That's the cool feature about cineform, you're not locked into just one NLE application.

Now I have two options: 1) Cut and edit photo montages and stills in Vegas, and/or 2) use some form of proxies in PPro3 for edits, and like you're finding out, AFF or EDL the project to Vegas and render from there.

I also looked into SpeedEdit, however, it refused to run on my machine.

I really don't want to break camp and drop Premiere altogether. Adobe may eventually release a point update to fix this mess, but how long until that happens? I emagine they are hustling to get the entire suite out the door very soon, and most likely this is just one issue of many.

There are other problems/crashes being reported with Premeire that I haven't experienced. I believe that most folks need to ensure they configure their PCs to run more efficiently; including the use of large scratch disks, limit the amount of background applications. Shutdown or disable un-needed services. Use dedicated video drives, and not run them on a shared buss with the system drive. Perform file maintence and defrage their drives, and often.

When it comes time to render. Then do just that and not try to surf the web, or get a dedicated second pc for that. Premiere is a fussy kid and wants a large playpen and all the toys to itself.

So, in my opinion/experience, the only real serious issue is the handling of large stills. Everything else is just minor nuisance or wish list fodder.

Enough yakking. I've got some workarounds to look into and I'll post my findings tonight.

Proxies are working.

I'm a photographer, and I need to render out a simple slide-show of some 100 high-rez photographs. 4secs each with CF transition. Simple enough? Well, PPro3 can't handle that because of memory issue. What to do? We use proxies. "But on a 100 images? C'mon. No way!"

Fortunately Photoshop CS2 has some cool tools for creating batch proxies of stills. Lets assume that I've already sorted, edited and fixed my stills in PS, saving them as high-res jpegs. I'm now ready to import them into PPro3, (BTW PS CS2 raw image importer has batch processing).

Importing the 4064x2704 images into PPro would be murderously slow, and prone to crashing. PS CS2 a has neat tool called "image processor" (look under file-scripts-image processor). This tool will allow you select an entire folder of images and do repetitive chores such as resize, change compression ratio and save to a seperate folder. Just what we need for proxies.

PPro3 does have some automatic linking capability, but it complains if you change the name, location, or size of the image -but not the compression. Linking 100 files can be very tedius. However, what if we are linking/unlinking entire folders? Would that work? Sure it does!

So I place my hi-rez images into a folder named "hi-rez", and using PS' image processor, I select my hi-rez folder, set it to save the converted images to a new folder, "low-rez", reduce the jpeg quality to lowest or "1", and keep the original image, and click "start". Sit back and drink my coffee.

At this point I now have two folders of identical images, however, thanks to compression, the images in the low-rez folder are 10% of the memory footprint of the hi-rez, and PPro likes that.

Creating a CFHD 1080i project, I import (drag and drop) the low-rez folder into the bin. I then click on the folder and select automate to sequence, accepting the default for my slide show.

However, PPro is still a little laggy. No problem, in the track settings I select view clips as "frames only", and it's smooth like butter.

I then do any additional edits as needed. Once done. I then go back to the bin, right click the "low-rez" folder, and set it to "offline", (media files remain on disk option). I again right click on the "low-rez" folder, select "link media", and in the file browser I select my "hi-rez" folder, hitting the "select" button, the folder expands in the browser revealing the contents. I merely select the first image in the folder and press the "select" button again. Because I have not changed the image name or size, PPro3 will automatically relink all images in folder to whats in the bin.

At this point, if I were to attempt a render to CFHD, the application would crash with a memory error, or crash altogether. So I choose to save the project out as an AFF. Then close PPro3.

I then open up vegas 7, set the project template to 1920x1080i HD, and import the AFF file. Walla! The images import, and I proceed to render the timeline as a CFHD. Twenty-three minutes later I have my completed movie.

Some of you might ask why not just do this in Vegas to begin with? That's not the point. I wanted to do my edits in PPro as I'm used it. I also have many older PPro projects that simply need a small fix and re-render. Many projects only have a few images. All I need to do is create proxies for them, edit as usual, relink and hand off the rendering chore for vegas to do.

Finally, we don't need vegas, any application that recognizes AFF or EDL should be able do the job. "But Adobe needs to fix this!" you say. Fine. We all agree (including Adobe :). However, I need to get work done. This method will do it.

I'm getting some freaky stuff happening with Magic Bullet Colorista and PPRO CS3/Aspect HD v4 when white-balancing footage.

- previews are going a bit haywire (noisy video and sometimes rolling picture!), but not all the time - seems quite random.

Contacted Redgiant Software who helpfully said "CS3 isn't supported until it's released"... hmmm - I won't bother helping them in the future then!

Maybe a workaround is needed.

Anyone out there been using any colour-correcting tools in CS3?

I'm more concerned with white balancing footage that's slightly off (we shot 2 camera with a Sony Z1 and an FX1, and obv the whitebalancing we did on location wasn't that good).

...and yes, Peter, I am considering exporting an AAF and doing colour-correcting in Vegas ;)

That settles it! Capture with HDLink, CC and Render with Vegas! Somebody tell Adobe we've fixed their problems! (I'm sure they would be glad to get the head up! :)

CineForm and Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 / After Effects
 

Okay, no idea where the issue might be, but this group is great with ideas.
I am working on encoding my HD project into H.264.
I has not rebooted all by itself w/o being complete. One of the encodings
had been running for 24 hours. Any ideas?

This is a 50 minute video. It so far did it once after 24 hours when encoding the 50 minutes. I then started a 10 minute encoding, and it rebooted.

Thanks

Dave

24 hour render? Does it get stuck somewhere, sit and spin, overheat and shutdown? Need more info on this. What's your PC specs, project type and media?

Use care with Adobe color correction with Prospect!
 

Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but we really didn't know until we accidently output some corrections a bit ago. We discovered if you have 1920x1080p CF'ed material imported into PP3, you better NOT accidently use an Adobe color corrector (HLS in particular!) and then render and output back to CF 1920 again.

If you do, will suddenly discover that your beautiful CFed material is now all full of stairsteps and looks terrible, even though you used EXACTLY the same settings for the output.

Maybe most everyone already knew this, but we didn't until now...

LESSON FOR THE DAY: Use Prospect HD color correction unless you want to ruin your output.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: of how many other filters and corrections in CS3 is this true?

(Additional note: this "imported-into-PP3 material" was done in AE and rendered out with the newest CF HD codec at the 1920 HD) res.

This doesn't seem correct. All the Adobe filters under Color Correction should be full 32-bit float, and therefore don't introduce band like this.

I agree! It is the only one we have ever found that did that. It would be good to check it out further. I was able to reproduce it again.

It would be good if someone else also duplicated this behavior. The color filter is exactly the Adobe HLS one. We are running all the latest updates, including CF's. The CF filter for Prospect did not show that behavior and worked fine. All we were doing was taking the saturation down a little bit (15%) and used that filter. It was brought into PP3 as CFHD progressive, we applied the filter, then exported out again as a progressive 1920 CFHD.

If it's a bug, we need to know. Maybe a single color filter excaped Adobe's attention, or maybe somehow this one got installed over the top of the correct one?

That is highly unlikely, as this is a "clean install" CS3 and CF Prospect HD machine.

Mac PPro CS3 doesn't import Cineform?
 

Hi,

I was trying to import Cineform AVI files into PPro CS3 (I have only Cineform player installed yet) and got the following error: Unsupported compression in file.

The file in question plays well in QuickTime and imports into FCP 6.0 without any problems.

Did anyone experience similar problems?

You could try rewrapping the files to .mov? I'm not (yet) a Mac-type, so I don't know for sure, but it might be worth a shot to see if that helps.

Carl

I have had to rewrap my Cineform files to MOV to get them to work on PPro CS3 on Mac. I am not sure if there is a way to get the AVIs to work.

Aspect / Prospect / Premiere Color Management
 

I hope one of the Cineform people might be able to answer this one.

I have recently read that Premiere does not do color management (while AE does). What does this mean in terms of what one sees on the software monitor inside Premiere (or using full-screen overlay on a special purpose monitor) when editing and using Cineform color correction filters? What color space is being used and is there anything that can be done to make that color space useful (one would assume it already is otherwise why the filters).

My editing needs are simple, mostly just slicing and joining clips and mild color correction. For that I have felt I should not need to work with AE.

Andrew

If I remember right, you posted asking about an external monitor for use with Premiere, using a consumer LCD?

I don't believe PPro has it's own colorspace setup, however, Cineform uses the correct colorspace for the overlay.

You can specify to use the correct colorspace for your HD footage, and whether to use RGB or YUV for the overlay.

Carl

Hi Carl

Yes you're right I was asking questions about monitor options. That is encouraging what you say about overlay with Cineform, so does that mean Cineform is determining the color space in Premiere's timeline preview displays.

Andrew

That is my understanding, yes.

Thanks. I'll give it a try.

Premeire CS3 Cineform MPEG quality issue in encoder
 

I am having trouble matching the video quality of my MPEG files to the quality of the videos creating using Cineform AVI movie in Premiere CS3. Is there a problem with the Encoder output option and Cineform? What is the solution? The I lesser quality outputing Flash, WMV, or MPEGS in Encoder. I am guessing that all output using Encoder has quality issues for Cineform presets.

I have even tried importing the AVI file that was used to create the DVD back into Premiere and still got the same results.

The quality of the AVI video which was used to create the DVD was perfect.

Any help would be great..
thank you, richard

Work with support, www.cineform.com/support, as your post is not clear what you doing. Questions: "Encoder" and your talking about "Adobe Media Encoder", quality are you talking compression, motion, or interlacing artifacts? CineForm presets have no impact of the quality of the various output option in Premiere, the two aren't connected.

Sorry for the confusing email.

I guess my question would be what would cause a quality difference between Premiere->Adobe Media Encoder->MPEG DVD and producing a DVD by importing an AVI that was exported using Cineform AVI. Now the MPEG DVD encoding from Adobe Media Encoder was based on the same Cineform AVI video. I notice that the video is clear and crisp on the DVD (VOB files) compared to the MPEG DVD file generated by Media Encoder. For example, the line in the "A" letter would be harder to see. What would cause the difference? Is there a way to see the bitrate settings Adobe Encoder used?

Also, what is the best workflow when producing Flash files with Cineform? Squeeze?

I personally have found many reasons to hate Adobe Media Encoder.

The downres quality is sub-par. I use Nero to downres, and it comes out better than anything I managed in AME, and trust me, I've tried.

After Effects does a wonderful downres, with a sharpening effect applied, but it takes time. As I stated, Nero works for me. Others use VirtualDub or another free third party software. There are many threads here discussing the best ways to go from Cineform in Premiere to SD DVD. Use the search function to take a look at them. Adobe Media Encoder is, sadly, behind the curve in terms of accomplishing this, but there is free/cheap software that does an outstanding, beautiful job. Just use the Export->Movie function to export a Cineform AVI as your master copy, and produce your DVD from there. That seems the most popular workflow.

Carl

Any CF issues with the PP CS3 3.1.1 update?
 

David, are there any issues with CF (or fixes) you know of yet with the PP CS3 3.1.1 update?

Just wondering.

Heavy Distortion on Preview in PPro CS3
 

I imported footage into a Cineform project with PPro CS3 3.1.1. It captured fine, I could scroll and drag the slider through the footage fine, but when I wanted to play in the source window or from the timeline at normal speed, the image became heavily distorted with lines (it looked like an old broken tube TV) I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong and if there's a certain setting.

Also...I want to take full advantage of cineform, is there a basic guide or thread that exists that shows what the best setting to use for HDV (quality, etc...). Hard drive space is not a concern, whatever the best would be.

I'm running a Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz, 4 gigs ram, winxp pro 64bit, 7200rpm drives and I shoot with a Canon xha1 often at 24F

Thanks!

Jim

Hi Jim,

It may be trying to use a version of our codec that is incorrectly performing the half-res decode. Try re-installing your CineForm software.

Have you opened a support ticket?
If not, and re-installation doesn't work, please do so and include a screenshot of the error you're seeing, so we can track it down further.

As for settings, "High" quality is sufficient for HDV sources. It's definitely a case of diminishing returns with Film Scan 1 and Film Scan 2 when starting with an HDV source. Your user guide should provide you with the settings info to properly handle the 24F mode of the camera when capturing in HD Link and CineForm projects in Premiere.

Sounds like another "force YUV" prob. Did you happen to open an old project with "force YUV" turned off? That happens to us regularly, especially after bringing in an older project to use some of the elements from it.

As soon as I updated to CS3.1.1, PPro started locking up and crashing in the Cineform project I was in the middle of. I also got error messages regarding some problem with (I think this is right) "Photoshop Server.exe" refusing to close- both when loading the project, and when turning the system off.
For lack of anything better to do, I uninstalled Aspect HD (the latest version), rebooted and reinstalled it, and all seems well so far. We shall see.
I am a born sucker for updates, but it is not always a happy experience.

Working fine here, with AspectHD 5.1 projects.

Yeah, I know the feeling Robert! I'm one too...

Graham, I'm glad you've seen no glitches so far. I'm getting paranoid on updates, so good news is welcome!

Unfortunately, like Robert, I'm a sucker for them and can't wait to see if there are major issues. Thankfully, so far, so good for us.

Cineform/PPro 3.1.1 Freeze Ups
 

I am in the middle of an Aspect HD project and was having no problems until the PPro 3.1.1 upgrade. Now I am getting PPro freeze ups when rendering timeline previews (pan n' scan of stills, color corrected clips, even crossfades on titling). I will also get random freeze ups when attempting to play timeline previews.
After freezing up, it requires a system reboot to get PPro up and running again. It's at a point where the software is almost unusable to get any work done.
Maybe I'll have to just reinstall PPro 3.0. I don't see a way to roll back the 3.1.1 upgrade. Any other ideas would be appreciated and I would be interested to know if anyone else is having any problems with PP 3.1.1 + Aspect HD 5.2.1.
Thanks
Win XP Pro, Intel Quad, 4 Gig RAM, Quadro fx 1500 card with latest drivers,
Sys Drive: SATA, Media Drive: RAID 0, Export Drive: SATA

can anyone point me to a workflow thread on using after effects cs3 for downres? wanting to find anyone's workflow using cineform, cs3, and ae to get that perfect quality sd dvd :)

encore stinks on ice

It help to know if you trying one of the follow:

1) Downresing from 50i/60i to interlaced SD.
2) Downresing from 50i/60i to progressive SD.
3) Downresing from 24/25/30p to progressive SD.

Workflow is different for each.

60i to progressive sd-dvd. just want to know how to fit ae in this equation.

thanks

For that I think HDLink would be higher quality. Import you HD 60i AVI master, and select deinterlace and resize to NTSC 16x9, then convert.

Exsting Premiere Project into Cineform Project?
 

Hi folks,

1. Is it possible to convert an existing APP 2.0 Project into a Cineform Project maintaing TC Information and tape information?

AND 2.
If you have captured with HDVSplit and edited in APP 2.0 with a cineform roject - is it somehow possible to tell the single clips which tape and TC it was - to be able to recapture later?

Oh god - how simple was it with DV!

thx
Eric

Well for #1, you can create a new Cineform project, then import your non-cineform project file into it. Once imported just select the old timeline. Unless I'm misunderstanding what you are trying to accomplish.

I've never seen a way in Premiere of changing the propject template mid-project (so to speak). However, try this...

Start a new project with the template you want and import the original one into it. Never tried this myself and can't take credit for the idea. I simply remember reading it as a solution to this type of problem elsewhere once before. Hope it works.

I've done this many times, personally I wish adobe would just let you change project settings like they used to, but this is a suitable work around. I used it when conforming my movie from the DV proxies to 4k originals. Worked perfectly without a hitch.

John, can you expand on that just a bit? Sounds interesting! How do you edit with DV proxies at the size they are and then switch to 4K originals?

Maybe it's simpler than it sounds, but it could save us some worktime on the 1920 material we're doing. DV stuff is fast to edit, full HD is not...

Without turning this into a Premiere thread, you create a 4k project, import the DV edit, offline the clips, relink them to the 4k clips that have the exact same TC and frame count.

Only really works if you have separate audio tracks from the clips.

I did this when we created a Cineform 1920x1080 file that we use as our master for Blu Ray and HD-DVD which I'm currently stumbling through right now.

The Cineform copy of our movie looks awesome.

If you want to know more about it... www.postcardsfromthefuture.net

5.1 Surround with Prospect HD in Premiere CS3
 

How to do it?

How to manage the project and which export settings in CS3, XP SP2?

I have M-Audio FW 410 firewire audio interface, with 8 outputs, DVD authoring with Encore.

Thanks in advance!

(...perhaps its a quest for Premiere´s forum?)