cineform and mercalli

[Gary Greenwald]

now that mercalli has a stand-alone and a plugin for shake, i was wondering the following-

i convert my canon 5dmkII .mov files with hdlink, so they are now .avi's with cineforms codec.

if i want to run the mercalli standalone, before beginning to edit in premiere (i know theres a mercalli plugin but i wanted to try doing it pre-premiere), can i do the basic firstlight work on the .avi and then bring it into mercalli standalone, save the finished non-shake video as an .avi using cineforms same codec? i see in mercallis export an option for 4 types of cineform codecs possible, but didnt know if one of these would be a perfect cineform codec again to then continue doing firstlight touchups and working in it with premiere.

thanks if anyone knows, or does it; if i can keep the cineform codec intact if i edit and export with mercalli...

[David Newman]

Try it yourself so you can tell us all.

[Gary Greenwald]

hello, i had tried but got varied results so i thought id see if there was a right way instead of listing all my wrongs.
what i use - neoHD, premiere CS4, mercalli 2.0, xp32

basically, when i load an .avi clip ive already prepped in FL into mercalli, it shows th imported video as using a play format of 'cineform hd encoder 2' and i am able to work with it perfectly in mercalli.

when i am done i move over to EXPORT - AVI in mercalli, and i am given 4 options related to cineform-
cineform hd encoder
cineform hd encoder 2
cineform raw encoder
cineform hd codec 7.0.3

- if i try to export in the format that it imported as, cineform hd encoder 2, then the output filesize is 1.5x bigger than original, and i no longer can work with it in firstlight, also, there is a magenta X crossing the entire videos vertical when playing in WMP and it crashes once it reaches the halfway point of a video.

- if i try to export in cineform hd encoder (non v2), then i get the exact same results, except the filesize is just a couple hundred bytes smaller in a 1.5gb 4 minute file.

- if i try to export as cineform hd codec 7.0.3, then i get the same results as above, but a filesize 'almost' the same as original (though still crashing at halfway into play and magenta X.

- if i try to export with cineform raw encoder, i get a full program crash with some type of .ax error in a dialog i cannot quite see.

so it seems none of the choices work for exporting in cineform for me, and i did not know if there is a right way, and it is just an error with my own setup. thanks, gg

[David Newman]

Please report those bug to Mercalli as the only component that shouldn't work is the "Raw Encoder", which only direct cameras source as support. The others are all standard VFW or DirectShow encoders, they work in a large number of tools.

File size is not significant as you can control the quality of all these codecs. The X (or do you mean '+') could be a watermark for some licensing failure.