New Cineform user confusion.

[Deniz Ahmet]

I'm struggling with deciding between Aspect and Prospect as a new user.
I will only ever edit from HDV tape capture. So....

1) Do I need the upscale to 1920 from 1440 - what's the benefit? Does it for example speed up final export to blu-ray as no need to upscale at that final stage?

2) I understand 10bit is a benefit for graphics work, does that mean I see a real advantage when creating overlay titles in Premiere?

3) what is the benefit of "32 bit floating point effects" in ProspectHD?

4) What is CineformRAW encoding in ProspectHD - whats the loss of this in Aspect mean?

5) In conjuction with Blackmaic HDMI capture, HDV ingest from tape is only 8bit as I understand, so what improves when capturing via HDMI into cineform instead of over firewire?


Thanks in advance! This forum is superb btw.

[David Newman]

1) The speed up for blu-ray from 1920 source versus a 1440 source, would be tiny. It is the encoding time of blu-ray that is the time killer, not the frame resize.

2) The benefit for 10-bit is mainly for color correction, not titles or graphics.

3) Color correction. In a 8-bit whole your have 256 levels, you color correct (any operation) you end up with less than 256 levels this can show up as banding/contouring -- looks bad. 32-bit float filter and rendering means all your 256 (8-bit source) can be preserved through color correction. See http://www.cineform.com/products/Asp...pect.htm#10bit

4) RAW encoding is for capturing from bayer camera sources. If you don't have that, you will not miss it.

5) If you are capturing tape over HMDI, the only advantage is 1920 capture via 1440 (Firewire.) Capture can be slightly faster as you computer doesn't have to decompress MPEG2 or (optionally) scale to 1920. The really advantage to HDMI is when you capture live, then you get 4:2:2 color instead of 4:2:0, and no MPEG compression artifacts.

[Deniz Ahmet]

1) Regarding 10bit over 8bit - If I create some CG (say opening credits) in after effects etc and render off into your codec and import into ASPECT 8bit vs Prospect 10bit - is there any difference in quality?


2) Regarding colour correction in 10bit - wouldn't you need a 10bit panel TV
(like latest Bravias) and HDMI 1.3 to see thebenefit - or is that a different issue. Just trying to think ahead, most consumer flat panel TV have colour banding due to 8 bit panels right?


3) I guess there is no value capturing 1920 over HDMI if using AspectHD as that only supports 1440 projects? Hence no advantage of the BlackMagic Intensity, just use the firewire.


Really hope you guys are working to incorporate BlackMagic timeline preview - this is your missing link to an amazing full package. Your customers are begging for it.

[David Newman]

1) 10-bit graphics with smooth gradient will be smoother, but most titling it not impact by 8 vs 10bit. CG composites can benefit from 10bit just like video sources.

2) While 10-bit displays are available they are not necessary. 10-bit can be dithered to an 8-bit output and look very good, the issue is you can with each render generation as dithering adds noise and compression does like dithering.

3) Still live captures from HDMI, even at 1440 are far superior in quality to tape based data over Firewire.

[Richard Leadbetter]

One thing to bear in mind is that HDV is native 1440x1080 any way, and I'm fairly sure you can export your final video for BD in the exact same resolution. Let the player do the scaling to 1920x1080 and save encoding bandwidth on image quality.

AVC-HD discs are a subset of the BD implementation and they definitely support 1440x1080 so no reason why proper BD won't either.