Vegas 8.0b and Cineform
 

I thought I would offer this thread as a potential warning to anyone who uses the internal Vegas version of Cineform.

Vegas 8.0b ships with the Cineform codec 2.8.7 build 148. If one intends to only render Cineform files from Vegas and use them inside Vegas, there is no need to do anything further. For those who'd like to be able to read Cineform files in other applications like Virtualdub, you need to download the free Neo Player from Cineform.

When this is done, and Neoplayer is installed, it installs a new codec version. Essentially a DLL. Until recently, there was a workaround that allowed you to go into the folder where Vegas 8.0 was installed, and rename the cfhd.dll file. When Vegas opened again, you'd see the new codec available, and you could render. And other applications on the system could open AVI files that were encoded with the Cineform codec from Vegas.

This week, Cineform upgraded their codec version to 3.5.9. While this codec still allows you to open Cineform encoded files, it breaks Vegas in such a way that the workaround no longer applies. To get Vegas to encode in Cineform again, you must Uninstall the Cineform update. I tried to work with Cineform on this but was told it's a problem with Vegas. Perhaps it is.

Luckily, I found a way around the problem. I still had the older 3.3.0 version of the codec (CFHD.DLL) on my other system. Installing the newest version of Cineform, and then replacing it's newest codec with the slightly older 3.3.0, worked perfectly. Vegas can now operate with that version, and so can my other applications.

I had hoped to purchase Cineform Neo HD in the coming months, but until this type of issue can be sorted out with Vegas, I cannot risk spending $600 and not being able to use the software.

I am still a fan of Cineform, and it works tremendously well for my workflow. I am just disappointed at it's integration with Vegas at the moment. Perhaps those of you who own the HDV or HD version of the product can give assurances that this problem only plagues those who have the freebie codec. I'd be quite relieved if that was the case.

Thanks for your time and attention.

The two most recent builds of Neo HDV work fine with Vegas Pro 8b. I'm not sure that the Neo Player Cineform codec ever allowed you to do anything but decode. If you tried using it from within Vegas to encode, it would give you an error message saying something like "Your license does not allow encoding." The internal Vegas Cineform codec (2.8) allowed you to encode and decode within Vegas, but not much else could use the V2.8 codec for even proper decoding.

My guess is that your "workaround" appeared to work, because you had both versions of CFHD.dll accessible on your computer. One was in a Vegas folder and the other was in c:\windows\system32. You were always encoding with version 2.8 and decoding outside of Vegas with 3.x

I could be wrong, but I really doubt that the codec that you installed with Cineform Neo Player would do any encoding, as why then would anyone buy Neo HDV if they could get a full version of the codec for free?

Thanks for the warning. I had tried four different installations of 8.0, 8.0b, a variety of Cineform versions, with and without renaming CFHD.DLL; in all the combinations I tried, Cineform always threw the license error. I deduced that Cineform was removed from Vegas 8, but I'm glad I was wrong.

Where can I download the older 3.0.0 version?

If you own a license you will have no problems. We will check if there is anything wrong with the free verison.

I asked the same question of support and got no answer. Send me your email address and I'll send it to you. It works.

-P

Jay,

When you select the Cineform codec to encode with inside Vegas, it tells you what version it's using. Both the 2.8.7 that ships with Vegas, and the 3.3.0 version that was downloadable, created usable files. I could open those Cineform files with virtualdub, Windows Media Player, etc. I did NOT get an error code encoding with them. And in fact David Newman of Cineform instructed me on how to get version 3.3.0 to work properly. His company, his product. I think if it wasn't supposed to work, he would have stated so.

The version that you get for free is NOT a full version. Even though you can encode with it, you get to select no parameters for the encode. When I downloaded the new version, 3.5.9, and tried to configure the codec inside Vegas for encoding, I suddenly had many options to choose from. Unfortunately, the license error popped up and no encoding could be done.

Now I realize you may think I am an idiot, but as a computer professional with more than 20 years in the field working with everything from PC's to Cray YMP's, I have a pretty good idea when dll's are working, and when they are not.