Cineform feedback after Adobe CS4.1 Update
 

Still getting the ImporterProcessServer crash on longer encodes, but it crashed 2 hours into the encode instead of 1:40 into the encode (encoding a 1:30 video). Encoding a shorter video (about 6 minutes) took 30 minutes and completed successfully. Probably something between ImporterProcessServer and CFRenderProc chewing up memory and not releasing it that the 4.1 update increased the amount of available memory on which to chew, but that's just a guess.

The CFHD AVI exported audio is still completely messed up. So, 4.1 did not improve that, and looks like we'll need the (hopefully impending) fix from Cineform...

Thanks,
Matt

Cineform feedback after Adobe CS4.1 Update
 

Starting a new thread because I moved this thread that reported the Adobe 4.1 release to the Premiere forum. Moved Matt's post from that thread to this one because it was specific to Cineform (it appears as post #1 because posts appear in chronological order).

ImporterProcessServer
 

Well, for me at least, projects open much faster in PPCS4 and preview performance with CF files is about the same. Rendering does seem to be faster though I haven't tested a long render yet. But the ImporterProcessServer is unstable again, lots of crashes while editing:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: APPCRASH
Application Name: ImporterProcessServer.exe
Application Version: 0.0.0.0
Application Timestamp: 4a0e03b3
Fault Module Name: CFHD_AVI_Importer.prm
Fault Module Version: 1.3.0.15
Fault Module Timestamp: 4a14b75c
Exception Code: c0000005
Exception Offset: 00027b87
OS Version: 6.1.7100.2.0.0.256.1
Locale ID: 1033
Additional Information 1: 0a9e
Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789
Additional Information 3: 0a9e
Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789

Guess now that I'm an official customer, I should log a ticket! :-)

Glenn

Well I see no difference.. Actually playback in preview is more choppy..My guess is the major fix from Adobe wad to support the RED???

Well maybe now that the update is out CF will release the presets and the acclerator engine or what ever it is? I am back in CS3 recreating a project that cs4 ruined because of CF.

the messed up audio issue is supposed to be fixed with the new cf build that is going to be released today (i hope)

Guess I'll wait and try the update first.

New build today where was that posted?

support told me it was going to be released today..lots of fixes etc for the issues i have been facing. Iam just waiting for David to pop in with a thread to say it is up :)

Y'gotta keep an eye on the Cineform Web site. If the Davids are sane, they'll be out drinking beer by now. Build 212 has been uploaded, per the Cineform updates link. Unfortunately, I have a Windows 7 RC upgrade in progress, so it'll be a while before I can download & test.

ciao,
Matt

We're not sane.... :-)

I upgraded to CS 4.1 today. I just downloaded NeoHD 4.02.211 (at 5pm pacific time)
Playback is not consistant. It will play for a few seconds, then the image will pause for a second or two, then start playing again at point it should be, kida of like "catching up"

This is a single 1440 clip. This clip played fine on CS 4.01 and CS3 3.2.
I set my program monitor to "Draft" and I have 8gb ram, Vista 64.

And you will notice the CPU isn't doing anything when it pauses, sometimes CS4 (4.0 and 4.1) just stops asking for frames, we have requests into Adobe to explain (of a workaround) or fix it. CS4 is still far slower than it should be (although 4.1 helped a lot.) However, you should find 4.0.3 much better, you can download that now.

Just updated to NeoHD 4.03 (212) It does help playback.

A big THANK YOU to you and your guys for working so hard on this.

I wish Adobe would be willing to work with us, the customer, like you do.

Davids, everyone over there at Cineform, really big thanks for all the support. I really hope you guys get some time off to relax. It seems like you guys are always hard at work, even straight through the weekends. Anyways much appreciated for the dedicated effort.

Update to the stuttering playback issue.

I took the clip that was playing back poorly and and did two Cineform exports:
Export with I frames only, Export with I&P frames.

The I frame only plays back bad, while the I&P frame export plays very good.

Can someone else try this and see if they get the same results?

Hope this can help Cineform find the problem.

Build 212
 

The adobe update really stinks.. Now CF plays choppy I mean really choppy starts and stops starts stops, you cant even tell if it’s the clip or the application so you do not know until you burn your disc if something is wrong with a clip!!!

I am exporting a 18 min clip and its telling me its going to take 3 hours and 18min. I think that is an improvement?

Everyting from CF seems to be working I am trying the transitions now..

Oh it seems that Adobe told PPCS4 to use more memory I am see about 5% usage out of 8g when before it was 2.5 to 3. I am not seeing any higher CPU usage

Hello,

I installed the latest Adobe updates and the latest cineform build for Prospect Hd and now my PPCS3 files crash everytime I try to render them. :(((((((

Now I am going to open the PPCS3 project and try it in PPCS4. Maybe it will work better now. I wish the RT engine was available.

Simon

I've been having lots of crashes with PPCS4 and slow encoding, but I just found something interesting. A new project with old content imported is running much better!

I was trying to encode an HDV project to CF AVI but was getting VERY slow encoding. A 2.5 hour project was going to take an estimated 86+ hours (35x)! Even encoding it directly to MPEG2 took 50 hours (20x, and the quality was terrible!).

I tried a number of things before stumbling onto something. I created a new PPCS4 project with some of the same CF sources as the problem project, and on a whim I tried importing select timelines from the original. When I started encoding the first one to CF AVI, about 1 hour of HDV, I was shocked to see the estimate: under 10 hours! This is consistent with what David Newman said he was getting, about 10x.

So now I need to find out what's causing the original project to run SO slow so I can avoid this in the future. Maybe it's a cache issue?

Glenn

My test failed.

I opened up an old project from PPCS3 in PPCS4 and rendered it. No crashes which surprised me but the preview monitor screwed up the video. It was scaled all wrong. :(((

Back to CS3. I can't render but at least I can still edit until these problems get fixed soon.

Sighhhh!

Simon

One thing to check is to make sure you have the latest video card drivers for your video card. I noticed the same thing, but updated my video card drivers and everything smoothed out the way it had been.

Thanks,
Matt

212 and cs4.1
 

One more thing. When I export Cineform AVI files, they are being de-interlaced eventhough I am specifying Upper Field first.

Adobe must be an Adobe thing as there is no deinterlacer in our export code -- we just compress the frames we are given.

After Effects Crash rendering out CF AVI's
 

Hello,

I am in After Effects after the 4.1 update on my 64bit Vista business computer, when I render out Cineform AVI's from the latest build of Cineform

ProspectHDv403b212-090529

I get a crash here is the link to my screengrab of the Crash

http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/3467/cs4crashcf.jpg

That one doesn't look like a CineForm crash, ae.blitpipe is Adobe's.

Hint: Alt + Prt Scr grabs the active window, not the whole screen.

Hi David,

In the AE log it said Crash occured while invoking plugin Key Light 2.1.

Cant play Cineform video or Audio in a DV PAL Premeire Pro project
 

Hello,

I bring in a Cineform high quality AVI file 48khz 16bit stereo file 1280x720 25p into a DV PAL 48khz DV project in Premeire Pro 4.1 latest update.

The video does not play back properly stops, and the audio just repeats like 1 sec of audio again and again. No audio waveform for that file shows as well.

Submit bug reports to both CineForm and Adobe, while we will likely have to fix these issues, Adobe created this mess.

Still get ImporterProcessServer crash
 

Well, CS4 4.1 + CFHD 4.0.3-212, still getting the ImporterProcessServer crash on longer videos. I think anything that takes 2 hours or more to encode will crash, but I haven't tested that yet. Fixing to kick off another test and go to bed, so I'll post results.

Sure would be nice to actually be able to use CFHD AVIs....

Thanks,
Matt

Good catch Andy. I did the same thing with a 2.5 min 1080x1920 segment and the I&P render was much more "normal" looking than the I only render when previewed in Premiere. When played in WMP, even better. It was approaching what I used to get with CS3 and PHD3
A clue!!
Thanks

Long Cineform AVI export vs. custom MS AVI w/Cineform codec
 

Until I got CS4.1 and NeoHD 4.0.x, I was exporting from Adobe to the custom MS AVI before authoring to DVD and total export time was running around 150% of the actual length of the clips.

Now with NeoHD 4.0.x and CS4.1, I see a new (to me) export option which is Cineform AVI. A project that requires 90-100 minutes to export a 65 minute project now estimates to require almost 8 HOURS.

I haven't "invested" yet to see if there are noticeably better results, but it would be nice to know if that is about what should be expected for time (comparatively speaking) and more important is there a tangible (or visual) value-added by exporting to Cineform AVI from CS4.1? The first thing I noticed is that it doesn't default to the Cineform codec.

My machine is an I7/920 not overclocked with 6GB RAM, 10K boot/software drive and a pair of 7200RPM SATA drives project data on one, output to the other. Vista 64-bit

I have a 9-hour edited singing convention to release to the 30+ performers and if I need a week (72 hrs processing time - LOL) to just export, I'd like to be able to tell them it will be worth the wait!

Anyone with insights to share?
TIA.
Dave Nuttall
San Antonio, TX

Dave,

This thread has a lot of good info on your question: http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/cineform-...-encoding.html

Glenn

I-Frames vs. I+P Frames
 

Ok, I cut down a sequence to about 34 minutes, so that the export duration should be relatively short--two or three hours. I exported once with I&P frames, and once with I frames.

The I&P Frames export completed normally. There is, of course, no audio, so *that* still needs fixing.

The I Frames export failed. I didn't get an error, but AME stopped processing about 1:30 into the encode, and ImporterProcessServer was missing from the process list.

Is there any way to log the memory usage through the duration of the encode?

CFHD is still pretty much unusable with CS4, even after the build 212 and CS4 4.1 updates. Doesn't really do me much good if I can't export masters (with audio!!!).

Thanks,
Matt

EDIT: The audio only seems to be missing if my master track is 5.1. With a stereo master track, the audio is present. Frustrating...but if I could export an entire video, then I could probably work around that until it's fixed. Support ticket updated with new information...

Well, my experiment with importing my project into a new project is showing some success! For whatever reason, I can render the new one at about 10x, where the old one is about 35x! Strange, the new one is an import of the entire project. I tried opening the old one and clearing the cache but it didn't help.

In any case, I split the final timeline into two, and rendered the first half in CF, came out great! When I tried to kickoff the second half it rendered for a few minutes then I got the dreaded ImporterProcessServer hang (ticket logged).

I just restarted the second half, we'll see how it goes.

Also, to begin building the widescreen DVD version, I took the first half, which is 1440x1080, and resized it to 720x480 in HDLink. Looks great! Next I'll use AME to convert it to MPEG2.

Glenn

Getting audio here. Please submit a tickets to both companies.

David
I'm not clear about the new higher downscaling quality of HDLink.
The notion I have is that making a master CFHD and using HDLink to downscale to SD gives a higher quality SD master than if I were to downscale from the CFHD timeline using AME with the Cineform Compressor.
Is this correct- HDLink is better than CF/AME??
Thanks

We use the same scaling code in our importer within Premiere, however there are situations where PPro messes up, it is all about avoided these corner cases. Also HDLink is significantly faster.

premiere 4.1 and neoscene 130 updates-
since i updated both two days ago, my timelines went from 'yellow' to 'red', ive uninstalled both premiere and neoscene completely, even manually via registry, but just not able to get yellow back, and ive spent the weekend trying to resolve it (and submitted a trouble ticket to cineform i believe). i hope i can get this resolved, otherwise premiere 4.1 seems fine for me

another new issue, when exporting in premiere using the cineform AVI/MOV codecs, i get a 'gdi****.dll' error and crash back to premiere, but any other codec goes thru fine. if i load AME SA then yes, cineform codec works.

so importing and exporting with pp4.1 and cineform files is an issue i cant resolve it seems.

David,
I have a ticket already open with Cineform. I will not open a ticket with Adobe until Cineform confirms and provides actionable evidence that this is not a CFHD issue. I can export my videos with audio to my heart's content using any other codec. The problem only manifests when using Cineform's codec; therefore, Cineform gets first crack.

Thanks,
Matt

The reason I mention file tickets with Adobe is these issues are caused by their API changes, you won't hear of CS3 users having these problems. We need Adobe to stay on stop of their API support. We have many tech requests into Adobe, no harm it let them know why from users also.

Dave,
If it will help Cineform (or if the problem really is Adobe's) then I will fill out a ticket there, but I don't want to be a bouncing ball between two companies' support teams. I'd like to wait and see what you're tech finds in response to my updates on the relevant ticket, if that's OK. I just exported several H.264 clips from CFHD AVI source, where the sequences were mastered in 5.1, and the audio downconverted to stereo and exported without issue. It is only when exporting to CFHD AVI that I have any problems.

Thanks,
Matt