Just a quick observation, been recently testing HDV clips in After Effects and playback was terribly slow, I mean I would hit Ram Preview and it would just sit there for 10 seconds and then start to generate the preview.

Well, I wanted to see if I could get any better performance with Cineform so off I went into Sony Vegas to do a quick render upon which I got the "Not Licensed Error" and this was for the included Cineform Codec with Sony Vegas 8.0c. Well, from the forums I did the rename fix of CFHD.dll file to CFHDold.dll, still no dice. Installed the Neo Player, still no dice, Uninstalled Neo Player, renamed all CFHD.dll files to CFHDold.dll and still the same "Not Licensed Error".

Well, I gave up on just a test, went back to After Effects with HDV and low and behold when I hit Ram Preview it snapped to and began generating the preview immediately, there wasn't a 10 second delay like before. My guess is that the Cineform Codec was affecting After Effects in some manner.

So the ending result is, I'm happy with After Effects working correctly even if it means I can't test out Cineform from Vegas with After Effects ;-)

Your conclusion are wrong. Next time try a version that has a licensed encode -- NeoScene, NeoHD or better.

I believe my conclusion are wrong too!!! Re-instantiating the cfhd.dll did the trick but funny thing is is that I tried this yesterday with no dice. So to my point, After Effects continues to perform well after the new install so there was something buggy before. Thanks.