Image flip in Firstlight.

[Ben Hickson]

I have some footage I'm working on that was shot with a Redrock adapter and converted to cineform without rotating it 180 degrees to correct the orientation. So everything is upside down. If I go into Firstlight and flip the image 180 degrees on all of them, and save it, will they playback in realtime correctly oriented? Isn't that how firstlight works? Or is completely changing every pixel going to be more processor-intensive to play back?

[John Reeve]

Hi Ben,

I use the flip feature on 3D content all the time. It is not more CPU intensive to use the flip. None of the metadata changes make the system work any harder as far as I know. Enjoy!

-John

[David Newman]

You not get something for nothing, all changes do add some compute time, but it is very efficient such that many operations you will not notice to increase in compute load. For 180 degree flip you can also used the option within HDlink to rotate your footage.

[Ben Hickson]

What do my settings need to be in HDlink to rotate footage? I converted something just now that came out rotated 180 degrees, but completely green. Attached is a screenshot of the settings I used. Basically just left everything off except M2 lens adapter mode. The file I tried it on was already a 1280 x 720 cineform file.

Also, how do I tell what compression level (Low, Medium, High, FilmScan, FilmScan 2) a file was converted at? I have mediainfo, and it says bit rate is 39.6 Mbps on this particular file. Are there certain bit rate values that correspond to certain compression settings? Or should I be looking at another value in mediainfo?

Thanks!

[David Newman]

Ben,

I don't understand you question on rotation, given how you started this thread. You can do either, HDLink (for the reason I explained) or in FirstLight, both work.

Green image, how do you get that? One or two others have reported green images yet we can't determine what is happening there (no reproducable here.)

You can use to the data-rate or filesize to determine what quality was used on the initial encode -- CineForm is a VBR (Variable Bit Rate codec) or constant quality design, so data rate vary based on the source image.

If you need to know you can use this tiny shell tool:
http://cineform.com/downloads/ParseCFHD.zip
Unzip and install in C:\Program Files (x86)\CineForm\Tools

from a shell
>parsecfhd MVI_0081-001.avi -h
4:2:2 CineForm 2D File 1920 x 1080 quality 3

quality numbers
1 - low
2 - medium
3 - high
4 - Filmscan1
5 - Filmscan2

[Ben Hickson]

Great shell tool thanks!

Maybe in a future release... some sort of integration with the CineformActiveMetadataStatusViewer.exe possibly...

Maybe the user could check a box in that menu that says... "CFHD info in Explorer" and then it would add an option in the right-click menu that says "View CFHD Encode Information"

And it would return something like:
Cineform 2D File
4:2:2
1920 x 1080
quality 3 (High)
encode date: 10/19/2010
encoded with: HDLink (or Remaster, or Vegas 10.0a, or Premiere CS5)
license: NeoScene

I don't know how hard it would be to make the shell tool work in a right-click menu, but I think a lot of people would appreciate this information. When someone finds a file that doesn't look great, they want to know why. And if they have different versions of a rendered project, they could see when they were actually created, not just when windows says the file was created, as that can change if it gets copied to external disks, etc.

Great product!

[Ben Hickson]

on the green image thing... would you like my file so that you can do testing? since you said you can't reproduce it. doesn't matter to me, i got my thing figured out, but if it would help you....