CineForm and Premiere Pro CS3 / After Effects

Steven Gotz · May 2nd, 2007, 10:24 AM

I recommend that whatever you do with the stills, you do it in a separate project and export it into a new DV AVI.

Bring your HDV into a SD project and edit it all there along with the stills (as AVI)

That should help with your memory issues.

Peter Ferling · May 2nd, 2007, 11:26 AM

Yes. Such was the fix for my last big project. Had one tiff frame grab that I used as five second still. Everytime I encoutered that image, it would crash or hang (jpeg didn't work, resizing nada). I had to open a new project, import the still, render it as a five-second clip and replace that in the original project, (Thanks to optical mice, I no longer have the safety of a mouse pad when I slam my fist on the table).

Let's see if I have to tape up my hand this time.

Peter Ferling · May 3rd, 2007, 02:48 PM

Going well so far.

I've received my PCIe eSATA card and have stripped two 500GB esataII ata's into raid 0 for a 740Gig disk. Lot's of room to handle fragments. Using a disk test tool, I'm getting about 38megs/sec on the pair (vs. 50megs/sec on my 4disk scsi array).

I captured the first hour of tape three-times. Two times for comparative tests. Using HDLink at HDV 1440 spec medium, a second time in HDLink as scaled progressive to 1920 medium. The rescale and deinterlacing took 100% processing power, and 4x the amount of time to encode. While the HDV was RT on Quad-core, (or 1.5x on a dual xeon bottom end). I couldn't tell the difference on the monitor, so I decided to stick with HDV for cuts and edits, (saving time to deinterlace, etc. for the final render).

I had to create a custom cineform HDV (1440x1080i) project, as I don't have that with Prospect, everything is scaled up 1920. Since I shot this in HDV and intend straight cuts and very little FX, I'm keeping it HDV spec (and with 8-hours of material, I don't have three-days to scale/deinterlace).

I'm now capturing HDV material in CS3 without a hiccup, using 60% processing power.

I have seven more hours of media to capture, tommorrow might prove interesting.

Douglas Turner · May 3rd, 2007, 11:52 PM

Just a quickie - is the deinteralcing in HDLink motion sensitive or does it just basically blend the 2 fields, therefore pretty much halving the resolution.

Otherwise, can't think of why you'd bother converting your footage from 1.33 pixel aspect 1440x1080i HDV to 1920x1080p HD.

Better off deinterlacing on final render out of PPROCS3 using a decent deinterlacing plug-in that only deinterlaces areas of motion?

Peter Ferling · May 4th, 2007, 06:47 AM

That's best answered by David. I've read that capturing progressive/deinterlaced makes for the best material when end result is going to DVD. It was just a test. I agree. Keep with the format shot for edits, and then only deinterlace, etc. for the final media.

BTW, tape two is capturing well. Scene detect is working, I'm using only 60% of the chips, allowing me to do other things (such as posting this message).

Prior to capture I did get one hang up and an error due to camera drive being in a "bad state" (I'm using my XHG1 as my HV10 'deck' is on loan). Restarting the camera fixed the issue and I was able to resume.

David, that reminds me, I can access the capture settings for cineform HDV via the main menu, under 'project'. However, I get the popup with the large cineform logo when trying to changes settings via the capture panel. Clicking the logo on the popup takes me to your web page where I can upgrade to Aspect and get better performance... how much faster is Aspect over Prospect? :)

Peter Ferling · May 4th, 2007, 09:07 AM

Oh-oh, things just got interesting. I captured 2nd hour of footage, cineform post process indicated 2hrs required to encode. Should have been RT.
The encoder then quite mid-ways. The last 45minutes of footage wound up being a repeat of the same clip. Some twelve copies. Strange.

I deleted the data, including the encoded files and conforms and restarted the project. This time I did not multi task. Same deal, but with a different clip and the last 15minutes of the tape (11 copies of the same clip). Watching the performance monitor, I could easily and predict the downward spikes that indicated a encode of the same clip, with PPro3 faithfully conforming each as it arrived. Some kind of looping error. I did not have this issue with HDLink. (BTW, the folks at Adobe did mention that background rendering is not possible with CS3).

I'm now capturing again with HDLink, (I did not reboot, I want to see if somethings hung up with the cineform encoder in memory, or if it's with PPro3).

Peter Ferling · May 4th, 2007, 10:05 AM

HDlink captured successfully, so it's not the tape/camera/pc, etc. It's PPro3.
I'll have to use HDlink going forward. (The clincher will be what happens when I import the footage into PPro3).

Douglas Turner · May 4th, 2007, 01:04 PM

Tis a shame, background rendering would've been a real plus for CS3 :( - especially if I could've set up a render farm using my laptop and HTPC as render slaves...

I s'pose if you are going out straight to DVD, then deinterlacing using a resolution-dropping method won't really hurt the final product - but I always like to keep the fidelity of the project until the very last moment... ie. TMPGEnc going from CFHD avi to mpeg2.

Peter Ferling · May 5th, 2007, 10:09 PM

Good news. So far I've imported 7 hours and 4 minutes of Medium quality HD into PPro3. Some 561 clips. Importing took about 5 minutes, with thirty minutes to conform. Some clips are only a few seconds, and a few cover an entire hour. Still PPro3 chugged along without missing a beat and comformed them all.

Just for kicks, I autosequenced all the clips to one timeline, apply a CF transition as the default. Playback with overlay enabled was adequate (there is a slight buffer/sync delay with the Nvidia card -a known issue).

Clip navigation, pan and zoom on the timelines was good. Disabling the header and tail clip icons (removing the need to redraw), and timeline navigation was RT.

I am able to scrub and playback the timeline without issue. Scrubbing was very responsive. Despite that the resources climbed near double of my last huge project (which was painful in PPro2), the application remains stable.

I've started trim the clips from the bin, and the trim window is very fluid.

Another thing I noticed is that when previewing clips in the trim window, and double-clicking another clip to view, I had this issue with PPro2, where the previous clips showing up briefly before the selected clip came into full view (as if the previous clips were stuck in memory). It's working normally.

Reloading the project took about three-minutes, however there were no issues.

I started rendering a CFHD off the timeline, and noticed that the render started immediately! No waiting, no hangs. The window pops up with frames flying!

Lastly, when using two monitors and having overlay. I would have to disable the overlay in order to use the second monitor, or close PPro down. Now I just select a different running app (placing PPro in the background) and the buffer overly is release, (so I can type this message).

Well, wanna hear the big kicker? I'm using my old Dell 650 dual Xeon, which is the bottom feeder recommended system for cineform. Wait till I start cutting this on the BOXX at work!

Stephen Armour · May 7th, 2007, 03:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Ferling

Well, wanna hear the big kicker? I'm using my old Dell 650 dual Xeon, which is the bottom feeder recommended system for cineform. Wait till I start cutting this on the BOXX at work!

Want another kicker? I'm doing exactly the same thing on exactly the same system! Prospect + CS3 on an old Dell 650 dual Xeon (3Ghz) with a Matrox 750 card! Ha! And it's working...not fast, but working...(SCSI RAID with Cheetah's).

Peter Ferling · May 7th, 2007, 03:21 PM

Too bad the 650's run on a weak 533MHz FSB!

Update:

Moving my soccer project to the BOXX quad opteron I got a little faster performance, and usage for edits and playback was about 50% (vs. 70% on the dual xeon).

In the name of speed, we've always tried to upgrade the cart, while ignoring the horses. The penalty for that has been stability. Make the cart too heavy and eventually the horses will stumble against the strain.

I don't write programs so I'm no expert, but from a working observation, it's obvious that Adobe has change the way memory is handled, and thus created a more stable application. That is, they now use more of it. With full resource utilization, the application has overcome some weaknesses that were evident in PPro2. However, this comes at a price: Image stills.

Load a single 3000px size image and the application practically grinds to halt. A work around, as mentioned on this forum, is to disable the 32bit float option in the playback controls. Still, that only improves scrubbing, and does little for rendering. Add some motion to that 3000px image and crash, crash while dragging or adding the keys mind you.

I and others have complained to Adobe about this (in regards to slow rendering as well.), Unfortunately folks at Adobe say they cannot reproduce the crashing issue and cite that it's a cineform problem. Furthermore, as of this morning, one of the Adobe's forum admins admitted that although this issue is of high importance, fixing the rendering times would only 'criple' other aspects of the program. Our only resolve is to reduce the image sizes down to 2000px or less, which BTW is good management for non-moving stills -but what if you have to PZR? Is 2000px enough creative freedom? Despite crashing, do you really want to put up with 30secs or rendertime for each 4secs of still image?

Don't entirely take my word for it. You'd have to test this out for yourself and on your own system. Also, this is just the beta or preview version, as the actual release version may differ.

My personal take is that for cuts and edits of video, a majority of what I do. PPro3 is more stable and has addressed some of my needs. For photo montages at HD resolution... well...

David, I can emagine that you and Adobe have been at odds over this.

David Newman · May 7th, 2007, 03:28 PM

Can you point out who is saying it is a CineForm issue? I have proven that you can crash CS3 in Decktop mode and a single large JPEG file -- nothing CineForm in that. I even had an internal engineer confirm it, so I haven't been following later threads. If they are still saying it is CineForm they need to do some more testing.

Salah Baker · May 7th, 2007, 05:57 PM

wow that may explain some BMP issues for me...

Peter Ferling · May 7th, 2007, 06:59 PM

David, when did their engineer recognize that? (Maybe that's why they admitted a fix would not be available in CS3), and I've referring to past responses.
Just browse the site and you'll see several response about trying to repeat the problem X in a non-cineform project, etc. You can quickly judge the tone yourself.

Today Aanarav Sareen asked if anyone was having other issues using Aspect v5 and CS3. I explained to him about my having to use HDlink for ingest due to creating repeat clips via CS3. I asked that he should try this with an unlocked beta.

He responded that he would give it a try, however he wrote that he did not have a copy of Aspect v5! What tha? Why ask the question if you don't even have a copy of the er, uhm software to test with? I politely reminded him that a trial of P2k was available...

Read for yourself:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforu...&enterthread=y

Salah Baker · May 7th, 2007, 07:41 PM

one question:
Add a adobe title over a cineform clip and timespeed it,with some opacity...you hit an issue on after a couple of them CF dissolve cuts?

May 2nd, 2007, 10:24 AM	#61
Steven Gotz Trustee Join Date: May 2002 Location: Clermont, FL Posts: 1,520	I recommend that whatever you do with the stills, you do it in a separate project and export it into a new DV AVI. Bring your HDV into a SD project and edit it all there along with the stills (as AVI) That should help with your memory issues. __________________ Steven Gotz http://www.stevengotz.com

May 2nd, 2007, 11:26 AM	#62
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Yes. Such was the fix for my last big project. Had one tiff frame grab that I used as five second still. Everytime I encoutered that image, it would crash or hang (jpeg didn't work, resizing nada). I had to open a new project, import the still, render it as a five-second clip and replace that in the original project, (Thanks to optical mice, I no longer have the safety of a mouse pad when I slam my fist on the table). Let's see if I have to tape up my hand this time. __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 3rd, 2007, 02:48 PM	#63
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Going well so far. I've received my PCIe eSATA card and have stripped two 500GB esataII ata's into raid 0 for a 740Gig disk. Lot's of room to handle fragments. Using a disk test tool, I'm getting about 38megs/sec on the pair (vs. 50megs/sec on my 4disk scsi array). I captured the first hour of tape three-times. Two times for comparative tests. Using HDLink at HDV 1440 spec medium, a second time in HDLink as scaled progressive to 1920 medium. The rescale and deinterlacing took 100% processing power, and 4x the amount of time to encode. While the HDV was RT on Quad-core, (or 1.5x on a dual xeon bottom end). I couldn't tell the difference on the monitor, so I decided to stick with HDV for cuts and edits, (saving time to deinterlace, etc. for the final render). I had to create a custom cineform HDV (1440x1080i) project, as I don't have that with Prospect, everything is scaled up 1920. Since I shot this in HDV and intend straight cuts and very little FX, I'm keeping it HDV spec (and with 8-hours of material, I don't have three-days to scale/deinterlace). I'm now capturing HDV material in CS3 without a hiccup, using 60% processing power. I have seven more hours of media to capture, tommorrow might prove interesting. __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 3rd, 2007, 11:52 PM	#64
Douglas Turner Regular Crew Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 132	Just a quickie - is the deinteralcing in HDLink motion sensitive or does it just basically blend the 2 fields, therefore pretty much halving the resolution. Otherwise, can't think of why you'd bother converting your footage from 1.33 pixel aspect 1440x1080i HDV to 1920x1080p HD. Better off deinterlacing on final render out of PPROCS3 using a decent deinterlacing plug-in that only deinterlaces areas of motion? __________________ Doug Turner http://therunsmovie.com

May 4th, 2007, 06:47 AM	#65
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	That's best answered by David. I've read that capturing progressive/deinterlaced makes for the best material when end result is going to DVD. It was just a test. I agree. Keep with the format shot for edits, and then only deinterlace, etc. for the final media. BTW, tape two is capturing well. Scene detect is working, I'm using only 60% of the chips, allowing me to do other things (such as posting this message). Prior to capture I did get one hang up and an error due to camera drive being in a "bad state" (I'm using my XHG1 as my HV10 'deck' is on loan). Restarting the camera fixed the issue and I was able to resume. David, that reminds me, I can access the capture settings for cineform HDV via the main menu, under 'project'. However, I get the popup with the large cineform logo when trying to changes settings via the capture panel. Clicking the logo on the popup takes me to your web page where I can upgrade to Aspect and get better performance... how much faster is Aspect over Prospect? :) __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 4th, 2007, 09:07 AM	#66
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Oh-oh, things just got interesting. I captured 2nd hour of footage, cineform post process indicated 2hrs required to encode. Should have been RT. The encoder then quite mid-ways. The last 45minutes of footage wound up being a repeat of the same clip. Some twelve copies. Strange. I deleted the data, including the encoded files and conforms and restarted the project. This time I did not multi task. Same deal, but with a different clip and the last 15minutes of the tape (11 copies of the same clip). Watching the performance monitor, I could easily and predict the downward spikes that indicated a encode of the same clip, with PPro3 faithfully conforming each as it arrived. Some kind of looping error. I did not have this issue with HDLink. (BTW, the folks at Adobe did mention that background rendering is not possible with CS3). I'm now capturing again with HDLink, (I did not reboot, I want to see if somethings hung up with the cineform encoder in memory, or if it's with PPro3). __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 4th, 2007, 10:05 AM	#67
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	HDlink captured successfully, so it's not the tape/camera/pc, etc. It's PPro3. I'll have to use HDlink going forward. (The clincher will be what happens when I import the footage into PPro3). __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 4th, 2007, 01:04 PM	#68
Douglas Turner Regular Crew Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Sydney, Australia Posts: 132	Tis a shame, background rendering would've been a real plus for CS3 :( - especially if I could've set up a render farm using my laptop and HTPC as render slaves... I s'pose if you are going out straight to DVD, then deinterlacing using a resolution-dropping method won't really hurt the final product - but I always like to keep the fidelity of the project until the very last moment... ie. TMPGEnc going from CFHD avi to mpeg2. __________________ Doug Turner http://therunsmovie.com

May 5th, 2007, 10:09 PM	#69
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Good news. So far I've imported 7 hours and 4 minutes of Medium quality HD into PPro3. Some 561 clips. Importing took about 5 minutes, with thirty minutes to conform. Some clips are only a few seconds, and a few cover an entire hour. Still PPro3 chugged along without missing a beat and comformed them all. Just for kicks, I autosequenced all the clips to one timeline, apply a CF transition as the default. Playback with overlay enabled was adequate (there is a slight buffer/sync delay with the Nvidia card -a known issue). Clip navigation, pan and zoom on the timelines was good. Disabling the header and tail clip icons (removing the need to redraw), and timeline navigation was RT. I am able to scrub and playback the timeline without issue. Scrubbing was very responsive. Despite that the resources climbed near double of my last huge project (which was painful in PPro2), the application remains stable. I've started trim the clips from the bin, and the trim window is very fluid. Another thing I noticed is that when previewing clips in the trim window, and double-clicking another clip to view, I had this issue with PPro2, where the previous clips showing up briefly before the selected clip came into full view (as if the previous clips were stuck in memory). It's working normally. Reloading the project took about three-minutes, however there were no issues. I started rendering a CFHD off the timeline, and noticed that the render started immediately! No waiting, no hangs. The window pops up with frames flying! Lastly, when using two monitors and having overlay. I would have to disable the overlay in order to use the second monitor, or close PPro down. Now I just select a different running app (placing PPro in the background) and the buffer overly is release, (so I can type this message). Well, wanna hear the big kicker? I'm using my old Dell 650 dual Xeon, which is the bottom feeder recommended system for cineform. Wait till I start cutting this on the BOXX at work! __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 7th, 2007, 03:21 PM	#71
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	Too bad the 650's run on a weak 533MHz FSB! Update: Moving my soccer project to the BOXX quad opteron I got a little faster performance, and usage for edits and playback was about 50% (vs. 70% on the dual xeon). In the name of speed, we've always tried to upgrade the cart, while ignoring the horses. The penalty for that has been stability. Make the cart too heavy and eventually the horses will stumble against the strain. I don't write programs so I'm no expert, but from a working observation, it's obvious that Adobe has change the way memory is handled, and thus created a more stable application. That is, they now use more of it. With full resource utilization, the application has overcome some weaknesses that were evident in PPro2. However, this comes at a price: Image stills. Load a single 3000px size image and the application practically grinds to halt. A work around, as mentioned on this forum, is to disable the 32bit float option in the playback controls. Still, that only improves scrubbing, and does little for rendering. Add some motion to that 3000px image and crash, crash while dragging or adding the keys mind you. I and others have complained to Adobe about this (in regards to slow rendering as well.), Unfortunately folks at Adobe say they cannot reproduce the crashing issue and cite that it's a cineform problem. Furthermore, as of this morning, one of the Adobe's forum admins admitted that although this issue is of high importance, fixing the rendering times would only 'criple' other aspects of the program. Our only resolve is to reduce the image sizes down to 2000px or less, which BTW is good management for non-moving stills -but what if you have to PZR? Is 2000px enough creative freedom? Despite crashing, do you really want to put up with 30secs or rendertime for each 4secs of still image? Don't entirely take my word for it. You'd have to test this out for yourself and on your own system. Also, this is just the beta or preview version, as the actual release version may differ. My personal take is that for cuts and edits of video, a majority of what I do. PPro3 is more stable and has addressed some of my needs. For photo montages at HD resolution... well... David, I can emagine that you and Adobe have been at odds over this. __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. -------------------------------------------

May 7th, 2007, 03:28 PM	#72
David Newman CTO, CineForm Inc. Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California Posts: 8,095	Can you point out who is saying it is a CineForm issue? I have proven that you can crash CS3 in Decktop mode and a single large JPEG file -- nothing CineForm in that. I even had an internal engineer confirm it, so I haven't been following later threads. If they are still saying it is CineForm they need to do some more testing. __________________ David Newman -- web: www.gopro.com blog: cineform.blogspot.com -- twitter: twitter.com/David_Newman

May 7th, 2007, 05:57 PM	#73
Salah Baker Major Player Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Patterson La. Posts: 207	wow that may explain some BMP issues for me...

May 7th, 2007, 06:59 PM	#74
Peter Ferling Trustee Join Date: May 2005 Location: Wyomissing, PA Posts: 1,141 Images: 57	David, when did their engineer recognize that? (Maybe that's why they admitted a fix would not be available in CS3), and I've referring to past responses. Just browse the site and you'll see several response about trying to repeat the problem X in a non-cineform project, etc. You can quickly judge the tone yourself. Today Aanarav Sareen asked if anyone was having other issues using Aspect v5 and CS3. I explained to him about my having to use HDlink for ingest due to creating repeat clips via CS3. I asked that he should try this with an unlocked beta. He responded that he would give it a try, however he wrote that he did not have a copy of Aspect v5! What tha? Why ask the question if you don't even have a copy of the er, uhm software to test with? I politely reminded him that a trial of P2k was available... Read for yourself: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforu...&enterthread=y __________________ Pete Ferling http://ferling.net It's never a mistake if you learn something new from it. ------------------------------------------- Last edited by Peter Ferling; May 7th, 2007 at 08:16 PM.

May 7th, 2007, 07:41 PM	#75
Salah Baker Major Player Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Patterson La. Posts: 207	one question: Add a adobe title over a cineform clip and timespeed it,with some opacity...you hit an issue on after a couple of them CF dissolve cuts?