cineform

[Bluesproggit]

Ok, their blurb on their website is confusing me (plus I havent had enough sleep recently to get my brain in gear). Can anyone explain to me the benefits of purchasing cineform products for wedding video editing?

My current workflow is to capture from my sony fx1 to PP CS3 via firewire to HDV. I edit the footage (using MB software for grading) and export to SD via debug frameserver and tmpgenc. If I have a request for blu-ray, i export from adobe media encoder.

This has always worked for me before, but have always wondered what cineform was and what magic it utilises.

Any answers will be very much appreciated.

[RatVega]

I haven't used Cineform, but by all appearences, it's just another codec. And I don't mean that in a negative way; there are several new codecs out there to deal with things like HDV. Apple has their ProRes series and AVID has DNxHD. Both are "lossless" codecs that provide better image quality in smaller file sizes.

As handy as HDV is, it is very heavily compressed (around 35-to-1) in order to get it on 25mbps tape. For this reason it is prone to certain artifacts and can be very different to grade in workflows that require greater than 8-bit output.

Don't be confused about the "smaller filesize" term; it's as compared to uncompressed which was the old solution. I did a film in uncompressed 720P/24 and it was 240GB/hour...

If you're happy with your current results, there's no real argument to change anything. OTOH, if you think your footage looks like pooh compared to other producers like yourself, this is the area you can attack.

[Bluesproggit]

It does appear to be a high cost to achieve good results. I'll have a go at the trial version this weekend and see if the results will justify the £££

[RatVega]

My frank opinion is that if you're "in the zone" with your exposure and not experiencing issues with color correction/effects, then there's probably no justification.

The uncompressed work I did was for an indy producer who shot a lot of underexposed HDV (horror flick) and wanted to take it out to film for release. This is a classic scenario for uncompressed, where they have a couple of strikes before you come to bat. The footage (as HDV) was marginal for DVD (8-bit) and they were talking film (nominally 32-bit float.)

I'm no Adobe PP fan, but I'd be foolish to think or suggest that they don't have adequate tools to take decent HDV through to a polished DVD product. My problem with PP is probably the demo crew that Adobe sends down to LAFCPUG annually to amaze us with features in PP that we've had in Final Cut for several years... They simply don't understand who they're talking to. A lot of good stuff has been cut on that software, just not in Hollywood...

[Bill Grant]

Weird,
I'm just updating my version of Cineform Neoscene for Windows7. I use it to convert 5D footage over and edit in Vegas. That's it. If you're workflow owrks, then work it!
Bill