CS3 to CS5.5

[Matthew Cairns]

I have been working on a HDV project in CS3 (Premiere, After Effects, Audition, Photoshop) and hope to move to Windows 7 Pro 64Bit with CS5.5 and use Neo/Neoscene. How smoothly will the CS3 projects open up in CS5.5 and what potential issues would I face? I am planning to re-capture used footage via Neo and place in project.

Thanks

[Ann Bens]

You should be ok exept for the effects that are no longer available in CS5.5.
I am not sure about dynamic link of that will work.
You do not need Neoscene for HDV footage in CS5.5 but if you still want to use it you do not have to recapture the footage just convert it in Neoscene. CS5.5 handles hdv footage just fine.
Make back up although launching a CS3 project will make you save to another project.
Still make sure you have a back up just in case things dont work as the should do.
Before you start editing away in 5.5 make sure you can replace the footage with the CF avi's.

If its was me i would finish in CS3 and start fresh in CS5.5.

[Matthew Cairns]

Originally Posted by Ann Bens

You do not need Neoscene for HDV footage in CS5.5 but if you still want to use it you do not have to recapture the footage just convert it in Neoscene. CS5.5 handles hdv footage just fine.

If its was me i would finish in CS3 and start fresh in CS5.5.

My understanding was the quality of captured image was better in Neo (and easier to work with) than that of CS3. Is the quality of image better in a CS5 capture than that of a CS3 capture? I only wanted to use Neoscene as I thought the quality & efficiency of use would be better.

If I convert a CS3 capture to Neoscene isn't the less quality preserved? Wouldn't you have to do a fresh capture to preserve the improved quality?

Are you suggesting not opening up in CS5.5 but finishing the project in CS3? As I will be getting a new computer with Windows 7 I hope to get CS5.5 - I would want to use it over CS3 as running CS3 under a 64 bit OS is questionable.

Cheers

[Bart Walczak]

Matthew, if you capture HDV via firewire, then you are recording a digital stream, there is no loss of quality during capture, and Cineform will not make it better on ingest. At least this is my understanding.

[Matthew Cairns]

Bart - this is a new area for me, so I will post with quotes from other sources as this indicates what I am considering:

1) I found this on Cineform's website:

"Chroma Interpolation: 4:2:0 → 4:2:2. Background: Most DSLR, HDV and AVCHD camcorders record chroma (color) in a format known as 4:2:0. Without diving too deep, 4:2:0 chroma is half the color resolution of more professional 4:2:2 formats. When Neo Scene detects 4:2:0 chroma it properly interpolates the source chroma to 4:2:2 for more accurate color processing during editing and effects work. And if you ever "key" your material, CineForm’s chroma interpolation will substantially improve your resulting visual fidelity."

"Visual quality equivalent to uncompressed workflows but with much lower cost"

2) From Jeff Pulera in a forum (Dec 17, 2009) -thanks Jeff

"HDV is recorded as MPEG-2 on tape, and runs at the same 25Mbps data rate as DV, creating files of about 13GB per hour of video. So, you're not losing any quality capturing through 1394, you are getting the same file that is on the tape, which is Long-GOP MPEG-2 with 4:2:0 color. If you wish to work with a better codec that will withstand compositing and multiple-generations, then you might consider the Cineform Neo Scene codec, which is 4:2:2 and easier to edit than native HDV. It will require converting your captured HDV clips."

So I guess that is similar to what you are saying - an 'more robust' could be used instead of 'better quality'

As mentioned, Neo/Neoscene looked like really helping in CS3, but I'm not sure if it is needed in CS5.5.
Hopefully the dvinfo crew may shed light.

Cheers

[Adam Gold]

Matt, I made the same transition you are contemplating a while back and here are my experiences:

You should finish your current project in CS3 and then migrate to CS5.5. While everything will likely be fine, it's like updating windows mid-project: a roll of the dice. By the way, moving up to Win 7 64 only made CS3 work better, faster and more stably for me, and those -- even from Adobe -- who warn against this are likely just covering their butts.

The most significant thing I ever did to stop CS3 from crashing and locking up was to stop using and uninstall Cineform, and I say this as a longtime Cineform fan and supporter.

Cineform products are completely useless with HDV and CS5 and later, unless you are doing heavy color correction with First Light. They were originally designed to enable slow underpowered systems to handle HDV but as both Premiere and PCs have improved, the Cineform products are unnecessary and in fact will slow your system down if you have an approved nVidia card with GPU Acceleration enabled. I have the tests to prove it.

Neo or any other Cineform product cannot improve your footage but will give you more space to work with the data if you are doing heavy post processing. It's basically a bigger bucket to pour the same amount of water into. The data is the data.

If you do decide to change horses midstream, no new capture or conversion would be necessary. I would really follow Ann's advice here.

[Matthew Cairns]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

By the way, moving up to Win 7 64 only made CS3 work better, faster and more stably for me.

Sounds good Adam, did you have to open CS3 in XP mode or were you able to open directly in Win 7?

Any experiences with After Effects & Encore in Win 7?

Matt

[Adam Gold]

Nope, just opened directly in Win7. Worked like a charm. Worked great in Vista 64 as well.

No AE, but Encore was perfect with both DVD and BD.

[Bart Walczak]

Matthew,

I second what Adam said.

Cineform has its uses if you are capturing analog tapes or as an output/intermediary codec if you are handling processed files to other people. However, transcoding HDV files to Cineform on ingest will not add any more information that there already isn't. The only reason to do it is to increase performance, which nowadays is not a necessity. Any decent machine can handle HDV without a problem.

[Jay West]

To answer the OP's question, CS3 runs under 64 bit operating systems without any need for WinXP emulation, compatability modes, or the like.

For the most part, I agree that you will not "NEED" Cineform Neo to work with either HDV or AVCHD under PPro CS5/5.5 with hardware MPE enabled (meaning that you have a suitable CUDA card).

That said, Cineform conversions can help in some circumstances, hinder in others, and be superfluous in other situations. Whether Cineform will help or hinder depends on what you plan to edit under CS 5.5 and how you edit it.

Will you get a loss in quality if you do not use Cineform? Generally, no.

In theory, Cineform conversions give you a format that is more robust to work with, meaning more data to work with that does not require all the decompression effort the computer needs to play AVCHD. Generally, this does not increase the quality of your captures. Depending on what and how you need to edit, it may diminish the possibility of untoward artifacts when you apply a lot of effects or processing. Depending on what kind of projects you edit, it might help or hinder. The operative word here is "might." It really depends on what you do.

I just said "generally" does not increase quality. There is one thing place I have found that Cineform does a better job of capturing than PPro CS5, which is in maintaining audio-video synch on HDV-tapes from my Canon XH-A1. Back when I was using CS3, I had a lot of problems with audio from HDV cams going out of sync when capturing through PPro. Essentially, the audio started out 15 frames out of synch with the video and got progressively further out of synch over time. Cineform fixed that. That problem went away for me when I switched to tapeless recording units and moved on to later versions of PPro. Recently, however, I had to pull some HDV footage from an older XHA1 tape. PPro CS 5.5' s capture exhibited the same loss of sync problem that I had seen before. Capturing with Cineform avoided the problem. Not everybody has this problem, however.

I personally like using Cineform Neo for a number of things. I find it particularly handy when I am working with larger multi-camera projects where I have five (and sometimes up to eight) tracks of HDV and AVCHD. I have found that, on my I7/950 12 gb RAM system, Cineform conversions run a lot more smoothly than running the native file formats under CS5 and 5.5. I also find that Cineform conversions allow me to run longer segments of AVCHD/HDV mixes before PPro starts bogging down. Finally, as Adam pointed out, the First Light application (which comes with Neo but not NeoScene) can be very useful for color balancing and matching between the various cameras. When running Cineform conversions in PPro, I can have the source files also open in First Light, make color corrections (which are in metadata) and see the results almost instantly in PPro without any drag on timeline playback or need for rendering.

Adam mentioned Cineform slowing down his system. I saw something similar with some of the older updates of Neo 5, but have not noticed slowdowns with most of the updates issued over the last year. Also, if you have downloaded the recent updates, the conversions imported into CS5.5 will require virtually no time for conforming the audio. This will not be true for older Cineform conversions. On my systems, the older conversions take just as much time for indexing and conversion as straight AVCHD and HDV imports do.

On the other hand, Cineform can really slow you down because of the time it takes to process the conversions from "mts" and "m2t" files to "avi" or "mov." I have projects where that processing time is not offset by any benefits in editing. Four of my cameras match very well on their own (as long as I remember to select the correct picture profiles, that is.) When I have only two, three or four camera tracks, all of which match very well, and where the editing is pretty simple, I find no need for Cineform conversions. For example, I recently videoed a day long "continuing legal education" for distribution by my state's supreme court. I used three Sony AVCHD cams. One cam was on the presenter, another was on the room for audience participation. Editing was simply cutting between the views and adding introductory titles for each presentation. For the afternoon panel discussions, I had a third camera providing a wide shot of the entire panel. I had no need for Cineform to edit this kind of program. The images would not have been any better with Cineform. For this project, there would have been no advantage to spending the time for Cineform conversions.

Back to what Adam said about CS3, I echo his view that CS3 will run fine under a 64 bit operating system. It still runs quite happily under Vista 64 (on my laptop) and, the last time I tried it, under Win 7 Pro on my editing workstation.

[Adam Gold]

Another thing I just remembered about capturing under Cineform:

The major reason I stopped using it, and you can find details about this in the Cineform forum, is that during long captures of entire tapes of multicam shoots, the captures would suddenly start breaking up with massive macro-blocking about halfway through, inexplicably. I'd have to capture each tape four or five times to get a complete capture. This was on a system with a screeching fast RAID array and very fast dual quad-core Xeons and massive amounts of RAM, on various dedicated capture devices. The problem never occurred when capturing native mpeg via Premiere, only when using Cineform presets and capturing via the Cineform Capture in Premiere or using Cineform's HDLink. We never figured out either the cause or a solution despite numerous trouble tickets. Cineform kept blaming my hardware. Eventually the only solution was to bail on Cineform and the problem never recurred.

The problem is fully documented with screen grabs and everything on the forum, a couple of years back.

Make no mistake, I loved the idea of Cineform. I still do. It just didn't work for me. And now, as it has evolved into a completely different set of tools, I have a license for their current product that I'll likely never use.

[Matthew Cairns]

Thanks Jay & Adam for the wealth of info,

I continue to have capture issues with CS3 involving audio synch problems (see my other posts) which happen sporadically and often with no commonality. I was starting to think Cineform would remove those issues, but from what you are saying it may replace them with other issues.

When I'm up and running with the new system I will give the trial a go.

Thanks