I am converting some Z1 HDV footage (captured in Vegas over firewire) with HDLink to 1920x1080 Cineform, high quality, interlaced.

The resulting footage when compared to the original in Vegas has a slight luminance drop and a shift towards green. Is this normal? I'm using the latest release of NEO HD 5.

Thank you, Marc

I've noticed this, too.

John,

I filed a ticket and they are looking into it. I'll let you know.

John,

Just got a message that they found the problem and it will be fixed in the next build. Cineform has amazing customer service!

Great! This is good news, the slight green shift has been there for a while. I'm curious now whether this has been an encoding or a decoding issue.

It is a decoding issue, that was accidentally introduced back in August '10 when we added the uncompressed modes to the CineDeck capture/player. It only impact YUV I-frame encoding, and it is subtle. Existing files will not need to be re-encoded once 5.3.2 is out.

This, too, is great news. I have a LOT of Cineform encoded footage!

I just heard that Cineform now considers this a "low priority" fix, well it's not a low priority for me! This bug affects image quality and image quality is why I bought Neo HD in the first place.

Anything like this that is related to quality will keep me from using this until it is fixed. Any idea of a timeframe for this fix?

I upgraded to NEO HD 5 so I could use it in Vegas 10 on a project that needs a large amount of HDV footage converted to 1920x1080. I'm not really comfortable with getting a green shift on all of the footage during conversion. Seems like a quality hit to me. I hope this gets fixed soon so I can use the product as intended.

The luminance bug is fixed, there is no longer a codec issue. This is why posting half information from support is not all that helpful. The remaining issue is related to the 1440x1080 to 1920x1080 upscale in HDLink, that is not new as it is always been that way, and is really minor. We had not noticed this shift until the the other bug was discovered. I expect that it would never have been reported/discovered if it wasn't for the now fixed error. You don't need to use the upscale, and you have upscale in the NLE if needed, so it is only a convience feature (plus if you use FirstLight it completely doesn't matter.) This is why it is reasonable to be lower priority that other items on our plate.

My complaint from the start was color shift when resizing. When support told me they fixed it I tried it again and found it was still a problem. When I asked them to make sure they were resizing they confirmed that was the problem. Guess I'll need to consider another workflow without resizing because the shift is more than minor to me.

Marc

Really? I even can't see on a waveform display for my HDV images. The reason we thought we found it was we did tiny a small shift in the decoder -- with the decode we can ran it through a 100 generation to make shifts more visible, as the first generation was not obvious. So we have fixed the issue for 99.9% of users.

It's the shift to green I'm concerned about. The luminance issue is not a big deal to me. I will just not scale at this point since that fixes the issue.

I'm having a difficult time seeing the green shift, an invisible error is harder to fix. I think Jake as a test example from you as my HDV clips don't do it.

Just tested the new version and the green color shift I was seeing when scaling footage has been fixed. Thanks David for taking the time fix this even though most users were not affected.

Marc