Cineform On the Big Screen
 

I recently edited an hour-long documentary entitled "Sons of War" using Adobe Premiere Pro and Cineform Prospect HD. The good news is that the doc is an official entry at the upcoming 2008 Sedona Film Festival this February. The doc was shot on location in Austria, Belgium and Germany. The acquisition format was HDV using a Sony HVRZ1U. But I on-lined and conformed the project in 1920x1080 with Prospect. After locking the cut, I exported to HDCam for presentation. After laying it off to tape, we reviewed it on a 50inch plasma screen and the images were impressive. Now, we're looking forward to seeing how it holds up on the big screen at the festival.

That sounds great. Congratulations.

Can you talk about your experiences and workflow for exporting your Premiere Pro project for HDCAM? How difficult was that?

I'm sure it will look great, CineForm has be of the big screen many many times. CineForm is even a projection format for a theater group in India (and they use huge screens, much bigger than in the US.)

Loss of Hair
 

My NLE is equipped with an AJA card with an HD-SDI "spigot".

Initial attempts to export to tape were frustrated by green flashes and the odd line crawling up the image. This was accompanied, on my part, by much phone calling/e-mailing/praying and hair pulling because anyone I asked had a different solution.

I had cut the entire project in Premiere Pro 1.5 and thought that there might be some fixes I was missing. I decided to upgrade to CS3 which, most importantly, allowed me to install all the latest Prospect HD builds.

I had rendered the 60 minute project into three 20 minute AVI's. Doing this is vital because it eases the work load on the processor when it's time to layoff to tape. And you don't want the computer having to work it's way through hundreds of cuts and transitions on the timeline--even if they are rendered. I then opened up a new CS3 project, imported the three "reels" and added bars, slate, etc. Since the show was targeted for broadcast and shot in the HDV version of 1080i, I retained the interlace settings. The cabling between the NLE and the Sony HDcam is simple as were the deck settings:

29.97
Interlace
05-Input (this means the video signal serves as the reference)

Surprisingly, Export to Tape did not work in our situation. I still don't know why. But we used the "crash record" method and hit "Record" on the deck then played the CS3 timeline. We used a big 50inch plasma screen for monitoring and playback. The images were beautiful.

We now have three handsome dubs of the project. Cineform Prospect is just the best, especially support guru Jake Seagraves.

Jim, don't worry - I've been doing large-screen HD video presentations using Cineform since 2005, and they look fantastic on large screen. Even in 1440x1080 Cineform Aspect resolution.

And yes, Cineform's Jake is a cool guy :)