Export to M2T with CS3 and Cineform

[Stacy Rothwell]

hi....

I'm just about to install Production Premium CS3 and wanted to know if the problem of not being able to export to M2T is still here or has it been fixed.

Premiere (and Cineform) are completely useless if I can't export back to tape.

Thanks!

stacy

[David Newman]

While hope people aren't using HDV tape for mastering and archive -- I personally haven't bothered in years, and use hard disks for my achives -- faster, easier to create redundancy, cheaper and more reliable in my experience. The M2T export failure under 2.0 was a licensing battle over MPEG components, CS3 doesn't change this for CineForm. However, have a new licensing agreement signed with a friendly company and will be re-introducing the direct M2T export from Aspect HD timelines in the not too distant future. In the meantime you can export M2Ts via CS3's Adobe Media Encoder.

[Stacy Rothwell]

Originally Posted by David Newman

While hope people aren't using HDV tape for mastering and archive -- I personally haven't bothered in years, and use hard disks for my achives -- faster, easier to create redundancy, cheaper and more reliable in my experience. The M2T export failure under 2.0 was a licensing battle over MPEG components, CS3 doesn't change this for CineForm. However, have a new licensing agreement signed with a friendly company and will be re-introducing the direct M2T export from Aspect HD timelines in the not too distant future. In the meantime you can export M2Ts via CS3's Adobe Media Encoder.

David,

Thanks for the reply. I'm certainly looking forward to this new release.

I have tried and tried to find where in CS3 the media encoder has an option for MPEG2 Transport Stream. Every place I look I can't find it.

can you give more details?

By the way..... the reason I need to go back to HDV is becuase the videos and graphics I do are shot on HDV but end up on XDCAM HD. Using the transport stream card that is an option on XDCAM HD, I can send a true HDV stream into the PDW-F70.

for some reason, Adobe STILL does not natively support MXF files from XDCAM..... arrggghhh even with the new CS3.

Thanks for the help

Stacy

[Stacy Rothwell]

David,

Any more news on this? It's killing me as I now cannot export at all.

I tried your idea of Adobe MEdia encoder.... but there is noting explicity there about export to HDV or a compatible TS.

Stacy

[Ed Hecht]

Stacy,

I just bought PP CS3 myself and did a little research. When the dialog for the format in the Adobe Media Encoder comes up, choose "MPEG2 Blu-ray". Then in the Multiplexer tab, check the "TS" radio button. The subsequent "Save As" dialog will show the m2t file extension. Hope this helps.

[Craig Irving]

Ed, does this mean we can finally break down the render & record step?

I'd like to render/export in advance and THEN be able to export straight to tape that way I don't have to leave my camcorder on for 5-6 hours unnecessarily during render.

[Bobby Hester]

I installed Aspect HD 4.3.2 and just realized that I can't export to m2t. I came to this forum and found a posting by David Newman (CTO, Cineform Inc.) which read:
"While hope people aren't using HDV tape for mastering and archive -- I personally haven't bothered in years, and use hard disks for my achives -- faster, easier to create redundancy, cheaper and more reliable in my experience."

This is the last straw for me. What kind of hdv editing solution won't allow you to export to m2t. Don't tell me that It's a bad idea to export to hdv. I have been a cineform user for a year and a half and it has been nothing but trouble. I think cineform has potential to be a great product but they can't seem to engineer their software correctly. When I first purchased cineform its down conversion capabilities to SD were terrible. David said that it must have been my computer and that the quality he was getting was very high. A few months later he announced that they have an new encoder or something like that and we would now be able to down convert a high quality SD video. Looking back I can see that he likes to pass the blame for bugs in his software to others like adobe or my computer. From there I experienced memory leak problems and now I can't export to m2t. I can't tell you how many hours I've spent trying to work around problems in this software. They release an update that fixes one problem but causes four others.

I'm usually a very patient person but I just can't financially afford to have this software eating up any more of my time.

[David Newman]

While you have taken a quote out of it context, I do basically believe that position that tape is dead for archive -- I personal don't trust it. Now I should be allowed to be little dramatic in my response occasionally, just as you have here. Most readers find my outbursts more useful than none at all. However, our inability to export to M2T was a licensing dispute (not with Adobe) not an engineering issue, and it has fustrated the hell out us to -- not because I want good M2T export, but our customers do, and that is good enough for me. We have now signed a new agreement to add M2T export back again under CineForm control -- this is a new SDK based on TMPEGEnc, so it will take a couple of months to fully support it. All that said M2T export is still available within Adobe Premiere, we not disable those features. So it just our bonus features are missing, you can still encode M2T / MPEG files with Adobe Media Encoder, place them in HDLink and export them out, or import an Aspect HD into HDV an do an export to tape. This is why I was short with that earlier response, people are requesting features they already have. CineForm does intend to improve on those standard features of the Adobe, but we are not stopping anyone from making as many tape archives as they like. While you may not be happy with the way things are (yes they could me simpler), but I can assure you that we very busy addressing as many customer requests we can -- I'm sorry there aren't more of us to get things done faster.

[Marty Baggen]

Bobby... too bad you're suffering through a lot of frustration.

Rather than question or discuss your workflow, I will simply remind everyone here (many of whom have already made this point) that David places himself on the frontline of the users, suffering through questions and troubles that are quite often, brought on themselves. That, in addition to giving us solid tech support... frequently within hours, or even minutes. That doesn't fit the profile of someone who is going to mislead his customers.

And the answer to your rhetorical question of "what HDV solution wouldn't allow an M2T export?".... how about a software whose primary goal is to provide an ALTERNATIVE to M2T within the post production environment. Makes sense to me.

I hope you get your issues resolved.

[David Wislon]

Strange how these things go… I’ve been using Aspect HD since the first version making long form documentaries on a number of HD cameras from the first JVC HDV camera to the HVX200. In all my experience I’ve found CineForm products to be extraordinarily robust and reliable. I’ve often wished other software (and software support) I rely on was as trustworthy and user devoted as Cineform products. Whenever I’ve been in a serious crunch (such as half way round the world mid-seven-week-shoot with a dead laptop) CineForm technical support was there for me in spades. I am also greatly impressed by and appreciative of CineForm’s rapid and exacting presence on this and other forums.

Having been at my wits end in the middle of production more times than I care to remember, I completely understand Bobby’s position. And while I don’t for a moment doubt his sincerity or experience with these products, I just feel a need to note that my experience with the two CineForm products I have used for almost four years now (HDLink and Aspect HD) has been astonishingly positive in virtually all aspects.

[Stacy Rothwell]

Originally Posted by Ed Hecht

Stacy,

I just bought PP CS3 myself and did a little research. When the dialog for the format in the Adobe Media Encoder comes up, choose "MPEG2 Blu-ray". Then in the Multiplexer tab, check the "TS" radio button. The subsequent "Save As" dialog will show the m2t file extension. Hope this helps.

Ed,

I tried what you are saying but the audio to go back to HDV is not PCM or Dolby digital. these are the only choices available and it errors saying neither audio type is available for that output option.

Best regards,

stacy

[Stacy Rothwell]

David,

I appreciate your responses. You keep mentioning that Premiere has the ability to export an m2t file using adobe media enocder, but there is no preset for it.

Do you have a set of instructions to make this work so I can export via HDLink?

Unfortunately, Adboe has once again (in my opinion) done a half-assed job of supporting additional equipment right out of the box. I am specificaly referring to XDCAM HD. Final Cut Pro supports this as is. Adobe, even on their brnad new flagship product, does not.

I need to produce graphics that ultimately get played back on-air with two PDW-F70's (one for video and one for key). The only way that I can, reasonably, get there at this moment is to use a final render of HDV then send that through the XDCAM HDV option card. That's why I want to export to M2T, not becuase I want to archive on tape.

Had Adobe seen fit to support an extremely popular format using MXF import and export through ethernet like Apple does, this would all be a completly moot point as I would just be doing this files rather than video.

so anyway, do you have a procedure for using the media encoder to create M2T files?

thanks for the help!

stacy

[Dave Campbell]

Interesting comment about tape. I still archieve ALL my stuff on tape. Video,
computer video, etc. I do not trust hard drives.

So yes David, I look forward to a simple, working export to tape.

Now, this is interesting since MS has taken ALL tape support out of Vista
and Longhorn for the same reason, they feel tape is dead. Well wonder why they have not taken floppy support away also, this has been dead for a long time. So, I have had to spend a bunch of time trying to find a third party solution so I can continue to use my tape backups.

Dave

[Craig Irving]

I like to export back to M2T (HDV) for 100% compatible playback on the PS3. That's another reason for it.

But yes, I also feel more comfortable archiving to tape. At worst a few frames get dropped, however if it's on a hard drive you run the risk of the whole file being damaged/corrupted.

[Dave Campbell]

I know the other day I was using a brand new 300 gig sas drive for video files.
For some reason, the disc glitched, and all of my large files were just gone.
I did everything I could with s/w tools to try and recover, but no luck.
This is when I clearly learned I still need to keep tape as a backup, no matter
how horse and buggy it may be.

Dave