RAW was available. I don't think the update includes cineform though (I could be wrong).

Cineform is a great codec, it does have occasional issues with some applications because QT was never really designed to handle this quality of video, so the quicktime settings have all sorts of checkboxes for forcing applications to work at >8 bit colour depths.

Obviously CD have ProRes on their road map (and another press release this morning confirming that)

But the benefit of cineform is cross platform and 4444 12bit RGBA encoding at the highest level. The alpha channel is compressed differently to because it's an alpha. I've heard talk that even ProRes 4444 often stores as 10bit YUV internally, despite decoding at 12bit.

ProRes is a DCT based codec, like JPEG. Cineform is a wavelet based codec so their approaches are different.

It would be great if Adobe integrate cineform without needing to buy it. The post world could do with pushing this a bit harder.

cheers
Paul
 
Yeah, been thinking about this too. Would love to have a cross-platform intermediate codec to transcode my RAW to and also for other files for a HQ Backup. Seems like it will be part of Premiere and Media Encoder but we'll see what kind of flavours and encoding performance we get. I know that quicktime implemetation on windows is really poor and my 12-core system barely exports at 50% CPU load for quicktime files. I think it's due to being 32-bit QT on Windows. Kind of sucks. DNxHD MXF's export near 70-80% load on my system and go much quicker.

Let's hope more and more goes into making Cineform perform great in Premiere, AE and AME because I'd love to be able to use something like that for intermediates and transcoding
 
Kyron said:
I don't quite know how to interpret this news update. Are they saying Cineform is now included in creative cloud (effectively saving me $300 by not having to buy GoPro Studio? Or is something less glamorous like they've added support for the codec to their rendering engine to be more efficient?
Click to expand...


I'm also unclear on what Adobe will deliver, actually.

If they are saying MOV only, then it already is not full Cineform - whoch (at least on Windows) does have AVI output option.

Then, there's debayered Cineform and CineformRAW. Which one is included?

Then, there are add-ons like FirstLight, DPX2CF, etc etc. Are those included?

I suppose we'll see :)

In the meantime, if full Cineform is actually included with Adobe CC, that's great news for RAW 4 PRO app (disclaimer: I wrote it) - if you want to easily convert to Cineform at either proxy, or production level.
 
PrimeHD said:
I'm also unclear on what Adobe will deliver, actually.

If they are saying MOV only, then it already is not full Cineform - whoch (at least on Windows) does have AVI output option.

Then, there's debayered Cineform and CineformRAW. Which one is included?

Then, there are add-ons like FirstLight, DPX2CF, etc etc. Are those included?

I suppose we'll see :)

In the meantime, if full Cineform is actually included with Adobe CC, that's great news for RAW 4 PRO app (disclaimer: I wrote it) - if you want to easily convert to Cineform at either proxy, or production level.
Click to expand...

Yeah, let's hope they include multiple flavours, because like I said on Windows .mov encoding is pretty slow. I guess also Resolve 11 doesn't work natively with Cineform does it? (read and write) Maybe I have to just work on mac more often with Prores :(
 
AFAIK Resolve does not understand CineformRAW, it always works with Cineform as debayered codec.
 
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