JY-HD10U in the press.

http://digitalproducer.com/2004/02_feb/features/02_02/hdv_jvc.htm

Congrats Geoff on the coverage this gives you. Thanks for the nice quotes.

Good to hear this kind of information. I wonder how they are handling the chroma noise.

That's an excellent article. I'm glad to hear these cameras are starting to make their way to the mainstream. I can't wait to see the CBS show that they are filming with the HD10!

It's my understanding and experience that the noise is more prevelant in dimmer scences. I would imagine that based on reading the article that they are lighting correctly and won't really have too much of it to deal with.

Troy

We are familar with both Geoff Pepos and the people editing that show for broadcast (all CineForm Aspect HD customers.) The chroma noise issue is something we have been working on. A beta verison of a chroma noise filter is now available to all Aspect HD (for PPro) users (just drop me an email if you wish to beta test), so I hope we can help filter any HD10U work before it airs.

Thanks, David. I've been keeping an eye on this camera, as well as the DVX100. I'm currently weighing my options for an effects-filled feature.

Because the project will take about 3 years and a lot of work to create, I need to produce an image that will hold up in a high definition future and possibly film-out. Unfortunately, I'm currently Mac based, so I can't use your product, although I've heard a lot of great things about it.

Best of luck with your products.

David, you are welcome. I wouldn't say those things if the software sucked. ; )

Yes, we have noticed the chroma noise and we do welcome Cineform's work in this area.

The first day we got the camera, I went out back and shot at the magic hour...well it's really a magic 17 minutes...everything automatic on the cam.

Brought it back and connected to our HD TV and..."Ooh. What is that red-mooshy-pink-color-cast-smeary junk all over the TV?" It was if a tick had exploded all over the shadows. Sorry for the gross description. A simple solution...checking the white balance. I shot the other day in the same light...white balanced the cam and it looked great. Also, exposing for the highlights (and even verging on more underexposure than you were taught is right by your grandfather and his Kodak Brownie) is a good idea. Contrary to popular belief, there is a lot of detail in the shadows with this cam...

We have created a "filter/multi-layer stack" in After Effects also that we're very pleased with. Some of it is based on Ansel Adams' zone system. With it, we've been able to increase the percieved "dynamic" range of the image. We use a combo of transfer modes and blurs in certain zones to remove the blotchies and various adjustment curves...and we also wave our magic bone over the keyboard.

While I'd love to say that everything we do is lit correctly, sometime ya just have to go with what you have. We have taken on purpose some really awful footage just to see what the limits of the cam are (it still faired better than my not-named-here DV cam that I shot the Sundace pic with) and turned this stuff into something pleasing...at least to us...that's a personal thing isn't it...aesthetics. I mean, look at the Impressionists...Their resolution was pretty crappy. ; ) They did know a lot about visual perception though. I think Degas maybe used a 240 by 180 pixel canvas, maybe sometimes.

One can also increase percieved sharpness or import to your image by blurring (or even darkening) out the unimportant parts of your image...hense the use of DOF, good production design or at least well chosen locations, relative motion in the frame (the only really well kept secret of motion pictures), costumes, and background actors that don't upstage the leads, among other things.

Oh, gotta go. Another movie is starting...it's Friday nite and I shouldn't be working.

T'nite we put some stills from our current film on our web site in the Purgatory Playhouse section...although reduced in size for the web...you'll get the idea.

Take Care,
Geoff Pepos
www.rhythmfilms.com

For those with a fast PC, and JVC HDV camera and some spare time, here is a good opportunity to try out some neat tools for HD editing.

My company (CineForm) has just released a try out version of Aspect HD 2.2 (latest version.)
http://www.cineform.com/products/DownloadTrialStart.htm

This will require a installed version of Premiere Pro. However, if you don't have that you can download a trial version of Premire Pro from Adobe.
http://www.adobe.com/products/tryadobe/download.jsp?ftpID=2333

To make all these trial versions work together we have listed a small patch on the CineForm support site. Note: If you have a release version of Premiere Pro you will not need this patch.
http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=614 (Click on the first link in "Most Recent Topics".)

Have fun.

Except expiry, any other limitations? Such as limited functions, water marks...

None that I know of. The Aspect HD is a fully functional version. The try out of Premiere Pro seems fully featured also.

I have tried the demo version. It performs quite well. Now, I want to set up an external monitor to preview the effect during editing. How can I set it up?

For the real-time external monitor preview you will need a dual head video card that output the overlay channel to a secondary monitor. The Matrox P750 and Parhelia does this along with many of the recent ATI cards. This is a video card setup; nothing needs to be changed within Aspect HD (other than checking "scrub to overlay surface" within the playback settings.) If you can get Media Player to output video to the second monitor it will work with Aspect HD.

Did more tests with the demo software.

1. Aspect HD converts m2t file to its own format and edit in Premiere Pro. At the end, directly output timeline as a ts file which could be sent back to HD10. In the whole editing process, there is nothing deal with the original m2t clip. Is there any loss of quality?

How is the video output edited by Aspect HD compared with the output from JVC Mpeg Edit software?

In fact, I check the resulting video clip of Aspect HD in my HD monitor, my impression is the mpeg noice seems to be more serious.

2. To import the converted file to Premiere Pro, there is a process called conforming. It takes quite a long time to import a folder which contains one hour vedio.

3. To output from the timeline as ts format, it takes 36 minutes to output 1 minutes video clip in which I only put some Aspect HD transitions. Is it normal? My PC config: P4 2.8G CPU, 1 GB Ram, 120 GB video drive.

1. If you only intend to perform edits capable with the included JVC software, then you will see no quality difference. If you intend use more power editing tools like PPro and After Effects, then quality of the CineForm has to be better because you can't do it with native MPEG. The CineForm approach gives the greatest creative freedom of any HD editing solution, as we don't limit you to one editing tool.

2. That is a Premiere Pro function, it only does it once per clip per project. The result of this "conforming" is far more real-time audio features.

3. That seem long but is a Premiere function, typically an export to HD MPEG is about 8 to 1 compute time (i.e. your sequence should have taken 8 minutes.) Aspect HD transition are real-time for playback, but rendering to MPEG is not real-time for HD on any system (yet.)

maybe i could chime in here for a second:

i've been using Aspect HD for about 2 months now, and am extremely happy with it...over the years, i've used just about everything out there, from the first experimental motion video codecs on the Amiga, to the many MJPEG codecs (including the excellent Miro DC30), to the most recent attempts to offer high quality/high resolution at low data rates (MPEG2, WMV, etc.), and many inbetween.

it is true that MPEG2 TS files are small and efficient, and if used with a tool such as MPEG Edit Pro or Vegas, even extremely fast to "render" out (when re-encoding or special fx processing is not necessary in most parts of the used clips)...but personally, and after much experiemntation with the CFHD codec (Cineform HD), i've come to the conclusion that it is the best thing out there for me, in the light of not wanting/needing uncompressed video.

what has made CFHD particularily useful to me, is the fact that it not only serves as a very high quality aquisition and editing format for my HD10U footage, but that i have also come to LOVE it as an archival codec for my timelaps and CG frames...i have 10's of thousands of frames that were either rendered out from Lighwave 3D, or shot as timelaps sequences with a Canon 1D at 4.5MP.

for example, i recently shot a timelaps sequence of driving a convertible down the magnificent Cabrillo Highway (south of San Francisco) and through beautiful Pescadero Valley, at 1 frame per second...so the delta from frame to frame is essentially 100% (everything changes)...encoding to MPEG2 TS does introduce significant block artifacts (beyond the ones already present due to the JPEG format it was shot in), while ecoding to CFHD generates a beautiful video quality free of additional artifacts...it just serves as THE archival codec of choice for me now, as uncompressed video just adds up too quickly in size...i mean, storage is cheap now, but a few hours of uncompressed HD footage can cause financial and bandwidth issues to the best of us.

sorry for the rant, but i am really happy to have gotten beyond the initial reservations i've had (very much and for the very same reasons as you, Peter), and am feeling at home with this new Cineform workflow...i could go on, but i'll spare you the gushing.

hope you can come up with the patience to see the light ;)

Any chance of demo-ing the Connect HD for Vegas???

It is a possibility in the future.

I haven't posted in a while, even as a moderator, but I thought some might like to hear this story. Some may know that my day job is the CTO at CineForm, the developers for Aspect, Connect and Prospect HD. Last weekend all the engineers at CineForm, independently (not a work thing) got to make use of the HD10U and Aspect HD under extreme conditions by entering the 48 Hour Film Project competition (48HourFilm.com). With had a crew of software engineers we succeeded in writing, shooting and editing a film in HD in just 2 days. This was huge amount of fun, although exhausting.

For this production we used two HD10Us, one on a Glidecam 2000, the other tripod mounted for each scene. Everything was shot with 1/60th shutter, using ND on the tripod based CAM for some depth of field control. We using a shotgun mic on a boom attached to the tripod mounted camera -- the camera on the stablizer used a cheapir zoom mic (we rarely used this audio.) The project was entirely an indoor shoot and filed 3 hours at 720p30. We used actors that we got from craiglist (a great resource.) We started capture from HDV deck on the set into a 1Beyond laptop using three drives while shooting. Editing was completed on the laptop, with some scenes and effects shots completed on my (slower) desktop. We submitted our completed project on anamorphic DVD, 5 minutes before the deadline. The film is 7 mintues long and really benefits from shooting HD (we did a lot of scene cropping and recomposition.) The screening is at a local theatre this Thursday (interested San Diego readers should go to the Ken theatre at 9.30pm.) I highly recommend this competition.

Sounds like you guys had fun David! Sounds great. Any chance
this movie will hit the web some day?

Yes, I hope so. We see how well our film is received tonight.

Good luck with that and I hope it does well!

Awesome, David!

hwm

Now that HDV is hitting it stride, and we all expect a much wider adoption of HD/HDV post-production. To reflect this market change CineForm's pricing for Aspect HD and Connect HD has dropped significantly.

* Aspect HD 2.5 alone goes from $999 to $499.

* Aspect HD 2.5 with Premiere 1.5, Encode and Audition goes from $1199 to $799.

Connect HD alone went from $499 to $199.

Read the officaal press release here: http://www.cineform.com/press/rel-AspectHDv2.5.htm

* Note: Aspect HD is still in beta so these prices take effect early December when the Aspect HD 2.5 is fully released.

I have to admit this hurts. I purchased Aspect HD for 999 getting ready for the Sony when I bought it. I have yet to be able to use it and now the price has dropped 50%.

Ouch. :o(

Dave

As HDV becomes more widespread prices had to fall, but we understand that prices changes can effect the early adopter (our first customers.) We will price protect anyone who purchased within 30 days for the price change. Simply email salesinfo@cineform.com with your purchase date, and we will refund the price difference.

Its been more than 30 days. I understand I could have waited, just wanted to have my ducks ready. Oh well, just wish I had been able to use. :o(

Dave

Yeah Dave I feel your pain, Ive been busy the last couple months with helping a neighbor thats 90 and his wife with their health problems and havent used Connect HD since about 2 weeks after I purchased it for $500 only to return to Cineforms website and find out 60 days later I paid an extra $300.

Sort of like everything else , the early customers support the company and all those that wait get a better product 60 % off, I feel ripped off as well

Look at it this way, atleast you got noise filters and such, I got a $500 dollar codec

We just posted a new update for Aspect HD for free download. If you are already using Aspect HD 2.3 or 2.5, this is a worth while update for you. Along with some small bug fixes, this is the first version to support hyper-threading and multiple CPUs for capture (we already support this for playback.) This will significantly reduce conversion time for hyperthreaded P4s and make capture/convert real-time for modern dual-processor systems. Faster capture will make the real-time HD editing even more enjoyable.

For those who haven't yet to tried Aspect HD, there is a 15-day fully functional trail version available for download at www.cineform.com. Trial verison has also been upgraded to 2.5b.

Does your company have any plans to make the plugin for Vegas as fast as you have for Premeire Pro?

We are working directing with the Sony Vegas people to enhance HDV editing. However, there is still things we can do under Premiere Pro that Vegas doesn't (yet) support. This is the primary reason for the speed difference between Aspect HD and Connect HD.

Hi Everyone,

I normally do my best to answer questions of CineForm users on this forum but I will be very busy at NAB until Thursday. Sorry for the inconvience. I hope other users can continue to step in and answer questions where they can.

CineForm does not have a booth at NAB (there are very expensive) but out technology and software will be showing in many locations.
AMD Keynote (Mon 10:45 am): Prospect HD: Dust To Glory workflow on a big screen
SL332 (Microsoft) Prospect 2K: Demo of CineForm's new 2K workflow
SL2543 (AMD) Prospect HD: Hands-on Dust to Glory system
SL313 (Adobe) Prospect HD: Hands-on Dust to Glory system + Aspect HD: with Blackmagic HD-SDI card support
SL4916 (Blackmagic) Aspect HD: with Blackmagic HD-SDI card support
SU6406 (Sony) Aspect HD: 24P workflow from CineFrame 25 source
C4526 (JVC) Aspect HD: 24P support for JVC's new GY-HD100U
SL5501 (nVidia) Aspect HD: with nVidia's new FX540 card

So many booths we are spread thin. CineForm staff will be primarily in Adobe, Microsoft and Sony booths. I will part of the AMD keynote and then I will be mostly at the Microsoft booth.

I hope to see some of you there.

David

The full upgrade to Connect HD 1.7 went live today. This version has the new Cineframe 24 and 25 conversion to 24p and greatly improved capture for a very wide range of PCs. This is the first version with Vegas 6 support. A recommended upgrade for all Connect HD users.

Download trial or upgrade from http://www.cineform.com/products/ConnectHD.htm

Is it identical to the 1.7 Beta released about a week ago?

No changes where required, so the Connect HD 1.7 is the same as the beta version. However, for Aspect HD users we did updates between the beta and the 3.1 release.

Several of the new features from Aspect HD 3.2 have become available in Connect HD. Some the features that Connect HD 1.8 has over the stock CineForm components in Vegas 6.0 are:

1) The latest image quality (with the new enhanced V2.0 encoder.)
2) reverse pull-down for 24p extraction on the fly.
3) M2 Lens support for 180 degree image rotation on capture
4) Frame rate and audio pitch controls for 25 to 24 conversion.
5) 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 upconversion filter
6) Quality controls for the codec.
7) Progressive vs Interlaced encoding options (great for CineFrame modes.)
8) Real-time capture conversion with scene detection.
9) Compatibily with After Effects and other external compositors.
10) DirectShow based encoding for more speed and quality.

There is probably much more, but that is a good start.
Read more here: http://www.cineform.com/products/ConnectHD.htm

David Newman
CTO, CineForm

Is Vegas 6.0c available publicly?

The 'c' was a typ-o, I don't know what sub-version Sony is at. I meant Vegas 6.0 in general.

Yes another free upgrade for Connect HD users. The biggest new feature is Canon XL H1 24F/30F support. So along with the new Aspect HD 3.4 CineForm again has an exclusive. An added bonus for this release, is that it allows for easy installs of the CineForm decoders on any number of PCs, as licensing is only on the encoder and HDLink. If you need more PCs sharing the CineForm AVIs, simply download and install Connect HD, when you uninstall (for those PCs not encoding) there is a option to leave all the CineForm decoders installed. This also works for Aspect HD users, use Connect HD to add CineForm decoder to all your systems.

For more information please visit : http://www.cineform.com/products/ConnectHD.htm

All that has changed between the first posting of Connect HD 2.1 and this minor update, mainly fixing how the un-installer works. If an existing 2.1 installion is working fine then you don't need the update. Now Connect HD will correctly allow CineForm decoders to be installed freely on any PC. If you want encoding abilities you can leave Connect HD installed and purchase the $199 license, but if you only need decoders (for other systems in your workgroup) Connect HD can be uninstalled leaving the latest decoders in place.

When ever I go away for a few days (even on a weekend) things get busy here. I will investigate and follow up on a few more threads tomorrow when I'm fully back at work.

So far everything has checked out well. Of course if you do find any issues with Aspect HD 4.0 please file a trouble ticket at http://cineform.com/support/ so that it at be resolved quickly.

Aspect HD 4.0 has turned out to be a fairly good release despite the complications of supporting all the Premiere Pro releases with one install. We have found a fixed the one issue reported by forum local, Michael Stewart -- Export Movie using the Radial Blur filter caused a problem -- so expect an update to 4.0.1 to go online this weekend sometime.

CineForm is coming to a city near you by joining the Adobe Production Studio Tour. David Taylor (CineForm, CEO) will be at each of the city location demonstating a Wafian HR-1 and Aspect HD and Prospect HD post production solutions. Read more here: http://adobe.regsvc.com/reg/site2/?site=1483b

This might be my last post for a while. I'll be around for the weekend, but then out of town for a while (all good news -- but I'm not telling :) .) Other CineFormers have promised to stop by DVinfo to help as needed, so you shouldn't miss me too much.

You have big shoes to fill, but have a good trip!

Per David's comments above, I've posted Build 52 which fixes the minor (but annoying) problem reported by Michael. Also, I've added another section to our Aspect HD product page that identifies when we do minor updates like this. In the past, we haven't always let everybody know when we do a minor update because it doesn't really affect everybody, so the notification itself can be annoying. But this policy also can result in customers becoming out of sync with our latest releases. So I added a section that identifies all builds that we post and gives you the build number you can compare to. We'll do this for all v4.x releases.

David(s), thanks for making the change to inform us when new builds are posted for download. For every person that reports a problem, there are probably a bunch that grumble in silence with the same problems, or never have a problem because they update their software before The Next Big Project. Informing us customers of the good stuff that you're already doing for us anyway is definitely a "win-win." Hoping to upgrade to Production Bundle in about a week, and will then also grab the latest build of Aspect HD 4.x! And safe travels to David N.

For Aspect HD v4 (Build 52) and Connect HD v2.1 (Build 15) customers, some of you may have noticed that some of your clips had visible frame corruption after conversion into CineForm Intermediate. This was caused by a bug we introduced in a previous build. Not all individuals nor all clips exhibit the problem - it was somewhat random.

At any rate it would be good practice for ALL Aspect HD v4 customers and Connect HD v2.1 customers to visit our site and download the new build of Aspect HD (Build 53) or Connect HD (Build 16) which eliminates the problem.

We apologize for the inconvenience....

David.

We have a free 15-day trial version of Prospect HD now available. Because not everybody has 10-bit source material available we provide the trial version on a DVD with various source material, including;

o Never-before-compressed 10-bit YUV 4:2:2 Viper footage in Cineon files
o One 10-bit sequence rendered through 10 generations of CineForm Intermediate at our default quality level known as "FilmScan 1". The result for each generation is provided.
o One 10-bit sequence encoded into each of the six different selectable quality levels of CineForm Intermediate.
o 7 additional 10-bit sequences encoded into the default quality level.

We provide the Trial version free of charge except for shipping. You must have Premiere Pro 2 or After Effects to take advantage of Prospect HD v2 with the 10-bit material.

Shipping in the US is minimal, but as others have discovered (and even posted about in this forum!), shipping charges to destinations outside the US, including our neighbor Canada, varies based on different customs charges.

If you're in the US, we recommend you order the Trial version from our website. If you're in a different country and find shipping charges unacceptable, send me a message and we'll try to work out another way to get the Trial and footage to you.

David.

One small correction, the default quality export out of After Effects (where these clips orginated) is High HD Optimized. FilmScan1 is a new very high quality mode recently added to Prospect HD 2.0, but as it is overkill for most applications so we didn't use it for the multigeneration tests -- and they still hold up perfectly.

Please see the beta anoucement here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=67518