Neoscene or Neo Hd with canon xha1 and canon 5d

[William Boehm]

i want to pose this question to david newman, or anyone else that has used both neoscene and neo hd. i have just transfered 45 hours of hdv wildlife footage in alaska and pac now using neoscene shot from a canon xha1 ..very good camera but almost past its time. it is true that apparently neoscene will not make a high enough quality int. codec...10 bit 4:2:2: in comparison to Neo HD? It seems i ordered the wrong form from BH last month. i am not sure what i will be doing with the footage...possibly selling some of the rarer wildlife sequences, most of it for home enjoyement and making blue ray dvds. i have just started to learn editing on vegas 9. i intend to shoot with a dslr by summer, and that is waiting for a nikon dslr that will shoot 1080 p...

I will be only making basic corrections in color, some antishake, saturation, underexposing the shot. where does the transition take place, greater than 46 inch hd tv, projection? and is the difference that noticable on larger screens etc? what about shadows, detail...and i am wondering if I should have upgraded to neo hd? .thanks in advance. bill

[David Newman]

If you doing professional work you want (if not need) Neo HD, like if you do sell footage to stock houses. The "High" quality mode of NeoScene is fine for hobbiest work, but the Filmscan modes are missing. I would use Filmscan 1 as the default quality on all CineForm other products.

[William Boehm]

i am a little confused...does neoscene have filmscan1 and 2
i have upgraded the newly purchase neoscene...and didnt see those options, only l0w-high. i wouldnt be selling much footage, but some. what is the noticeable difference david?

[David Newman]

Filmscan modes are only in the professional product lines. Visually you are not likely to see a difference, however under heavy color correction the filmscan modes (named for the original purpose) hold more information that can be extract from the image. Ideal filmscan is used for capture directly from an uncompressed source (live capture feeds) rather than recompressing camera compressed data which has lot so much information already.

[William Boehm]

then neoscene should work for me with hdv footage, and canon 5 d footage. i wouldnt be doing much color correction, white balance, but rather saturate the color and where i have some footage slightly overexposed, saturate and darken the image. would this hold up then in the 10 bit 4:2:2 frames? i would rather not spend another $300 for neo hd if i dont need it. the other options are to deshake some footage taken from a boat or kayak. thanks again david for your help

[Ross Webb]

Hi David,
I'm a little confused by this.
Shooting on the Canon 7D + 5D for example are 47 and 45 mbits.
I realise its h.264 and very compressed and I'd like to understand better why Film Scan 1 would be better than other settings when the original is a relatively low bit rate (albeit rather compressed)
thanks
Ross

[William Boehm]

david..any response to these questions? bill

[David Newman]

"Ideal filmscan is used for capture directly from an uncompressed source" -- which is to say that there is little gain in using such a high quality transcode on a heavily compressed source. However Neo HD does support live capture over HDMI/HDSDI with appropriate add-on hardware, so even with the 5D/7D you can use the live feed for a high quality capture (although not with compromise as these cameras window their HDMI feed.)

[Laurence Kingston]

If you doing professional work you want (if not need) Neo HD, like if you do sell footage to stock houses. The "High" quality mode of NeoScene is fine for hobbiest work, but the Filmscan modes are missing. I would use Filmscan 1 as the default quality on all CineForm other products.

I remember a couple of years ago when medium quality was the one officially recommended for video professionals.

IMHO, high quality will look great on your Canon footage. There is no reason to use the filmscan modes on anything that was originally shot with an h264 codec (or whatever it is that Canon uses). Filmscan is designed so that you can see the grain on stuff that was originally shot on film and transferred to video. For the detail in video shot with any of the compression formats we all use, the high quality Cineform modes (the ones below the film scan modes) look as good as the source.

If you use any kind of camera which captures to a compressed format: a Canon DSLR, an HDV camera, a Sony EX1 or EX3, Neo Scene is a nice match for the quality of the video that those cameras record.

[Ross Webb]

Thanks Laurence,
your answer is very much appreciated.