CineForm RAW clips now available

[Jason Rodriguez]

I've uploaded some CineForm RAW footage from the CML bash and also a few clips from "Blood: A Butcher's Tale". I will add a couple more clips in the coming days.

http://www.siliconimaging.com/Digita...y_footage.html

There's a Read Me along with the RAW files giving directions on how to work with the CineForm RAW footage.

You can download a 15-day trial of Prospect 2K to work with the files in either Premiere Pro and/or After Effects (Quicktime and Final Cut support for RAW isn't available yet but is coming soon . . . QT will enable support in other applications such as Combustion, FCP, etc.). It's available at:

http://www.cineform.com/products/Dow.../Downloads.htm

A demo of SpeedGrade OnSet can be obtained from IRIDAS at www.iridas.com. for working with the .look files (making additional additional .look files and attaching them to the footage).

Thanks,

Jason

[David Newman]

For those not using Premiere Pro, NEO 2K is all you need to make them work in After Effects. And we are only day or two away from NEO Player a free tool for installing all the decoders users will need to play and manulate CineForm files from any of our products.

[Salah Baker]

Hey that is cool news ...
So now IF I give a client a CineForm Avi it wont stutter on playback, is it still tied to the min. sys. reqs.?

[Jason Rodriguez]

Well, I do know that the half-res proxy playback of the CineForm RAW file in Windows Media player allows for RAW file playback on pretty old machines, i.e., single-core Pentium 4's above 3Ghz and the the fastest Dothan Pentium M's.

[Peter Ferling]

Well, for the first time my old Dell650 dual xeon met it's match in playback of the RAW under PPro3 once I applied the .look file. I can get two layers of 422 1920x1080 with the 444 option. The half-proxy preview is very smooth in windows media. I have full screen overlay enabled on the second PC monitor, and the proxy looks very nice blown up. Suitable for client previewing. (Hmmm, it would be nice to have this feature with P2k).

I have to take a closer look on my BOXX and put these up on the external monitor. Tied up capturing today though.

[Jason Rodriguez]

I'm assuming your Dell 650 dual xeon has a 533Mhz front-side bus? If so, then the issue is not CPU speed but memory bandwidth.

At NAB, with a Pentium D (so Netburst dual-core), we were getting two streams (dissolves or picture-in-picture) to playback with color-correction and some titles without any issues. Of course memory bus contention is not so much as issue with the Pentium D's as it is with the older Xeons. The 800Mhz front-side bus versions help a bit, but aren't a huge improvement. Remember, these were the Xeon systems that Opterons and the AMD K8's were eating for lunch. Of course the new Woodcrest and Quad-core systems simply run circles around everything else out there.

BTW, be sure to read the "Read Me" with on the download page to get a quick-start on how to work with the RAW files. There's quite a bit you can do. And if you download IRIDAS, you can make some more .look files to play with, although that's not necessarily needed, i.e., you can go into AE or use Premiere's built-in toolset to get great color-correction . . . "looks" are meant as the base-look (i.e., like a film-stock or film-stock processing method), not as a means of direct shot-to-shot color-correction.

[Peter Ferling]

Originally Posted by Jason Rodriguez

I'm assuming your Dell 650 dual xeon has a 533Mhz front-side bus? If so, then the issue is not CPU speed but memory bandwidth...

Yes. That's the sole reason I was eager to dump the 650 in favor of a BOXX 7400, the strong selling point of the dual-dual opterons was dedicated bandwidth per core vs. a shared pipe of 533MHz. I was doing uncompressed SD from a toaster on that, and a fast scsi disk array was the killer tool vs. fast chips then. Once I switched to an all digital/compressed format... The BOXX has been good therapy.

However, I did mention that the proxy file played back smoothly. In a pinch, I could live with cuts and edits on the 650. I get two layers with cineform 422 on the 650 as well, so it's obvious that there's a lot more data in the RAW.

I definitely will try keying some of this in AE.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Let us know how it goes!

You don't need a super-screamer for RAW . . . I only have a dual Opteron 252 (so only single-core), and it handles this stuff pretty well.

BTW, I find I get the best results with Keylight, and setting the "Replace Method" under "Screen Matte" to "source" instead of "soft colour" (which is the default in AE version of Keylight).

Also you can try turning off all the metadata during editing . . . that makes things a lot faster as well. That's under the Global Settings in the Playback settings of Premiere Pro.

Thanks,

Jason

[Vladimir Pavlovski]

Hmmm......
I have tried ProspectHD 4 months ago, and as usual after 15 days my trial has expired, and i have uninstalled it.
This is my experience on my machine (Core2Duo 2.4GHz, Asus P5W DH 975x chipset, 2GB DDR2 800 MHz Corsair, PNY Quadro 1500, 3 SATA2 Drives)
Cineform is the best codec I have ever experienced. I have rendered same animation in AE like uncompressed AVI and Cineform AVI. Than I imported same clips and put them in same comp. Cineform above Uncompressed. Than i turn on difference mode on cineform layer and THERE WAS NO DIFFERENCE, than I applied levels filter on cineform layer and difference occured on very extreme tweaking, that is absolutly fantastic codec, BRAVO.
Than I made tests on Premiere.
4 tracks of Cineform video, every track had animation on position and scale parameters, every track had Cineform color correction and 2,3 and 4-th tracks had opacity of about 25-30% just to see all layers. Guess what, THERE WASN'T ANY RED LINE TO RENDER on timeline, and playback was smooth as a butter.
I didn't experienced any problems with cineform, also Procoder was working smooth with this codec.
Maybe this is a bit outdated but i felt that i like to share my experience.

P.S. Sorry for my english

[Jason Rodriguez]

Thanks Valdimir for the feedback . . . yes, Prospect HD/2K, etc. are phenominal products that keep getting better and better.

BTW, believe it or not, but the codec has had some tweaks made to it in the past couple months, at it looks even BETTER now in version 3.0!

Valdimir, you might want to try downloading the NEO 2K version of the codec and see if that runs on your system for 15-days.

[Jason Rodriguez]

Also everyone, I've added another two CineForm RAW clips to the gallery that you can download and play with. They are from Evan's "Boss of the Glory" production.

[Vladimir Pavlovski]

I'm downloading RAW files, and next week i will post my experiences
Cheers.

[David Newman]

For those without Premiere Pro, and/or those who don't want to experiment with rendering the footage, CineForm NEO Player is completely free. NEO Player will play RAW within MediaPlayer, it will open RAW within AE and PPro. The only tools missing are the RAW development controls, export and real-time playback in PPro. If you have PPro 2/3, getting the trial of Prospect 2K is the best real-time experience -- NEO Player is just an option for those not wanting to install trial software.

[Peter Ferling]

Some initial findings. Before I begin, I'm at home and do not have access to my external monitor -so I'm merely looking at the result within the composition monitor. I do work for corporate video, and not for block buster movies (which maybe an advantage). So I'll just give my humble opinion as it applies to my experience.

I've checked the keys of both the BloodMarch24_24_2007_15_03 against one of my HDSDI captures up'd to 444. They look and key identical. However, my green screen is much brighter and from initial appearance, much noisier than the RAW.

However, Keylight does a very job with default settings. I cannot see any difference between using replace method as source or as soft colour. Adding a difference matte doesn't show any, um, difference either.

When I apply an exposure effect after the key, and set preview to screen matte, I can see the noise levels in both mattes. Both 444 and RAW look the same. Coming from a photography standpoint, RAW is 444, correct? I've only seen this kind of editing when working on RAW images captured from an Canon EOS1 Ds, a camera that uses a 35mm sensor with RAW capture (a little exspensive at $7500 for the body -when it first came out). I have to remind myself that I'm not in photoshop in 16bit mode working on a RAW tiff, that this is video...

That said, am I correct to assume that the SI is essentially a RAW still camera, and thanks to Cineform and the waifan, it's capturing 24 fps? The only real difference is what kind of lens'/filters/lighting you put up in front of your rig? Has it finally come down to that?

[Jason Rodriguez]

CineForm RAW is very cool in that it decodes to 4:4:4 . . . so the data is stored in a RAW format, which is not an RGB image, nor does it have a color-space, but when we actually demosaic the bayer data, we create a full 444 RGB image.

So yes, essentially it's like working with frames from a Canon DSLR, only at 24fps, and you always have access to the RAW information because it's wrapped in a codec . . . if you had to go through a render application, that RAW information would get "baked" or permanently "developed", and there would be no way to get back to the RAW data controls.

If you want some more information on this whole workflow process, read the powerpoint presentation I gave at NAB this year in the Post Production World conference.

You can get the power-point here: http://www.siliconimaging.com/Digita...wWorkflows.ppt

That said, am I correct to assume that the SI is essentially a RAW still camera, and thanks to Cineform and the waifan, it's capturing 24 fps? The only real difference is what kind of lens'/filters/lighting you put up in front of your rig? Has it finally come down to that?

Yep :)