I shot on miniDV using 2 cams. (1 HVX-200, 1 JVC GR-DVL520U...not real hi-quality, I know,
but the only other storage media I have for the HVX is 2 4GB cards - WAY too little for
what I needed).

File Props for all footage =
Type: AVI Movie;
Image Size: 720 x 480
Pixel Depth: 32
Frame Rate: 29.97

Am editing with Adobe Prod Suite, and have Aspect HD installed.
Some shots I need the Zoom effect, (not the PPro transition), to cover some camera flubs.
While PPRO seems to NOT have Zoom as an effect, the Aspect HD Link has a
"Pan, Zoom, Rotate" effect. I've used that, and got what I needed, but I lose sharpness in the resulting "Zoomed" clip.

I need to retain sharpenss, and I did NOt capture using Aspect HD. Should I have used Aspect for capture? Can I? Would it help retain sharpness?

Addendum:
I just realized this may not be entirely clear. In simple terms, will/can Aspect HD do anything to help if I did NOT shoot in HD?
All input appreciated.

Aspect HD won't help. Whatever you do, you will always lose some sharpness when zooming-in on an image during editing.

By the way, Premiere CAN zoom: go to "distort" in the video effects bin and you will have a way of scaling your images.

If you have "InstantHD" from Red Giant, you could upconvert your images to HD and then zoom them out. It could produce better results.

Aspect HD won't help. Whatever you do, you will always lose some sharpness when zooming-in on an image during editing.

I expected to lose some sharpness, but was hoping Aspect HD might somehow save me from myself.


By the way, Premiere CAN zoom: go to "distort" in the video effects bin and you will have a way of scaling your images.

Thanks for the tip. I'll play with that a bit. Wiley's "Bible" mentions a "Magnify" effect. Haven't checked it out yet, but I presume that's what you mean.


If you have "InstantHD" from Red Giant, you could upconvert your images to HD and then zoom them out. It could produce better results.

Don't have that, and know little about it. Will have to read more...and find a price.

THANKS again.

1920x1080 or 1440x1080? leaving settings at default cept ticking on deinterlace. I thought it did it at 1440x1080 auto but I see a setting in the resize video to change it to 1440x1080.

All 1080 HDV is 1440x1080. Aspect HD without a resize is 1440x1080. The resize option is to upconvert 720p or for P2 users to upconvert 1280x1080.

so if I capture and let hdlink convert to cineform avi and put a checkmark in the "deinterlace" setting. when I start a new project in pp2 should I use the aspect 1440x1080 60i preset? but if hdlink is deinterlacing the footage is it still 60i? If I'm wrong which preset should I be using?

For you are deinterlacing 60i you get 30p. And you should use a 30p preset, although the 60i preset will still work.

David,

Concerning HDLink's new ability to upscale DV/HDV, do you have any information as to how it compares with upscaling in avisynth or VDub? I know this might be too general of a question, but I'm hoping I can get you to shed some light on what might produce the best results given the willingness to involve many more applications and make things a bit more complicated.

Thanks again,
Juan

Try it, it is very good quality scaling. Based on an interlaced award Lanczos scaler that work in the source and destination YUV 4:2:2 format (no colorspace errors.) Plus it is much faster than avisynth or VDub.

Just installed the new trialversion but converting m2t files in HDlink don't take place. [Error message]
Tried installing on another machine and upscaling an avifile. Another error message.
Previous trialversion worked fine, so installed 4.1 again.
Works oké with the next 15 days trial.
Too bad, new version of HDlink promises a lot of good and interesting possibilities.
Could it be systemrelated, or are there other people having this problems?

There was an installer problem on some systems that has been fixed and 4.2.1 will be available today.

Much obliged!

I've just finished a half hour actionsport video that I intend to project digitally on a 2K projector. When I talked to the person in charge of the projection I was told that they would need the video on HDCAM tape to load on to their servers. Does anyone have experience with converting Aspect HD files to HDCAM or any other format for digital projection?

HDCAM can't be converted directly as it is not a file format. You will need to play out the sequence via HDSDI to a HDCAM recording deck. Deck rental for a recorder is between $500+ per day. So you will need someone with Prospect HD (with an AJA card) and a HDCAM deck (if we had a deck I would have offered you the service.) Alternatively you can export to an uncompressed QT/AVI file and find someone with a uncompressed HD system and rent the deck again (120-180MB/s totally 300GBytes for your half hour production.) Tape delivery of HDCAM or D5 are common deliverables for HD productions. There are likely post facilities that take uncompressed AVI/QT files to output to tape for you, but I don't know the costs for that service.

Hi Eveyone,

I am in the process of reasearching the components for a new computer but in the mean time I am using a Pent 4 3.6 HT, 2.5 gig RAM, with a separate system drive and video drive (both SATA 7200 rpm), a Matrox APVe card, and Aspect HD ver. 4.22. The camera is a Canon H1, and PP 2 for editing. The monitor is a Sony 36" CRT High Def using component out on the Matrox.

Here's what I did for comparison. I captured the same clip in both Adobe Native and Aspect using HD Link. When capturing the clip in HD Link, I used the large file size. I brought the clip up in the Program window of Premier and brought the Adobe Native clip up in the Source window. The playback settings on Aspect were set at De-interlace Video While Scrubbing unchecked, and the Disable Preview Mode Playback was also unchecked. You don't really even need the Sony CRT to see it, but the Adobe Native image was noticably cleaner when comparing the clip on the Source and Program screens of Premier...especially if you use the View Zoom Level settings.

At this point, I'm happy with Aspect HD because it's the only way to view the clips smoothly. Even though my current system exceeds Adobe's minimum requirements, I get studdering video playback, but even studdering, It's closer to playing back the tape right off of the camera and into the CRT, than Aspect is.

Am I asking too much, and it's just the nature of the beast, or are there other things that I can try to get a cleaner picture through Aspect? Lastly, if anyone out there might know where the bottleneck is in my current system with respect to studdering video on Adobe Native, I'd sure like to know. The drive will capture all day long without a dropped frame, but playback jumps.

Thanks very much,
Richard

Just to clarify...when you say "cleaner" are you meaning pixellation-type artifacts? Rather than, say, a change in black levels or a color cast or similar?

Hi Graham,

By "Cleaner" I mean more detail in the picture. I can't see any differences in Black Levels or Color Casts. The clip I used was of a home on a shore while I passed by it on a boat. The home had quite a bit of rock work done on the lower foundation. The Adobe Native clip showed deatail in the rock work while the Aspect HD clip showed the rocks more like blobs. In addition, you could see more detail in the landscaping plants whereas the Aspect clip lost detail in the individual branches.

Hope that helps and thanks,
Richard

The source window will look better 99% of the time. Reverse the two.

The bottleneck is poor programming on Adobe's part regarding HDV.

Richard,
You say that you have "Disable preview mode playback" unchecked.
Preview mode playback displays the image at half-resolution. That's why you're seeing less detail.
You should be seeing no difference in quality between the source M2T and the resulting CineForm AVI at full resolution -- we pride ourselves in that.

Is there a means of downloading previous versions of Aspect?

Marty
OnQ Film

Support can get you a link. And please work through support so we can get to the bottom of why some systems can use the latest version.

Thanks David... I have a ticket submitted and will provide any info I can to help them track down the problem.

hey all, i recently purchased a sony fx1 and have had no problems with moving up from dv when editing ( in premier pro2) but when using after effects the response time is quite slow. my original post can be found here

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=78098&goto=newpost

i was hoping somebody here would be able to help me. For me to be able to scrub through the timeline in a.e i have to drop the quality down to 1/4... is there anyway of speeding up rendering times of hdv in ae?

I just turned off open gl and it seems to scrub fine now

sorry about that

I have a questiona bout Aspect HD 4.23 for Adobe Premiere Pro 2 (and 1.5.1) and the PAL version of the Canon XL-H1. I know what Cineform is supporting the Canon 24F mode... but I cannot find information about Canon 25F. I have an European model, so I must be 100% sure that it is supported.

If someone can help me out, it would be greatly appreciated!

I have one other question: the advantage of Adobe Production Studio is that I can swap files from one program to another without rendering. If I use Cineform Aspect HD... will this remain the same or do I have to render again?

You can use the Adobe sharing tools been apps and 25F is supported.

Thanks for the fast response. This is exactly what I wanted to hear! Maybe it can be specified more clearly on your website. That's the first place I looked for the information but it only lists 24F and 30F for Canon.

Can someone that has been doing this for a while please post a successful workflow for capturing from an HDV cam (Sony HC1 in my case) into Premier Pro 2.0 and out to AVI for DVD.

I've had the evaluation copy up for several days and it runs out tomorrow, I have yet to get started on a project due to several issues that have been bugging me which I know have to be my fault but I'm not sure.

1. Capture Process: I've attempted to Capture from Premier using the F5 command and I get video that is jerky at times or has horizonal interlace lines in it on playback to a reference monitor.

I attempted to capture with HDLINK and it stalls after 5 to 7 minutes of a 30 minute capture.

I finally was able to capture using HDVSplit and run HDLink conversions to CF AVI and finally had sucess, I know that someone has to be able to cut out one of these steps and do it faster and easier.

2. Import to Premier and editing: I've been able to get the video into Premier and edit with few to no issues however I see horizonal interlace lines from time to time on clips and I know that they are not there. An example is a shot of a car spinner where the movement is jittery and interlaced, yet when viewed on a reference monitor there is nothing there.

3. Export from Premier to DVD ready file: I've exported the timeline and experimented with Upper fields, lower fields and progressive fields and followed every FAQ that I can find on either here or on the Cineform site and seem to continue to run into poor video quality or interlace lines but never the perfect video that I see others are getting or what I used to get from DV.

So the question, can anyone help with this or am I destined to do a HDV > DV conversion via the camera and edit an SD project and give up on HDV?

System specs:
Dell P380 Workstation / Intel Dual Core 3.46g / 2g Ram
Matrox Parhelia APVe card to 16:9 HDV Monitor
Premier Pro 2.0 / HDVsplit and HDLink from Cineform

Project Specs:
Aspect HD 1440x1080i 60i (CF Installed)
PAR: HD Ana 1080 1.333
Upper Fields First

Export Specs: Per CF FAQ Export2DVD.htm
720 X 480 D1/DV NTSC WS 16:9 1.2
Lower Fields First

HELP!
MIGUEL

I attempted to capture with HDLINK and it stalls after 5 to 7 minutes of a 30 minute capture.

I typically get two or three stalls per 60 minute tape using HDLink. It's a pain, but I think it always manages to stall at a scene break, so I don't lose any material. Adding to my frustration is the file numbering, which starts a new sequence with each restart of HDLink. Cineform is considering an enhancement to file numbering in a future release, but it's very low priority, and may never actually get released.

Best,
Christopher

I've captured several jobs using cineform with PPro 1.5.1, no issues. Both on an old Dell 650, and a new BOXX 7400. Using an HC1. Preview is always on the camera and not in PPro. However, clips capture well and zero issues.

Are you using a raid for capture? I have 3 drive scsi 160 on the dell, and 3 drive scsi 320 on the Boxx.

Artifacts such as flicker, slight blurring, etc. during playback while editing are preview buffer issues and do not show up in the final render. Even with a 512mb quadro 3450 card.

I've read about some issues with PPro 2, which is why I did not upgrade PPro. However, I believe cineform is a mature product. I demoed aspect and cut two real jobs on it before it expired. I will finish those jobs with Prospect.

Export at lower fields first? You have an upper field project and your reversing the fields? How are you playing these back? If on a set top DVD player for interlaced, then stick with the original field order as recorded (i.e. Upper). If your going to progressive scan DVD player or PC playback, then deinterlace (as post process) in render.

I've captured several jobs using cineform with PPro 1.5.1, no issues. Both on an old Dell 650, and a new BOXX 7400. Using an HC1. Preview is always on the camera and not in PPro. However, clips capture well and zero issues.

Are you using a raid for capture? I have 3 drive scsi 160 on the dell, and 3 drive scsi 320 on the Boxx.

Artifacts such as flicker, slight blurring, etc. during playback while editing are preview buffer issues and do not show up in the final render. Even with a 512mb quadro 3450 card.

I've read about some issues with PPro 2, which is why I did not upgrade PPro. However, I believe cineform is a mature product. I demoed aspect and cut two real jobs on it before it expired. I will finish those jobs with Prospect.

Export at lower fields first? You have an upper field project and your reversing the fields? How are you playing these back? If on a set top DVD player for interlaced, then stick with the original field order as recorded (i.e. Upper). If your going to progressive scan DVD player or PC playback, then deinterlace (as post process) in render.

Peter thanks for the help, the system is setup with an 80g system drive and 2 160g 10k rpm drives in a raid-0 for the editing work. I have 1.51 and will see what difference it makes however I've been cutting on 2.0 and really have no pain from it, not sure what you've encountered.

As for the field preference, this is by the FAQ on the Cineform site, I just did another sample export and when played back in media player so that I can output it to the APVe card, there are horizontal lines in the AVI that are NOT there in the project while I'm editing so I am going to call it a night and when I wake up in the AM setup the export with Upper and not Lower and see what happens. I'm not sure about what will happen in the DVD creation process however and that is what has me concerned but I guess that I can now take an Upper and Lower and put them on a disc and see what happens.

Thanks and I'll be in touch.

I cant seem to get scene detect within PPro2 with prospect to work correctly. And I totally totally agree the numbering is a TOTAL pain!!!!!!!! It has screwed up the orders of my clips a few times.

Dave

I went ahead and upgraded my Aspect HD program to v4, and as ususal nothing goes right with me. I pays my moneys and then my troubles begins. :)

I downloaded the file and it comes in as an .asp file. It has .zip at the end of the name, but both my computers say it is an .asp file and don't know how to open.

Help!


mike

I believe that the name of the file should be

AspectHDv423b71dl061016.zip or something to that effect.

Is that what you downloaded?

I believe that the name of the file should be

AspectHDv423b71dl061016.zip or something to that effect.

Is that what you downloaded?

Yup, that's it but both computers list it as a .asp extension. Names says .zip, physical properties say .asp

This is probably only ME again! :)

Mike

Just open it with an unzipping program and ignore what your PC thinks it is.

Stand by. I trying again. Went into the advanced setting on download maanger and for some reason it was asigning the .asp to the end of the file. Never been inside there before, so lets see if this works. It did not like something in Cineforms name I guess. Let you know in a minute!

Mike

That got it! For some reason the download manager was assigning the first three letters of the file as additional extension. Deleted it and all went well.

If it can happen, it can happen to me.

I would like to talk to you sometime about you work flow with all of this. I upgraded to PPro premium studio a while back and I just got my XLH1 this week. Many changes to be made. I upgraded to v4 Cineform for the scene detect, please tell me it is in there! What are you using for capture? My nice JVC HD deck won't work with the 1080i files of course. Very nice paper weight now!

I need to find a location for a very easy to understand work flow.

Thanks Steven,

Mike

I am wondering if you plan to support the Black Magic Intensity card in Aspect HD? It would be nice to be able to capture uncompressed streams from the HDMI port with Aspect HD with support for 1920 x 1080 which is available from the HDMI port while simultaneously extracting 24p from the 60i data stream.

If not, have you tested to see if your software can convert the uncompressed AVI files Intensity creates into files that work with Aspect HD. Also, during the conversion, can you extract the 24p information from the 60i AVI file?

This is a link to their product: http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity

The Intensity card is not available yet. You can bet we will adding support for this new card in some form.

hey guys I'm building a new pc that will mostly be for capturing my hd footage and will maybe sometimes use it for editing (I have my big pc that I will do 95% of my editing on). anyway I'm tired of having to wait an hour while just capturing footage so I grabbed some old parts laying around to build this machine. here's the specs for the new pc:

asus p5wdg2-ws mb
intel pentiun D 950 (dual core 3.4ghz)
2gig ddr2 corsair ram
300gig western digital (boot)
2x500gig western digital (raid 0 data capture)

now I have an asus 7800 pci-e and a ati x1800 that arent being used so is either better for capturing with aspect hd for editing with either pp2 or vegas 7 (i have both)? and remember that I will sometimes do some editing when the big machine is rendering.


thanks so much, by far one of the best forums I have ever come across :)

Mark

Both cards will work fine.

It's a little bit off-topic, but consider buying Core Duo (Conroe) instead of Pentium D, it is much faster.

my main editing machine is a core 2 duo 6800. but I cant stand waiting all those hours while just capturing video. the pentium d machine was built out of spare parts that I have mostly for capturing. but I'm having another problem so I'm gonna start another thread for that.

Both cards will work fine.

I hate to disagree with you but there appears to be a bug in the ATI drivers that will affect Aspect HD in certain configurations. I had 3 different ATI Radeon PCI express cards and it affected all of them, even with older drivers.

It seems to only be an issue when you have an HD monitor hooked up to the component HD out of the ATI. When editing in Premiere the aspect HD plugin seems to kick in to play differently when scrubbing and when previewing. Most users will agree that they notice an ever so slight delay and flicker of there monitors when hitting the spacebar to watch streaming video from the timeline after scrubbing and vice versa.

However with and external HD monitor hooked up, this preview only works. Scrubbing doesn't. And then it does....and then it doesn't. The ATI seems to have a hard time latching onto whatever the aspect HD drivers are doing. All I would get when scrubbing and applying effects was a black screen on the external TV. If I messed around and switched from scrubbing to streaming really fast it would sometimes come back....but only until I hit the space bar and then the preview would pop up but the scrubbing would stop.

I was never able to resolve this. I have a ticket in with Cineform but there has been no resolution.

This supposedly does not affect your HD out if you are using the DVI to HDTV. Only the component out.

Also, all other apps worked fine.....just premiere and aspect were flaky with the ATI. As great as the ATI card was at everything else, I built this machine to be used with Cineform so it had to go. I got an Nvidia card instead and have had no problems.....but do miss the performance. The nvidia seems to have a hard time driving my HD monitor at 1080i without some stuttering. The ATI never even hiccupped.

For now I have to drop the HD out to 720p for smooth playback. I switch it to 1080i for higher resolution color grading and effects work where playback smoothness is not as critical.

Peace!

A couple months ago I downloaded the trial of Aspect HD. It seemed to cause nothing but problems with Premiere, so I had to uninstall it. Premiere works fine, but oddly enough the Cineform presets still show up in my list.

edit: I did a search for "cineform" on my C drive and found the folder of presets was still located in the Premiere folder. I deleted that, and they are now gone.

My big problem is no After Effects won't open!

As soon as I try and open it, I receive this message (see attachment). Upon clicking anything, AE crashes. I can't even move that window without it locking up.

I've uninstalled the software....it doesn't show up in the list in my add/remove programs box...how do I get this out of my system? I can't find any cineform folders in the AE folder, and I have tried reinstalling the software.

I'm not afraid of using regedit if someone can give me a list of what files aspect HD puts in there.

Thanks!

Somehow you original install was bad as the uninstall typically removes everything. The only components AE may still be using is the CFHDIO.aex module within the AE plugins folder and CFHD.dll within windows/system32. Of course if you install the latest version of Aspect HD will likely find
no more issues. If you want another 15-day trial yet me know.

I just downloaded a trial version of the latest Cineform's Aspect HD for Premiere Pro 2.0 and I simply love it, but I have a couple of doubts before I buy it.

1- I have 2 desktops and one laptop at home. Do I have to buy individual copies for each computer or can I install it on all 3?

2- Lets say I format my hard drive and I have to reinstall every software I have again. Would this generate any problems? (because I would have to activate Aspect HD again, right?).

3- I notice that when I'm color correcting footage or applying effects (magic bullet for instance) I can view the results straight away while I'm doing it without having to wait any time at all...but when I hit play on the timeline the output video does not display the video with the color correction/effects I just applied, it simply plays the original version. I don't know if this is just the trial version or if this is normal on the original version too. Because when I color correct with premiere pro without Aspect Hd I can hit play and view the video with all the color correction/effects I've just done (depending on the effects it may be displayed jumpy, but IT does allow me to play the video with the effects).

Anyway, I don't know if there's anything else I should know. I'm using an AMD dual 64 +3800, 2GB ram, 3 separate HDs, Premiere Pro 2.0, oh and I would be editing 25F from the Canon A1.

1. In many experience, for Aspect, yes you'll have to buy individual copies. Although you can install the decoder on all three machines.

2. You simply deactivate the software before you format the hard disk, then it becomes free to activate again on another machine. If the PC dies before you can deactivate (I had two CineForm-equipped units die at the tail-end of last year) then contact CineForm support and they'll help - support from CineForm is generally excellent in my experience.

3. No idea about your specific situation, but that does sound odd. Aspect's effects are real-time, that's one of the reasons why the product is so excellent when it comes to editing. With regards to trial version vs full version, the trial is fully featured and the full version will react in the same way. That said you might like to try reinstalling the trial because what you are describing doesn't sound right to me.