is Neo Scene even needed in Premiere Pro CS5?

Luis de la Cerda · January 14th, 2011, 02:28 AM

Sorry for bringing this thread back from the dead, but I'd like to point out a couple of advantages that neoscene might bring to the table for a CS5 user...

A) For miscelaneous clips such as 3D animated sequences, compositing, motion tracking and animated titles. I know many would argue you could achieve that faster by roundtripping with dynamic link, but sometimes it can save you a lot of time to render that tough composite just once and not every single time your client finds another change that takes 5 seconds to edit and 3 hours to re-render. Sometimes I need to finish a video in multiple languages, so I'll just render an intermediate without titles and add titles and voiceover on top of that for multiple languages. That way I can render very fast when the client decides he wants to change a word in some title.

B) Mastering and Archival. You'll regret it down the line when your client wants a slightly modified or updated version and you find the only copy you kept of the edited program is either the original project for which you need to rebuild the complete original folder structure, or an h.264 mp4.

I'll also take this opportunity to kindly request from the cineform team to add alpha channel support to neoscene. I know this is supposed to be a high end feature reserved for neo4k, but let's face it, you can just encode a second grayscale clip as it is, and it would just make our lives easier to just be able to embed it in a single clip and use it freely for titles and compositing elements.

Markus Klatt · January 22nd, 2011, 05:12 AM

I was always sceptical of Cineform NeoScene, since I've first bought it for CS4. There were lots of promises "its the best" and a lot of people wrote here and in other forums "what is good enough for Hollywood should be good enough for you". Might that be true for most kind of "normal" footage I did see some kind of artefacts and bluring at my delicate and filigran night shots (eg. fireworks) when reimporting the cineform.avi into the Premiere timeline. But that was in earlier times and I did not use it correctly.

I then invested weeks and months to find the best image quality with AME for direct H.264 encoding for Blu-ray and an intermediate avi with Lagarith lossless codec for deinterlacing and downscaling to 720p and 576i.
But, AME gave me lots of sleepless nights because of its H.264 encoding (it stays not in the correct bitrate ranges and quality of color gradients is awful, massive bending in night skys and underwater shots).

So, I come to the point: I now use NeoScene Cineform.avi instead of Lagarith in Microsoft AVI for intermediate files in 1080/50i which I then encode in x264 for Blu-ray or deinterlacing/downscaling outside of Premiere. I now use Premiere for editing and slight color/contrast changes only and export the timeline as Cineform intermediate for final rendering.

The image quality of the Cineform.avi rendered with x264 is so much better in direct comparison to a Blu-ray H.264 encoding from AME, even with best settings. That's why I need an intermediate file and Cineform.avis are fast rendered and great to use for intermediates.

Kelly Huffaker · January 22nd, 2011, 10:39 AM

Ive been working with CS5 since it came out and have done a couple wedding projects since then. One wedding I worked with the straight .mov files WITHOUT a CUDA card.....it was okay. The second project I worked with .mov files WITH a hacked CUDA card.....quite a bit better. And the third project, I worked with transcoded files with Neoscene V5 and with the hacked CUDA card and it was phenominal!!! Multicam editing with 3 Canon 7d's was much faster without lagging. Working in After effects was also alot smoother to scrub the timeline than with the native files. (though I wish AE CS5 had a mercury engine too) I also liked that previewing my clips in Bridge was a ton more effecient as they were alot faster to preview. With the .mov files took FOREVER as I had to wait for bridge to load them up for some reason. So in a nutshell, I have cbosen to combine the best of both worlds and use Neoscene with CS5

January 14th, 2011, 02:28 AM	#16
Luis de la Cerda Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Mexico City Posts: 181	Sorry for bringing this thread back from the dead, but I'd like to point out a couple of advantages that neoscene might bring to the table for a CS5 user... A) For miscelaneous clips such as 3D animated sequences, compositing, motion tracking and animated titles. I know many would argue you could achieve that faster by roundtripping with dynamic link, but sometimes it can save you a lot of time to render that tough composite just once and not every single time your client finds another change that takes 5 seconds to edit and 3 hours to re-render. Sometimes I need to finish a video in multiple languages, so I'll just render an intermediate without titles and add titles and voiceover on top of that for multiple languages. That way I can render very fast when the client decides he wants to change a word in some title. B) Mastering and Archival. You'll regret it down the line when your client wants a slightly modified or updated version and you find the only copy you kept of the edited program is either the original project for which you need to rebuild the complete original folder structure, or an h.264 mp4. I'll also take this opportunity to kindly request from the cineform team to add alpha channel support to neoscene. I know this is supposed to be a high end feature reserved for neo4k, but let's face it, you can just encode a second grayscale clip as it is, and it would just make our lives easier to just be able to embed it in a single clip and use it freely for titles and compositing elements.

January 22nd, 2011, 05:12 AM	#17
Markus Klatt Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Berlin, Germany Posts: 169	I was always sceptical of Cineform NeoScene, since I've first bought it for CS4. There were lots of promises "its the best" and a lot of people wrote here and in other forums "what is good enough for Hollywood should be good enough for you". Might that be true for most kind of "normal" footage I did see some kind of artefacts and bluring at my delicate and filigran night shots (eg. fireworks) when reimporting the cineform.avi into the Premiere timeline. But that was in earlier times and I did not use it correctly. I then invested weeks and months to find the best image quality with AME for direct H.264 encoding for Blu-ray and an intermediate avi with Lagarith lossless codec for deinterlacing and downscaling to 720p and 576i. But, AME gave me lots of sleepless nights because of its H.264 encoding (it stays not in the correct bitrate ranges and quality of color gradients is awful, massive bending in night skys and underwater shots). So, I come to the point: I now use NeoScene Cineform.avi instead of Lagarith in Microsoft AVI for intermediate files in 1080/50i which I then encode in x264 for Blu-ray or deinterlacing/downscaling outside of Premiere. I now use Premiere for editing and slight color/contrast changes only and export the timeline as Cineform intermediate for final rendering. The image quality of the Cineform.avi rendered with x264 is so much better in direct comparison to a Blu-ray H.264 encoding from AME, even with best settings. That's why I need an intermediate file and Cineform.avis are fast rendered and great to use for intermediates.

January 22nd, 2011, 10:39 AM	#18
Kelly Huffaker Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Pasco Washington Posts: 128	Ive been working with CS5 since it came out and have done a couple wedding projects since then. One wedding I worked with the straight .mov files WITHOUT a CUDA card.....it was okay. The second project I worked with .mov files WITH a hacked CUDA card.....quite a bit better. And the third project, I worked with transcoded files with Neoscene V5 and with the hacked CUDA card and it was phenominal!!! Multicam editing with 3 Canon 7d's was much faster without lagging. Working in After effects was also alot smoother to scrub the timeline than with the native files. (though I wish AE CS5 had a mercury engine too) I also liked that previewing my clips in Bridge was a ton more effecient as they were alot faster to preview. With the .mov files took FOREVER as I had to wait for bridge to load them up for some reason. So in a nutshell, I have cbosen to combine the best of both worlds and use Neoscene with CS5