Ken, I promise not to mention VIA :)

Overlay quality: I do not know what the tech specs say (and from your quote the reply on Matrox forum was not so sure anyway) but hee's what I *actually* see:

Start AE (Parhelia's driver for it installed beforehand, of course).

Open a project. (My Workspace is already configured/memorized so Preview Window is showing in the Second monitor, which is a HD monitor connected to Parhelia's DVI output).

What I see first is a somewhat soft image on my HD monitor.

At the same time, there's a small Matrox button hovering on my First monitor with label "View Desktop".

I click on that button; AE driver now disappears, and what I see on the Second monitor now is the same image as before, but super-sharp, in AE's preview window.

Because all I did was disabling Parhelia's special AE driver, the monitor, its DVI input, and the image itself being all the same, I can assure you that driver-produced image is visibly softer.

I have read somewhere that video overlay is actually limited to NTSC resolution, and so far my own experience seems to confirm that.

Compare for yourself, and see the difference.

Steve, this NOTE is for you: Do NOT assume that Parhelia's AE driver (see above) even uses video overlay as other software does.

You see, I unchecked "Use Video Overlay" box in Parhelia as I was dissatisfied with its quality after uprading to HD monitor.

Consequently, my Second monitor stopped showing "features" - which is anything that produced by any overlay-using program.

But! It still does show AE's output generated by that special Parhelia driver!

I thought you should know about this, because you seem to be really interested in the overlay thing, and this is an important development that probably suggests that AE driver doesn't even use traditional overlay feature, but communicates with the card some other way (??). OR, that unchecking "Overlay" box in Parhelia does not prevent its own AE overlay driver from working still.

It's rather crazy, I know.

Bottom line is that I stopped using overlay features altogether after upgrading to HD monitor, as overlay quality is visibly inferior to the same video playing in the application's window.

<<<-- Originally posted by Kevin Sturges : How does Vegas Video work with HD? Is the display realtime? -->>>

Because Vegas is software-only, it depends entirely on your pc's performance capabilities. Not just cpu speed, but bus speed, memory and graphics card performance. On my 3 Ghz Pentium 4 with 800 Mhz frontside bus, 1 Gig of memory, and nVidia Geforce4 graphics card, I am able to work with JVC m2t files without dropping frames during playback. Timeline performance is also smooth, with no stuttering while scrubbing, etc.

<<<-- Originally posted by Bob England :Because Vegas is software-only, it depends entirely on your pc's performance capabilities. Not just cpu speed, but bus speed, memory and graphics card performance. On my 3 Ghz Pentium 4 with 800 Mhz frontside bus, 1 Gig of memory, and nVidia Geforce4 graphics card, I am able to work with JVC m2t files without dropping frames during playback. Timeline performance is also smooth, with no stuttering while scrubbing, etc. -->>>

I second you opinion on Vega, I am very happy with the results. My PC is very similar to your. I just added a Matrox Parhelia video card and did not see much performance improvement over the ATI 9600 but the PQ is slightly improved. I am considering a dual Xeon 3.06 just to see if my multiple track performance improves. I think Vega is very underrated for HD editing clips from this camera. I have had other say they had to jump though hoops to edit in Vegas but I just don’t see being that big of a problem.

Mike

I too had no problem playing HDV with Vega.

But, I did not find it Vegas able to play transitions without stuttering with a 2.8GHz.

How does your machine handle FX?

alpha channel and HDV< Cineform Aspect
 

does the alpha channel info get saved with HDV and does Aspect handle this as well?

and would Aspect/Premiere be adequate for color correction?

thanks.

Re: alpha channel and HDV< Cineform Aspect
 

<<<-- Originally posted by Josef Crow : does the alpha channel info get saved with HDV and does Aspect handle this as well?

and would Aspect/Premiere be adequate for color correction?

thanks. -->>>

There is no alpha information in HDV, just there isn't in any camera source. All alpha mixing is handled either by the CineForm pipeline (for real-time operations) or by Premiere's rendered filters. However, CFHD doesn't store alpha information on export (it is a three channel compressor not four) -- key channels need to be stored separately if you intend to do that type on downstream compositing work.

Aspect HD has two real-time color correctors. One is a linear channel corrector (brightness, contrast, saturation and RGB levels) and the other a three point gamma corrector (shadows, midtones, highlights.) These two can be used together for an excellent range of color control. You can also use the Premiere color corrector for additional flexibility -- but that one will need rendering.

AspectHD demo version?
 

Is there one available. It would answer a lot of questions.

Aspect demo
 

I too am interested in a demo version of Aspect HD. I am probably going to buy Aspect for Premiere Pro, but I would like to "try before I buy".

Also, one more question for David Newman:

You mentioned a color corrector that has gamma control. How well do these compensate for the JVC HD camera's highlight/shadow shortcomings?

-Chris Gordon

A downloadable demo version may happen in the future but I don't know when. Currently there is a demo version on Darren Kelly HDV training DVD.

Gamma style color correction is exactly what you need to tweek highlight and shadow characters.

AspectHD vs DecklinkHD
 

We are planning to shoot a low budget feature soon. We are planning to shoot using HDV. Right now we are thinking ahead about post and wondering if we would be better off using AspectHD ($1200) for editing or converting all of the MPEG2 files to Blackmagic Codec and using the Decklink HD ($1900) on Final Cut Pro? We are mostly concerned about performance.

We are comfortable using either FCP or Premiere Pro. All of our compositing and color corection (color finesse) will be done in After Effects, so we like being able to open Premiere Pro projects nativly.

Will we see better performance from using the Decklink HD hardware or AspectHD software. We will mostly just be doing cuts and disolves.

I hoped someone other than myself would chime in on this one. Here is how I see the difference:

Aspect HD is designed for preformance editing of HDV 720p30 (and soon many more HDV resolutions as a free upgrade.) Decklink HD is more an HD-SDI I/O card than an accelerator, mostly used for transporting uncompressed HD video to and from the computer. If you intend to shoot with HD-SDI equipment then using HD-SDI will give you the best quality, but you performance will be limited to your drive speed. As you are shooting with HDV, you will not be using the Decklink card for input (there are no quality advantages in using an expensive extenal YPrPB to HD-SDI convertor.) Useless you are thinking about future projects, the Decklink card will not be helping you here. It is never good to purchase something that you might needed in the future, as technology changes too rapidly for anyone to make wise advanced purchases. Aspect HD will serve you well, today.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm.

And, for the record for all you Mac nutcases out there like me, the guys and gals at AJA say their Kona HD card is tops for bringing in HDV to edit. But I think you need something else. Do a search here on the site for KONA HD and HDV and I think you'll find something written by Darren Kelly, who uses it.

heath

David,

Wouldn't you say that there is a process advantage to using the Decklink HD card to capture HDV via an extenal YPrPB to HD-SDI convertor.

Simply because the footage is ready for capture and does not have to be demultiplexed and reprocessed into a codec.

Also, my understanding of the Decklink HD card is that it will allow for realtime uncompressed editing of HD in the timeline, at least on the G5.

Finally, the card also allows for capture of other HD material (other than HDV) which is definitely a plus for a post production professional trying to capture (no pund intended) as much business as he/she can.

Frederic,

No, I wouldn't say there is any advantage is going out analog and converting to HD-SDI, then capturing uncompressed. First there is the unnecessary cost, then there is the slight reduction in quality (particular for 8bit sampling), and finially the large waste of disk space. The disk space is twice as bad as uncompressed normally is as you are now capturing 60p. All this assumes you can do it to. Users have been struggling with the 29.97p to 60p vs 59.94p issues.

As Aspect HD can demultiplex and encode into an AVI effectively in real-time -- it can't get much simplier.

You are correct that the Decklink card could allow real-time, however just two uncompressed 720p60 streams (i.e. a dissolve) will require a sustained disk performance 221MBytes per second. Technically this is possible but very expensive, and I have never seen it work. So with Aspect HD you can typically do four streams of the JVC footage off two SATA or IDE 7200rpm drives, which will only set you back $200.

I absolutely agree that HD-SDI does allow you to capture other materials, but this user asked about an HDV project. HD-SDI is a bad fit for today's HDV projects. If his next project requires HD-SDI, I'm sure the cost of HD-SDI and the disks required will be greatly lower than they are today.

David,

You make some good arguments.

Aspect HD Question
 

How do you monitor your editing with realtime preview with Premiere Pro and Aspect Hd combination on a NTSC broadcast monitor ?
Gabor

You will need a dual head video card that can take the video overlay channel and output that to a second display. Most of the recent ATI cards do this (9800 series I believe), along with the Maxtrox P750 and Parhelia video cards which promote this function.

If you need to ask whether a particular card has this function, ask whether MediaPlayer output can be seen on desktop, and have just the video signal go out the TV (s-video) port. The function needs a name, yet it is becoming common.

We just purchased a Matrox P750 to edit our HD10 footage with AspectHD. To my surprise the P750 does NOT offer RT video preview. The Matrox web pages were very decieving. Under the Matrox Parhelia and P series drivers page, the WYSIWYG plug-ins do not all work with the P series cards. Even though this is explained only in the read-me file of the plug-in. Something you would only check once you own the card and install the drivers. Customer support gave me a huge run around, then said they were going to refer my complaint to a higher athority. That never happened. After a further email was sent asking for a reply I got this responce.

"Hi Ken,

They made their web pages abit more clearer but that's about all that will happen.

Mike"

I had a feeling that would be the responce. I have the old pages saved and plan to bundle them with my emails and send them to any and all Video Editing, and Hardware Review sites.
The Matrox site has many of the same complaint on its tech support forums. Matox has been unwilling to budge and offer any of its unhappy customers an upgrade option. Pathetic!

The P750 will work with Premiere 6.5. But not After Effects and Premiere Pro. Something about them not using overlay. Tech support says they have no plans to release P750 WYSIWYG drivers.

I had this card recommended to me by half a dozen video "experts" specifically for editing Premiere Pro and After Effects. I guess I wasn't the only one who was tricked by Matrox.
Ken

Technically that is all correct, EXCEPT, Aspect HD has the necessary code that make a wider range of cards work with Premiere Pro, including the P750. Matrox should know this by now, but as CineForm is a competitor I guess they didn't want to put us on their site :)

It will only work in the Aspect HD editing mode, and the card is annoying to set up. Follow the Matorx instructions for making media player work to an external monitor. You may also contact support@cineform.com if Matrox is no help.

That is good news. I have our PC with the P750 up and running, getting the software installed, but our cam and AspectHD package will be arriving soon so I haven't been able to try it out yet. (can't wait!)
This is yet another solid reason to use AspectHD.
Ken

Aspect Hd Demo
 

I hope somebody can help me.I downloaded the Aspect HD demo simply because I just wanted to try it before I purchase the software.However when I was trying to install it I got an error message that the MSI installer cannot be accesed .I get in touch with support at cineform and they told me that something wrong with my xp msi installer.However I installed lately at least 5 other softwares and none of them has a problem.I tried the installer on another machine with the same message!!!
I dont know what to do and I really want to purchase this software but I need to make it work before I pay $1199 for a package like this...
I have the latest updated for windows xp !!
Anybody can help???

Gabor,

This is the exact error which you reported to me:

"The Windows Installer Service cannot be accessed. This can occur if you are running Windows in safe mode, or if the windows installer is not correctly installed. Contact your support personnel for assistance."

This error occurs when there is a problem with the Windows Installer Service or if the Service is missing. It can be a corruption of the Windows Installer, or a registry problem causing the windows installer service to fail. This may not be apparent when installing other software, if the other software does not use a windows installer. There are many different companies that use other types of installers. However, when this error occurs, it will occur with any installer that uses the Windows Installer Service.

My recommendation to you is this:

Search the web using the first sentence of the error message. You will find many recommendations for fixing that error, all of which are fixes for the windows installer service. Below I have pasted links to a few articles. Follow the advice in these articles at your own risk. Many of the articles involve registry changes and fixes, and CineForm is not responsible for problems that may be caused by following these instructions:

To check to be sure you have this component of windows enabled, look at this link:

http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/...error/1719.htm


If your installer service is enabled as in the article above, here is a registry hack for reregistering the service. USE THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK!

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=315353

Hope this helps you.

Thad H.
CineForm Support

Thanks
 

Thad,
thank you SOOOO much...one of these registry hacks did work.I tried it last night and one of them worked so it is all ok now..I will play with it today and I will order the full version !
Thanks again
Gabor

Aspect HD experience
 

Well, I loaded up my aspect HD plug in I just got into my Ppro 1.5.
I borrowed a JVC HDV camera and used capture HD to pull in an hour of video. Am using a dual 3.6 Ghz, MT, with 4 gig of DDR 3200 and SCSI drives. It basically brought the video in real time.

I edited a clip in Premiere. Outputed to M2t and exported back to the camera. Everything worked like a champ, and VERY easy to do.

So, couple of questions.

Looks like there is a limit to 30 minutes. Any idea when this will be fixed.

Looks like you have to play games with sending the export as a mpeg extension, and then rename to m2t. I assume this will be fixed somewhere?

I did not get a chance to try the transistions yet.

How about the encoder options. The default is a medium file size.
What about using Large file size. What impacts would this have?
If one is doing HD, why would one not want to edit in maximum quality?

What was neat, in my opinion, is the ability to take my HDV project, and dump it to standard DVD video for family. But, what options are people using to send out HD material? Can it be burned to a DVD and played on any players? I am going to try and get a DVHS deck which would work for me, but, very few folks have.

Man, these are exciting times!! Just need to get my hand on the sony HDV with XLR inputs.

Dave

There isn't any longer a 30 minute limitation. There used to be a output length limitation that was fixed nearly a year ago. This is now a fairly established product with a lot of customers add up to hundreds of thousands of hours in operation.

We set the default encode quality to medium as that holds more quality that you can capture with an HDV camera. We added the even higher quality setting as some people love overkill. :) Basically you will not see any visible difference between medium and large (high) quality modes.

Thanks.

Now, I thought I read about the 30 minute limit on your web site
yesterday. If this limit is gone, maybe that info should be removed so others will not ask my dumb question.

Dave

My mistake
 

Dave,

I turns out that article you read is a little old. There are two, essentially on the same subject, but one is on Premiere 6.5 and one is on Premiere Pro.

Basically there were exporting problems with Premiere that were fixed with the Premiere Pro 1.5 release. Since you have Premiere Pro 1.5, and all the latest Aspect components, this will not be a limitation for you.

I apologize for the confusion, and I'll be updating our article today.

Thad H.
CineForm Support

aspectHD and transistion question
 

Did a little more playing last night.

So I took two HDV clips and slapped them on the timeline.
I then took an aspect HD transistion and placed it at the splice.
When I played the timeline, the A clip of the transistion worked great with the a/b showing. But as soon as it hit the B clip, the A material got replaced with the B stream so I had a B/B.
Now, to make matters more strange, if I placed the marker at any point on the B clip transistion points manually, it showed the transistion correctly with the a/b material. As soon as I hit play, the A material again got replaced wth the B stream so it was b/b again. So, am I doing something wrong?

Thanks

Dave

Yes. :) But I have no idea what. You should use our tech support for help on this matter. Thad Huston will be able to help you.

Will do once your web site is back up.

Dave

Seems to be up from here.

Yep, its back now.

It looks like I did not "trim" my clips for the transistion.
I just asked on my ticket exactly how to trim in Ppro so
I know before I try what I think works, does work.

Thanks

Dave

Aspect Hd tryout, can i try?
 

Hello ! (this is for david newman especially)

Ive downloaded from the site Aspect Hd, the first version ever, but that time i didnt have any CAMCORDER to work with, i was just checking out how was the software interface.

by now, i got a JVC HD10U, but when i was check out the program, i couldnt open it, for sure, cause have been a long time since the trial version expired.

so, ive downloaded again the new aspect hd version from the cineform site and when i tried to install, i couldnt go futher cause.

the install its only possible one time for a computer. and this is right, and it is a trial program. anyway, i can't test it even with the vegas 5.

david newman maybe can help me? i really want to check how aspect hd work as a realtime product, etc. etc...

thanks

ciao

Once the trial version expires, re-installing will not re-activate it (for good reasons.) Send an email to support@cineform.com to see if something can be done.

Aspect HD v2.5 not installing
 

And techsupport@cineform.com is not working either.
Today I downloaded the beta trial version of Connect HD v2.5. When I try to install the program I get an error, "error locating Premiere Plug Ins path. Checking default path" and then click "OK". Then I get a new error, "error 1720". Premiere 1.5 is loaded in the proper path ( C/Program Files/Adobe/etc.). I have a P4 3.2/800, 2GB RAM, Matrox Millennium P-750, Hard Drives ( 2-10,000 RPM SATA System and Storage plus two video RAID's), basically a very fast computer that runs perfect. Running XP Pro/SP2, Adobe Video Collection Professional v2.5, firewall off, no anti virus, really no non-editing applications. Need help to get this to install. SP2 was the last upgrade, do I need to reload Premiere? I'm looking forward to using your program with my Sony FX-1. Thanks for your help.

The support email is support@cineform.com, not the one you tried. The support staff will get back to you quickly, so send off another email. Sorry, I don't have the answer myself.

I'm having the same problem.
 

I tried installing the Aspect HD v2.5 trial on my P4 Windows XP 3.0GHz machine and I get the "error locating Premiere Plug-ins path" message as well. I'm using Premiere Pro as well.

I download Aspect HD v2.5 and installed it on my home PC without problems. However there was a Windows warning (new to SP2) that I had to give the script permission to search (finding the Premiere installion.) Did either of you get that? When I gave permission it installed fine.

I did not get a windows warning to give any permissions. Just the two error windows that I mentioned. On the cineform web site, there is a link to report bugs, and that gives you the techsupport@cineform.com mailto. I was just following the links, and my message was bounced. I did successfully send a message to support@cineform.com this morning, but have not received a reply yet. Thanks for helping.

Connect HD Install Problem
 

Daniel

Uninstall Premiere Pro, then reinstall it. Then reinstall ConnectHD. The error you're getting is because a Premiere registry entry is either missing, or corrupt. That registry entry is what we use to figure out where our plugins should be installed.

Let me know if you still have troubles.

Thad H.
CineForm Support