Cineform support for Vista?
 

I am in the process of changing my systems over to Vista. I REALLY LIKE THE NEW PRODUCT!!!

So, I am still trying to debug my Prospect scene detection issue. So, I just tried it with Vista in PPro2, and it did the same thing as XP did. But, when I went to try HDlink in Vista, it died saying failure with some graph edit type thing.

So, Vista support?


Guess I will have to go back to XP and regive it a try from my trouble ticket. :o(

Dave

David, any official plans on when Cineform products will be supported on Vista?

Dave

Not many asking so far, which is good for us as we have so many projects. We are not going to look at Vista patches until next year. It is like a camera driver issue, as nothing else should be effected. Stick with XP for now for your editing systems.

David, just wait until Feb 1st, you will get LOTs asking. I am using and would never go back to XP. (stuck for now with video though :o( )

The issue I found was HDlink fails.

Dave

Sorry, I'm with David's thinking on this one. I don't want to be a beta testor/early adopter until I have no choice. I'll ride XP a little while longer.

Peter, I have been updating OS as Beta testers for many many years. All I can offer is this is the first OS upgrade I have ever done this has worked perfectly! Between Vista and Office 2007, I cant believe how much more stable, flexible, etc this solution is. I have ALL of my s/w packages that worked on XP going perfectly on Vista except Cineform. :o(

I know I am telling everyone that I know to wait to buy a new computer until Feb 1st, and then get Vista with 2 gig min of memory. Once I show them Vista and a number of the new fixes (improvements) compared to XP, they get all excited about updating.

So, all I can offer is if you get a chance, give it a try. You will be very surprised how nice it is!!!!

(And I dont work for MS. :o) )

Dave

An argument I would make against using Vista for a video editing workstation is that Vista soaks up a lot more of the PC's resources for things that have no benefit whatsoever to video editing.

Video editing workstations need every ounce of power available to get the best results for playback, rendering, disk I/O, and so on. This is why video editors frequently disable Antivirus software (and other apps) while doing their work. That extra stuff going on (CPU cycles taken, disk access, etc.) impacts the video editor.

I would anticipate that Vista will increase the amount of background stuff going on, decreasing performance of the most demanding video editing applications.

Same thing was said when XP came out 5 years ago.
The computers I am using today are so powerful, that I have yet to see a blip on anything I am running. And, they will do nothing but get more powerful.

I just happen to be the kind of person who loves to be an early adopter. Allows me to learn so many new things. Like today, I just learned the difference between a single and dual link DVi-d cable. I now have full resolution on my 30 inch monitor. Cant wait to double them up with Premiere and see how it looks.

Dave

I have had the same concerns, but those who have actually used recent builds of Vista say otherwise. It supposedly has significant enhancements in the way it handles multimedia. I'm more cautious about major changes like OS on my "everyday machines" than my "clean" video editing box, which would be a lot easier to "roll back" if necessary. So if reports of great video performance under Vista continue, my new Quad Core editing box will be the first one of the half dozen or so PCs I own to get Vista as soon as it is available at retail. If Vista and Cineform turn out to be incompatible, even for a fairly brief time, it'll be a straightforward matter of deciding which gives my editing box more capability.

Pete, when I tested with RC2, I had a number of issues, and was real negative. But when RTM came out, I said what the heck, lets try again. I was amazed everything, other than cineform, I loaded has worked like a champ!!! I have now transistioned all of my computers to vista so there is no going back. (I am stuck on the editing machine with XP until ... :o( )

So when it can be purchased 2/1, I highly highly recommend it!!!

And, it is running on my dual quad cores just fine. :o)

Now, I would love to use vista X64, but I found too many issues with XP X64 that I wont make that mistake again for a while!!

Dave

That's not good news for me. I had hoped that I could make the full jump to 64-bit computing only (I use XP x64 a little bit but the driver issues are irritating plus the lack of programs and support) to take advantage of my computers 64-bit architecture with Vista x64 but if Cineform isn't going to support Vista in 32-bit, I guess I will be waiting a long time for x64.

As I pointed out earlier, the issue is likely camera drivers, i.e like the XP x64 driver issues you mention. HDLink connects to one key Windows component provides the Firewire connection for HDV cameras. This has likely changed a bit. It will be fixed, just not in 2006.

I've been running XP x64 since April 2006. The Firewire driver works great for capturing from video cameras. The Firewire also works well with my ADVC Digital to Analog converter (which I use for previewing video on a monitor). Cineform HD Link also works great on the x64 platform for capturing and converting (no problems at all with it).

I'm running Sony Vegas (a 32 bit application) on the x64 platform. All the codecs work just fine. Since codecs are not technically the same as a device driver, they run fine as 32-bit dlls loaded by 32-bit apps (like Sony Vegas, VirtualDub, Windows Media Player, whatever).

There are several users on the Sony forum that are also using XP x64 quite successfully, including with their DAWs, 3rd party effects packages, etc.).

Jay, if you know your apps, and they are supported on X64, they I would use it, since I found it faster, etc. But, I had some apps that will not work, so it just was not worth the hassle. Unless you have an app that needs more thatn 4 gig of memory, and you have more than 4 gig, there is no reason I know of to use x64.

Dave

Actually any app that uses 2GB+ of memory can benefit from XP x64. A default 32 bit app is limited to 2GB of address space (RAM + virtual memory), and the 32-bit OS steals some of this away for its own use (hardware drivers, system dlls, and so on). So in truth the 32 bit app gets to use something less than 2 GB of address space.

Most applications never consume anywhere close to 2 GB of address space and don't care. A few that can use that much (like PhotoShop CS) take advantage of a compiler option that gives them more address space, but it only works if the user does something special to his boot.ini file. PhotoShop CS does, however, get the full 32 address space (~4GB) when running on XP x64 because this OS doesn't rob address space from the application.

I had an HDV project in Sony Vegas with a whole bunch of stills, compositing, and other stuff that was getting an "out of memory" error during renders. I saw on the Task Manager that it was pushing the 2GB address space limit. I then installed XP x64 and Vegas on a different partition, and the render sailed through without any error.

This was probably a very unusual situation (most video projects never use that much memory). But since I'm already running XP x64 and it's working, I've no reason to go back. All my hardware works fine, except for a scanner that I connected to a different PC.

Also I have 4GB of RAM, which isn't possible on 32 bit XP (because the BIOS and motherboard HW soak up almost all of the upper GB of addresses, making them unavailable for the OS). But this too is unusual; there really isn't much of a reason to have 4GB of RAM on a PC. Just makes it faster when I'm running several different apps at the same time.