Announcing Neo Family Version 5

[Chris Barcellos]

So to be clear. If I upgrade from my current version of NeoScene to NEO HD 5 will the upgrade price be the same as if I was upgrading to present Neo HD version ?

[David Newman]

Typ-o "Some" features in NeoScene.


David,

We are just like with Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas licensing, is it officially one license, one system, but we do allow two activations for system configurations that are not used simultaneously, a laptop and a desktop system.

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Chris Barcellos

So to be clear. If I upgrade from my current version of NeoScene to NEO HD 5 will the upgrade price be the same as if I was upgrading to present Neo HD version ?

Yes, update to NeoHD v4 today, and you will get v5 for free.

[David Dwyer]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Typ-o "Some" features in NeoScene.


David,

We are just like with Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas licensing, is it officially one license, one system, but we do allow two activations for system configurations that are not used simultaneously, a laptop and a desktop system.

Ah because I'm thinking about purchasing a netbook Acer 542G (semi decent spec) and it would be handy when I'm away to Cineform on there. So when I capture the files through my Sony MRC1K I can convert them into Cineform AVIs ready for when I get back home for editing.

So that would be all legal? I wouldnt using both, netbook will only be used on the capture and convert stage.

[David Taylor]

David, that's perfectly consistent with our reasoning for making two activations available.

[David Dwyer]

Originally Posted by David Taylor

David, that's perfectly consistent with our reasoning for making two activations available.

Great News! Now I have to ensure that the Acer ION2 netbook has a 320GB+ HDD

[Brant Gajda]

oops. nm. See the answer.

[Hans van Turnhout]

David,

That's bad news, especially for someone who bought the program when told that the Mac-version would be ported to CS4 (which as you know never happened). Will the Mac version have a capture utility or if it will it be able to split into scenes HDV captures from Mac (it can't split HDV captures from CS4)? If so, I guess the Mac version will do. If not, will mov-files captured through win7 "play as smoothly" on Mac CS5 as would a remaster in Mac?

//Hans

[David Newman]

Mac CS5 should play very well, whether the files are captured.

[David Taylor]

Hans,

There are some feature differences between Mac and Win. On Win we have a capture/conversion utility for HDV content that talks directly to the camera. On Mac you must capture from tape using QT or FCP (or equivalent), but without transcoding, which moves the HDV tape content to Mac as an MOV file. We then convert the MOV file to CineForm. This workflow will not change, so HDV on Mac will remain a two-step. BTW, yes you can capture on Win and move the files to Mac - that works fine.

Regarding CS4, it is true that CS4 support never happened on Mac; similarly our RT engine never happened for CS4 on Win. It is unfortunate, but supporting CS4 perfectly was simply not possible given the many problems in the CS4 SDK.

So the good news is that the CS5 SDK we develop to is in good shape. All Mac customers of v5 of Neo (Scene/HD/4K/3D) will get the CS5 components as a free update when they are ready, probably within two months of their availability on Windows.

[Steve Pesenti]

Hello David,

Will Neo v5 be backward compatible with CS3 and CS4, including support for real time playback in CS3?

Or will Prospect v4 users currently using CS3 or CS4 also need to upgrade to CS5 to move to Neo v5?

[David Newman]

Steve,

Good question, but the details are not finalized. Both CS3 and CS4 will continue to be supported, yet the new playback engine is CS5 only. CS4 will work well under v5.0 running the Adobe playback engine, but with all the Active Metadata improvements and of course the new FirstLight. CS3 is interesting one, we have a lot of the old playback pipeline to move from Prospect into Neo. The goal is to get everyone many new features whether they change Premiere version or not.

[Ray Bell]

Well I hate to have to be the one that ask this question... but from the Cineform post I get this....

Based on the pricing... If you bought Prospect 4K ( $1499 ) you wont get upgraded but down graded to NEO4K ( $999 ) ???

A $500 difference in price... The difference in price included:

40 Transitions
Keyframeable color adjust
Levels control
slow-motion
static/moving titles/video overlays
Pan/scan/rotate/zoom
32 bit floating point effects
multiple spatial resolutions on the timeline
AVI/MOV render
batch capture with timecode
batch capture with HD-SDI w/timecode
and HD-SDI timeline monitoring....

are the extras now included in the NEO4K or are the extras no longer there???

What am I missing here??? besides $500 Thanks

PRICING
--------

No change in pricing from current versions. Pricing below reflects a) new license purchases, and b) upgrade prices from the previous version to version 5:

- NeoScene: a) $129 b) $49 upgrade
- NeoHD: a) $499 b) $149 upgrade
- Neo4K: a) $999 b) $249 upgrade
- Neo3D: a) $2995 or b) free upgrade


UPGRADE PRICING FOR PROSPECT FAMILY OWNERS
-------------------------------------------------

- Prospect HD v3 or earlier to Neo HD v5: $149
- Prospect HD v4 to Neo4K v5: Free. Yes, All Prospect HD v4 customers will get a free upgrade to Neo4K.
- Prospect 4K (any version) to Neo4K: Free.

[Jay Bloomfield]

I'm guessing that the name change is to streamline the marketing, just like when Aspect was dropped. The name Prospect was used to differentiate the product line, in that it had a RT rendering engine in CS3. That dichotomy is no longer necessary as:

1) CS5 has its own improved rendering engine, which uses the GPU.
2) If you're doing video work on the desktop in 2010, you probably have a fast quad core computer and possibly a dual 6 core machine ( I see Apple is announcing its 12 core beasts at NAB). This has sped up rendering enormously, in addition to what your GPU might be doing.

Everything is now "Neo" something or other, but the "new" Neo 4K V5 is basically Prospect 4K with improvements. The Cineform guys can elaborate more on this, but I don't think it's that complicated.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Steve,

Good question, but the details are not finalized. Both CS3 and CS4 will continue to be supported, yet the new playback engine is CS5 only. CS4 will work well under v5.0 running the Adobe playback engine, but with all the Active Metadata improvements and of course the new FirstLight. CS3 is interesting one, we have a lot of the old playback pipeline to move from Prospect into Neo. The goal is to get everyone many new features whether they change Premiere version or not.

It's a relief to hear you are continuing to support CS3 and CS4, but it sounds like there might be some gotchas for the CS3 support? After all the pain we had with CS4, what we (and you) don't need now is a major bunch of hassles with CS3. Depending on Adobe's upgrade pricing scheme for CS5, it could be a while for some of us until we can afford Adobe's upgrade (expensive, you can almost bet on it...) on multiple machines.

Thank you Cineform, for the present of a freebie upgrade for Prospect HD 4 to Neo 4K 5.0. That is a wise and generous offer for many longtime, loyal customers!