CineForm support for Sony XDCAM EX

[Keith Rollinson]

Hi David,

Sorry if I missed the obvious elsewhere (I did poke around your Neo site) -- will Neo HD convert the 1920x1080 35Mb HQ files, either straigth out as .mp4s, or .mxfs as converted by the Sony browser -- into a flavor that PC Avids can ingest? You might know that Avid currently limits the EX-acceptable files to the lower, SP-quality files at 35Mbs. Thanks, and congrats on your products!

Keith

[David Newman]

Just confirmed a long export is working fine here. So please send a trouble tciket with details on your project. Submit at www.cineform.com/support. Thanks.

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Keith Rollinson

Hi David,

Sorry if I missed the obvious elsewhere (I did poke around your Neo site) -- will Neo HD convert the 1920x1080 35Mb HQ files, either straigth out as .mp4s, or .mxfs as converted by the Sony browser -- into a flavor that PC Avids can ingest? You might know that Avid currently limits the EX-acceptable files to the lower, SP-quality files at 35Mbs. Thanks, and congrats on your products!

Keith

Avids unfortunately have limited third codec support (by design I'm sure.) If you produce 1920x1080 CineForm MOVs, they will import into your AVID system, yet the Avid will then transcode those to DNxHD. So it will work, and the quality is fine, just slower than it would be if Avid supported playback of third party codecs.

[Keith Rollinson]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Avids unfortunately have limited third codec support (by design I'm sure.) If you produce 1920x1080 CineForm MOVs, they will import into your AVID system, yet the Avid will then transcode those to DNxHD. So it will work, and the quality is fine, just slower than it would be if Avid supported playback of third party codecs.

Thanks for the response, David. It sounds that, if one uses Neo to convert to your flavor of 1920x1080.movs, it should work. I'll download a trial tonight or tomorrow and try, as Avid is not saying when they will support the higher rez coming out the EX-1s, and no doubt there are others who would enjoy your solution in the interim.

Keith

[David Newman]

Thanks Keith, that is good to know.

[Travis Reese]

What HDLink quality setting should I be using when converting the .mp4's? High? Medium?

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Travis Reese

What HDLink quality setting should I be using when converting the .mp4's? High? Medium?

What are your production needs. For 35Mb/s sources, High is fine, although some like Filmscan 1. Medium is not commonly used.

[Mooho Bae]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Hmm, there have been no code changes for export. We don't test NEO with Premiere as Aspect/Prospect is designed for that product. Can you tell be anything about the point in the timeline where it fails so we can try and repeat it here?

David, it was about 1 minuit and 20 second. I delete a clip at 1:20, and exported again, but still the image freezed at 1:20, where another clip is.

The project editing mode is 'adobe HD-SDI 1080P 24'.

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Mooho Bae

David, it was about 1 minuit and 20 second. I delete a clip at 1:20, and exported again, but still the image freezed at 1:20, where another clip is.

The project editing mode is 'adobe HD-SDI 1080P 24'.

Try Prospect HD, using CineForm preset, as it works fine here.

[Mooho Bae]

Originally Posted by David Newman

Try Prospect HD, using CineForm preset, as it works fine here.

I just chaged video seting in exporting from "Microsoft AVI" to "Cineform HD Export", and it worked fine. The exported file size is reduced to about half. Thanks.

[David Newman]

Originally Posted by Mooho Bae

I just chaged video seting in exporting from "Microsoft AVI" to "Cineform HD Export", and it worked fine. The exported file size is reduced to about half. Thanks.

There is always some piece of information I forget to ask. CineForm HD Export is using our tools, when the other method is not. Our export is faster, higher quality, and more stable it seems. Glad things are now working out.

[Travis Reese]

I've never used Cineform before but I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong here. I'm using the defaults for HDLink except for setting the quality to high. When I process the .mp4 files from the EX1 the resultant .avi files from HDLink are much larger than the original .mp4's. For example, 198MB to 688MB, 635MB to 1.8GB, 158MB to 703MB. Am I doing something wrong here? I thought it was supposed to produce smaller files. I also notice that I get a little static throughout the audio on the resultant .avi files. I don't hear that static when I play the raw .mp4 files. Any clues?

[Steven Thomas]

Travis, the files will be larger.

Cineform is essentially an intermediate codec that is intraframe wavelet-based compression (not DCT compression) that is 6:1 to 10:1 smaller than their uncompressed YUV equivalent.

[David Newman]

The idea is we are signifantly smaller than uncompressed, while maintaining the advantages of uncompressed. Audio issues are of interest, can you please upload a sample MP4 file that does has audio problems?

[James Huenergardt]

My camera won't be here until next Friday or so.

I'm wondering how long it's taking to convert the .mp4 clips to Cineform using HDLink?

Can't wait to try this stuff out!

Looking forward to the Cineform SDI recording device.