Cineform footage showing up as Black in After Effects CS3
 

Hi there,

I'm running into some problems with my Aspect HD encoded footage.

When attempting to play back my Aspect HD captured footage in After Effects, all that is displaying is pure black. The video was edited in Premiere and imported by importing the Premiere project file and opening the timeline in AE.

I've tried both using and not using the 10 bit After Effects Importer that pops up when you first load AE.

The footage plays fine in Premiere, shows up with thumbnails and plays perfectly fine in Bridge, and plays perfectly fine in Windows media player.

Double clicking the footage from the "Project" asset list brings up the little After Effects player and the footage plays fine there (full res, no aspect-ratio-correction applied), but double clicking the footage's layer in the After Effects timeline will only give me black for the layer monitor...

I've looked around but have found no answers to the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.

First I've heard of this. CS3 doesn't use the importer that pops up (AE7.0 only), so just say no and never show again. If you have a clean AE project and import an AVI directly does it work? What do the properties say for the imported clips? There is a chance you are aren't running any CineForm importer.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I just went through and tried starting AE with choosing No to that import dialogue. Imported the footage and tried to make a new comp from it.

I also tried running the "Fix After Effects" and "Register Components" programs in the Tools folder of the Cineform start menu entry.

The comp was made but the footage is indeed still black.

Attached are screenshots with clip properties.

The "No compression" line tells me you are not using a CineForm importer, rather you are using a Video for Windows or Directshow engine -- not good for AE.

You should have im-CFHD_File_Import.prm in:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\CS3\MediaCore

if not you can copy the same component from:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS3\Plug-ins\en_US\CineForm

I saw this suggested as a solution to some other problems in another thread...

I do actually have the im-CFHD_File_Import.prm in \MediaCore\CineForm. For good measure, I also tried putting a copy of it just in \MediaCore\.

Still no luck.

I also tried specifying "CineForm AVI" as the filetype when importing. No luck with that either.

I also tried removing and reinstalling Aspect and just using the NEO Player... neither of those attempts seemed to do anything.

I will try removing any additional video codecs or applications which may cause a problem, but I don't think that will yield much result.

Did you have a standalone AE or CS3 Production Premium? I'm trying to think why AE is not loading plugins from mediacore. Might require a call to Adobe support.

Master collection. Purchased with an educational discount, not sure if that makes any difference in the version.

Eric,
For what it's worth, I just got AspectHD this weekend and noticed the popup when I started AE as you did. I captured some clips from a HV20 using HDLINK (for some reason the capture wouldn't work in Premiere) and was able to import the clips into AE without any problem, using the 8bit.

The only difference is I'm using Creative Suite 3. I'm using an AMD Phenom quadcore.

John Rich - Dayton, Ohio