Some questions about Aspect HD

[David Kirlew]

I recently read the two whitepapers on Cineform's website on the Aspect and Prospect codecs.

Although it is an 8-bit codec and not 10-bit does the Aspect HD codec suffer from banding issues?

[Chris Metts]

Hello everyone,

(I'm pretty new to 24p filming and extremely new to HDV, so please bare with me if all this seems stupid.)

I just got my new JVC GY HD100 the other day (this camera is awesome! :) and I downloaded the trial version of Aspect HD to see how I like it. That being said I shot some footage in 720/24p and captured and converted it to CFHD AVI files using HD link (that came with the trial version of Aspect HD) and made a quick little edit so I could make a DVD and see what it looked like on Tv. At first when I exported it (as a Cineform HD Export) and watched it on WMV9 it looked like it was in slo-mo but the audio was still at the right speed. I then changed the framerate to 29.97 and that seemed to do the trick. Next I made a new 16:9 project in Adobe encore version 1.0 and tried to import the edit, no go. I had a message pop up and tell me that the image size had to be 720x480. I then went to the Cineform website and went to "Support" and found a great article on how to make a DVD using Aspect HD.

http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/s...asp?deptID=614

(I wish I would have found it sooner haha.) It told me to change the frame size to 720x480 when I export the movie from Premiere, have the frame rate set to 29.97 and the pixel aspect ratio set to D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9(1.2). After all this I was able to import my "Quick" edit into Encore and make a dvd. One last thing I encountered was that my DVD plays fine on a wide screen TV, but that on a standard 4:3 TV it is all squashed, even if I set my DVD player to 4:3 letter box. (Which has always fixed that problem in the past.)

My questions are...

Is this the way most people using Aspect HD make their DVD's?

Am I still getting a "24p" DVD? (I know that the DVD player will play it as 29.97 anyway, I'm just curious. :)

Is the quality going to suffer from doing it this way?

And also why is it only able to playback on widescreen TV's and not 4:3 ones?

Or maybe I'm doing things the hard way and am too dumb to figure out the correct solution.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
-Chris

[Miguel Lombana]

Having a kind of odd problem that I was hoping someone might enlighten me on. I have a new project shot on an HC1 at 1080i, exported with the suggested settings that both David posted and are echoed on the Cineform FAQ site and imported into Sony DVD Archietect.

I do need to say that this is a selfish project, it's not for customer, it's of me and my family in Flagstaff playing in the snow but none the less it's the first dvd that I'm trying to edit in HDV and move into DVD for our enjoyment.

The issue is that although the project is 720x480 Wide, when imported into DVD Archietect, it's sticking to 4:3 and not accepting the 16:9. Which is odd because this is the first time ever that I've had a problem with DVD Arch doing something like this.

I've taking and changed the project settings to 16:9 (which is my typical startup) and even forced the clip to 16:9 and without reguard, it's still in 4:3 on preview or burn.

EDIT: I need to add one additional comment to this, I just tried to run a "Pro-Coder" conversion on this file and found that in Pro-coder I had to force 16:9 as well, for some reason it's seeing the Cineform AVI as 4:3 as well, even though it's 16:9. When I re-compress via Pro-coder and output a new MPG2 file, it's 16:9 and flawless, might be a little extra loss after having passed through a 2nd codec but it's WS.

Almost forgot, got to mention one more thing, when outputting with Lower Fields First, any slight movement results in major squigglies in the video, lots of horizontal noise, resulting in the need to export to Progressive, otherwise it's unviewable.

Any ideas?

MIGUEL

[John Jay]

Does Aspect HD currently have the ability to transcode from 100Mbit/s 422P@HL ?

[David Newman]

Yes. It can transcode from any MPG, M2T or TS sequence into a CineForm AVI. However Aspect HD is limited to a max. resolution of 1440x1080, a 100Mbit/s 422P@HL can be 1920x1080 -- requiring Prospect HD Edit.

[Miguel Lombana]

BUMP-

I wanted to update this in hopes that it might help me get a response cause something is not right.

In short, when I export HDV from Premier Pro 2.0 with the Aspect HD 4.0 engine, and I import the AVI into either DVD Archietect, I'm seeing a 4:3 project and not a 16:9 project despite the project settings being setup as 16:9.

To confirm my export settings:

Export Movie> Select Cineform HD Export> (Video TAB) 720x480, Frame 29.97 and PAR to D1/DV NTSC Wide 1.2> (Keyframe and Rendering), I select progressive (for this project) and when I'm done I'm getting a 4:3 project...

When I play this in Media Player it's widescreen and perfect, when I import it to DVD Arch, it thinks it's 4:3!

Has anyone seen this?

[Richard Leadbetter]

I don't know about DVD Architect, but I do know that getting your DVD player to switch to 16:9 is as easy as pie.

Is the footage appearing in DVD Architect tall and thin? If so, if all else fails you could simply author as normal (ie 4:3) and reset the aspect ratio flags on each VOB file using the freeware tool IFOedit. This will override DVD Architect's default 4:3 settings on your final 'ready to burn' files and tell your DVD player to run the footage in an anamorphic format.

If, however, DVD Architect is physically cropping the sides of your footage, another solution will be required.

[Miguel Lombana]

Originally Posted by Richard Leadbetter

I don't know about DVD Architect, but I do know that getting your DVD player to switch to 16:9 is as easy as pie.

Is the footage appearing in DVD Architect tall and thin? If so, if all else fails you could simply author as normal (ie 4:3) and reset the aspect ratio flags on each VOB file using the freeware tool IFOedit. This will override DVD Architect's default 4:3 settings on your final 'ready to burn' files and tell your DVD player to run the footage in an anamorphic format.

If, however, DVD Architect is physically cropping the sides of your footage, another solution will be required.

The export from the PPro Timeline with the CFHD Aspect 4.0 is coming out 4:3, when I play it back in Arch it's pillarboxed and stretched thin, DVD arch will allow you to force the aspect of the source file to 16:9 but to no avail.

What's buggin me is that if I use the Premier Pro HDV preset to start the project and export it using the 720x480 x 1.2 it's dead on perfect. So there is something different about the Aspect that is not the same as the version of Cineform that Adobe is using. I can however take the raw CFHD Avi in 1440 x 1080 and import it into DVD Arch and it will run a re-compression and it will be just fine, that's what really odd, the issue only manifests itself when I reduce the exported file to 720 x 480.

Miguel

[John Schlesinger]

After installing Aspect HD everything works so far except m2t export which gets to the end and crashes premiere with an error Runtime error microsoft c++ r6002 floating point not loaded

Any Ideas all other exports work including cineform HD avi's. Thanks

Using Premiere 1.51 alone on a system with little else.

[David Newman]

There is a patch available for systems that do that particular crash, please contact support at CineForm.

[Aviv Hallale]

If my understanding is correct, the m2v HDV files are not that performance friendly, so this software wraps it in a lossless codec that's easier to edit with? Is Aspect HD simply for Premiere while Connect is for Vegs?

[David Taylor]

Both Aspect HD and Connect HD use our CineForm Intermediate codec. Files captured are compatible and interchangeable between the platforms. HDLink, our MPEG I/O and conversion utility is also part of both packages.

But the architectures of Premiere and Vegas are different, so we have different components with each. For Vegas, we have done some special interface work between our CI codec and the application to provide an accelerated editing environment using the various preview capabilities within Vegas. (Wavelet transforms, which is the technology used in our codec, have some unique characteristics that can accelerate the editing environment).

In Premiere we also have our own RT SW engine that literally displaces the RT engine provided by Premiere (and which also includes our CI codec). This allows us to get to a very high level of performance, about 3X-4X greater than the RT engine in Premiere achieves. When using our RT engine, Premiere is operating as a comprehensive GUI issuing commands to the CineForm RT engine.

So, both include the CI codec and HDLink, but Premiere has the CineForm RT engine in addition.

To complete the story, Prospect HD extends Aspect HD by extending the codec and RT engine to 10 bits of I/O precision plus extended horizontal resolution. There are some other feature and architecture differences between the two also, but at a simple level the primary difference is the extension to 10 bits.

[Steven Gotz]

How cool is it that the CEO of the company answers your questions?

[David Taylor]

Ah geez, let's keep it in perspective - I'm also the part-time janitor. Now, how cool is it that the part-time janitor knows enough to answer your question? :-)

[Steven Gotz]

All joking aside, David Newman (CTO) and David Taylor (CEO) are both hanging out on these forums to help us. There always seems to be a new feature or a bug fix right around the corner. Unlike big companies, Cineform has been able to fix problems almost as fast as we can find them. Sure they don't have the huge beta tester program, but they repond fast enough.

The real issue with Aspect HD is that it is faster to use, offers a higher quality output due to better use of color information when applying effects, and makes it possible to use HDV in After Effects. Even Adobe admits that HDV and After Effects don't mix very well using native M2T.