5D MkII: Life after conversion, what to do?

[Jon Fairhurst]

Bill,

It would be nice to have a transcoding product that lets you transcode and scale in one go. You could batch process your video and immediately start editing 720p (or whatever) content.

I own NeoScene and it doesn't scale the output. (Though, to be fair, wavelet coding scales nicely when decoded.) I'm not sure what features the other Cineform products offer.

[Chris Barcellos]

I have my old Neo HDV still on my system, and it does downscaling. The rub of that is that it won't handle the 5D files. When Cineform went to NeoScene, the crippled that capability, so they could sell it with their higher priced products. Guess you can't blame them for that.

[Bill Binder]

Yes, I know. I've complained in the Cineform forums about this multiple times, and it's pretty much the only thing holding me back from buying NeoScene. Sure, I could rescale after NeoScene, but then again, that's another whole transcode in my workflow and I'm just not that die hard (one transcode is bad enough, lol), plus it makes re-doing a previous workflow that much more of a PITA to actually replicate years down the road if needed (I only save my originals).

The sad truth is since I'm mostly a serious hobbyist with a focus of online distribution of my somewhat serious archival project in the SF jazz scene, I've just been using the old built-in Cineform in Vegas Pro 8. I just drop my 5D2 files onto the timeline, run an events to regions script, and then batch render everything out to 720p30 Cineform from there. Then I do my projects in 720p and often frameserve out to a Flash encoder at half-scale from there (640x360). I then save and backup all of my project files, the original movs, and my final renders. Everything works flawlessly, so I'm not much inclined to change anything at the moment, but I'd buy NeoScene in a heartbeat if I could downscale on ingest/transcode. That just doesn't seem like a "pro" feature to differentiate on, but what do I know? I mean maybe downscaling 4k to a more usable resolution, but most "pros" aren't taking 1080p sources down to 720p, so why not?

[Jon Fairhurst]

Bill, your approach saves about $100 and some hard drive space, but that's about it. Hopefully, you're archiving the original MOV files to keep the maximum quality in the smallest size, as compared to the Cineform 720p AVIs. Sure, you can edit the AVIs immediately, but they're more bits for fewer pixels.

Since Cineform uses wavelets, you could transcode to 1080p, put that on the timeline of your choice with the preview quality of your choice, and the playback will be nice and smooth. When you do your final render for the web, you won't lose any visible quality.

Of course, the 720p Cineform files are half as big as the 1080p Cineform files, based on fewer pixels.

For saving hard drive space, I'd just archive the MOV files and blow away the intermediates. They can be regenerated later, if needed.

I'm not sure about the transcode time. On a fast quad core system, I can transcode at roughly real time. On my crummy old system at home, it's ...slower. I'm not sure if your 720p transcode is faster or slower.

[Desmond Sukotjo]

So you use cineform to convert your 5D files from 30p to 29.97 or 23.976p. However as Cineform themselves claim it is not really the ideal way to do so. Then what?

Cineform Tech Blog Blog Archive Canon 5D Mark II and 24p

[Jon Fairhurst]

NeoScene converts 30p to 29.97p perfectly by slowing both the audio and video. (This is still only a problem when cutting with 29.97 cameras viewing the same scene, due to the speed differences.)

Converting to 23.976 is another story. If there is no dialog, you can slow to 80% speed. It gives a dreamy feel. If there is dialog, it's more challenging. I produce stuff with dialog at 29.97, since I'd rather have a 30p look than 24p with bad interpolation.

[Desmond Sukotjo]

Jon. After you convert you 5D files using NeoScene. I believe you ended up with cineform codec avi/mov file. How do you edit this? What editing application do you use for this cinefrom files?

I wonder if we can use VirtualDub to convert 5D files to 29.97 720x480 NTSC PAR with ms dv codec (PC running windows). That way we can edit on a system without using cineform. Anyone tried this before?

[Jon Fairhurst]

Hi Desmond,

I use Vegas. There is nothing unique about the workflow. With Cineform's free decoder on the machine, I can just drop the content on the timelines and edit.

Encoding to Cineform at 1080p requires the purchase of NeoScene. Decoding and editing can be done for free on any machine.

[Desmond Sukotjo]

Jon. Thanks for bringing this up. Good to know. I don't use Vegas therefore I did not know that you can put movie files with cineform codec into the timeline and edit away.
In my case I'm on the Adobe's family. We can only do that if we have ProspectHD. Kind of lame huh??

[Jon Fairhurst]

I believe that it works in Premiere as well. You just need to have the decoder installed on your machine.

[Desmond Sukotjo]

Jon. Yes it actually does work on Windows Premiere Pro CS4. I downloaded the trial version of NeoScene. However all the converted clips needs to be rendered in Premiere. They're all RED in the timeline indicating they need to be rendered in order to display preview correctly.

Wish to have a workflow that can convert those 5Dmk2 files into something that can play in realtime in Premiere. And convert them from HD to SD in pre-process before editing. That way when I know the final product won't be in HD, why edit in HD.

[Ian Lim]

I'm using Vegas but I think NeoScene-converted files shouldn't have problems with Premiere either. With recent horse-powered computers, it has become easy to edit HD files and convert 'em to SD later :D

[Desmond Sukotjo]

Heeeyy... Ian. How's it going bro? Haven't heard from you for like centuries :o)

In reply to your comment. I just think that there's no point editing in HD environment if your client only asking for SD. It will speed up our work even more if we just edit in SD for SD output.