Neo First Light

[Björn Rehder]

A bit of a First light newbie question here...
Not to many tutorials or info out there on First light I could find. I finally managed to do some adjustments on a clip. Now if I playback on my own PC I can see the changes. However when I send that clip to client PC (have installed neo player there to view) all changes that were done do not show up???
How does this database thing work? (dropbox is not an option) How would client PC know about the Active metadata?

[Taky Cheung]

I ain't no First Light expert. But It's about meta data. The adjustment you made on first light stored with a separate database file. Unless you render the video at your computer, your client will need the same first light database in order to view your result.

[David Newman]

Taky is correct. If both systems has Neo or better, moving databases between the systems is easy. If the end user is only using NeoPlayer, then things get tricky. What is your situation?

[Björn Rehder]

Thanks Taky. That was my exact point..."your client will need the same first light database in order to view your result." The question was just how on earth do I point the clients' computer (i.e NeoPlayer) to the location of wherever the database is residing? (in this case let's assume an external HDD)

The reason I didn’t respond earlier was that I had queried this with Cineform directly and sorted it with Jake. (Excellent after sales service from Cineform btw!)

David, you’re quiet right that things are tricky with only one computer having FirstLight installed. And remember that all(most) computers that have to work /review the footage are NOT connected to the internet or even on an internal network.
Here’s Jake’s solution:
“If the comptuers are not even a part of a loca-area network, then you will need to export the database from one system to another using First Light's export database button. To import it into a new system, you will need to install a trial version of Neo, and then import the database using first light's import database button. Then you can remove Neo and install Neo Player and you should still have the database. The problem with doing it this way is that whenever you make changes to the original database, you then need to re-export it and re-import.”
“Once you have installed the trial of neo the database folder structure will be in place on the second machine, so there will not be a need to redo this later.”
I still have to test this method next week when I’m back in the studio but it sure sounds it will work.
David, would this (probably not so unique) situation warrant the development of a "small" script or program that could be included with NeoPlayer in future? Like when installing the “decoder” it will ask for the path of the database (IF ANY).

[Taky Cheung]

I just worked on a 1.5 hour timeline. With Firstlight, it is awesome to adjust the color settings on the fly without using any filter. Oh well, here's the after math,

I render the timeline before I went to bed last night. The timeline is about 1.5 hours. It's been 10.5 hours already and it renders abotu 2/3 of it. The estimated remaining time is 5:15 left. But it was 4:30 before. So the estimated remaining time is increasing as time goes.

Now I wasn't sure if using First Light instead of applying filter is a good method.

[Björn Rehder]

LOL Be grateful... now you can sleep longer!

I haven't done any intense rendering yet. I still busy "playing" with the movie. I'll see if my render times shoot up dramatically but I doubt it.

[David Newman]

The FirstLight color application is still faster, but Premiere export to CineForm AVI is way slower than it should be (we asked Adobe why.) If you export to Window AVI via the CineForm VFW codec, it will be much faster, but only 8-bit. The quality will still be very good as the FirstLight color corrections always use deeper color processing.

[Taky Cheung]

The remaining export time is now 5:19.. it increases 4 minutes since the past 12 minutes. I guess I won't be able to work on my computer all day at all. that means lower productivity. This is the part I miss using Matrox products with their hardware acceleration.

[Taky Cheung]

5 hours has passed and the remaining time jumps up to 7 hours. It is moving frame by frame slowly while the remaining time continue to grow. I checked the CPU usage it's 1% only all together. It's 4pm here my time, The work day is wasted.

[David Newman]

Aarrg!! I should have asked you to look at your CPU usage -- 1% is not doing anything. Kill it and try exporting like I said above.

[Taky Cheung]

I already killed it. I thought using First Light will speed up my workflow. Have to try out more as I always work on long project.

Not only I killed the project, I will add makers on timeline and export the timeline into smaller AVIs then use VirtualDub to chain them back together. ahhhhh

[David Newman]

Try using the VFW export instead of CineForm AVI -- you will get the same result.

[Taky Cheung]

Do you mean select "Microsoft AVI" instead? Then what about the rest of the codec setting? Is it "GoPro-Cineform Codec (X65) v7.5.5" ?

At the "Codec Settings" Button, do I need to change anything? Should I go "Higher HD" in encoding quality?

And under "Depth", 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit and 32-bit. which one?

Thanks for your help.

[David Newman]

something like this

[Taky Cheung]

David, thanks for the visual. I created a preset for now.

So what's the difference between why this way will export the file much faster?

I have v7.5.5. Is v7.6 only for CTO? =)

BTW Jake at support has been very helpful.