I am also curious what codec sony uses by default, high quality? medium? and what is the compression type lossless? or lossy in that how many times can it be rendered and re rendered before obvious loss occurs.

Also how large should average files be at various settings like high, medium, and what about the film setting? What is the major difference, I am still trying to get cineform to work on all my machine, it still wont work at all on three, and ify on one other but it works great on three others so I want to figure it out if I can because I like the idea of having a near lossless format to use as a go between at times.

On a slightly different note, I have uninstalled neohdv on one of the systems it was working on, and was planning on using the sony cineform vesrion to see size of the file, and cannot use the sony cineform codec now is that normal? It says its not licensed for use?

Sony uses the old 2.x codec at Medium quality. NEO HDx uses the new 3.x codec and user set-able quality (3 levels offered above medium.)

To get a Sony license without NEO HDV, install NEO Player.

why would anyone use a lower setting would'nt high be best?

There is High, Filmscan and Filmscan 2 (we call overkill), so no high isn't the best. ;)

ok, so I will bite, why would anyone use anything but filmscan or for that matter filmscan2?

We often call "Filmscan2" overkill at CineForm. Except for the most demanding keying or substantial pushing of data in post, you should not use FS2. We recommend High and FS1 for most work, but of course do some tests yourself.

As you move from High to FS1 to FS2 the CineForm files get bigger (so more disk space) and become slower to decode (more entropy bits to handle). For this reason we don't recommend FS2 in general, but obviously it's there if/when you need it.

BTW, even on the tests we did against HDCam SR, both FS1 and FS2 handily exceeded the visual quality of HDCam SR: http://www.cineform.com/technology/12Bit-RGB-QualityAnalysis/12Bit-RGB-QualityAnalysis.htm.

OK so now for a different question, looking at neohdv, neo hd and aspect why one over the other if using an XHA1, XLH1, HV20 and Sony Vegas mainly?

price aside what are the benefits and drawbacks.

It's a workflow decision.

If you're using PPro in your editing workflow then you want the Aspect/Prospect family. They have the RT engine for PPro. If not then you want Neo. For the most part the following is true, although there are HD-SDI advantages to PHD and P2K that I don't mention in this simple analogy.

Neo HDV = Aspect HD (minus the AHD RT engine)
Neo HD = Prospect HD (minus the PHD RT engine)
Neo 2K = Prospect 2K (minus the P2K RT engine)

Neo HDV/Aspect HD are 8-bit I/O precision and maximum 1440 horizontal resolution.

Neo HD / PHD are 10-bit I/O and max 1920 horizontal resolution and supports 32-bit float.

Neo 2K / P2K have 12-bit CineForm 444 and spatial resolution up to 2048x2048 and supports CineForm RAW.

If you're doing feature film work we'd recommend you bump up to Neo HD/PHD to gain the post benefits of 10-bit precision. Also, you may have other elements to include in workflow that are already 1920x1080. Whenever you're "pushing" your content in post (lots of color correction, keying, etc) in a fairly big way then 10-bit precision is going to help a bunch, even if your source is 8 bits.

If you're not doing feature film work and you're not pushing your images too much in post then Neo HD / Aspect HD are perfect.

That's also what our Trials are for - give them a try.