Not "When" for CS4, but "If"
 

Should we be considering the possibility of no RT Engine for CS4?

Are there Prospect HD users with CS3 and Windows 7 64-bit? When I attempted to migrate via that path, there were compatibility issues. Curious if those have been ironed out.

CS4 has been an abject bust for my workflow and there is no sane alternative to rolling back to something that works. To be honest, the RT Engine is not going address most of my grief with CS4 anyways.

This is in no way intended to be critical of Cineform. Unlike me, Cineform doesn't have much of an option to ignore CS4...... Unless of course, you finally take my sage advice and get going on development of that Cineform NLE!

It would be great if Adobe would just pass the encoding to Cineform.

One question I do have for David and the team is there any plans to use graphic cards for the encoding rendering? ie Nvidia Cuda?

Marty,

As we have found the CS4 API to filled with booby traps (or at least lot of pot holes) we sometime ago we decided that the RT pipeline needed to a new archetecture, and that the RT pipeline that moved from Pro 1.0 through 3.2, wouldn't survive the jump to CS4.1. It will be better than the CS3 RT engine, easier to add new output devices, and hopefully fix a few things people didn't like in CS3 RT engine, but all these changes take longer.

David,
GPU acceleration has no value for what we do at the moment, it slows us down.

David.... I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone on this board that doesn't appreciate your position. It's a shotgun marriage with you and Adobe.

It's difficult for producers because often, in particular these past 6-12 months, staying still is not an option. Products are phased out, compatibility with legacy products and operating systems are a fragile mix.... and before we know it, we're knee deep in a system that is drastically and negatively impacting our livelihood.

The CS4 debacle is profoundly worse than any other example that I can think of in the last 15 years. What has fallen on Cineform's shoulders is the hope that with your products, we can make CS4 usable in spite of itself.

So if I interpret your comments correctly.... there is something in the works, but it's going to take a while? I hate to even pose the obvious question of "how long do you think it will be?"... but clearly that is something factor into my decision of taking several large parallel (Adobe, OS, etc) steps in reverse.

I know as a producer, you can appreciate the questions.

Cineform NLE...... I will be your first preorder.

I wouldn't give 2 cents for CS4...except we bought a new Prod. Premium package for one of our workstations and it's a complete dud.

If Adobe gave us the right to load CS3 on it with the new serial number, we'd do it so fast your hair would blow back! XP x64 and CS3 work quite well together. I don't doubt CF has some nice features for their new realtime engine arquitecture, but the "old" RT engine works pretty darn well.

Kind of a quagmire isn't it? Adobe blowing off their own feet again. You'd think they'd at least pay attention to the one's that keep their video prog's on the market, and especially to the "enabler's" like CF, that give Premiere some serious value. Without it, one of these days, a few thousand users will blow off their Adobe commitments and leave Adobe, to never return. You can only take so much crap, and then it's time to swallow your losses and move on to something better. That day could be rapidly approaching for many of us.

If Adobe doesn't move soon to do some serious damage control, then we'll be forced to do the moving.....to "far, far away" from Adobeland. Hmmm. Maybe the other guys aren't so bad afterall...looking better all the time.

Well said Stephen.

I have a trouble ticket with Cineform which relates to CS4's lack of ability to collect and trim CFHD files for archiving. If this issue ends up being an Adobe problem, that is the deal-breaker for me.

I'm not looking forward to working my way back through a can of worms to get a productive system. I am hoping for CS3 along with the latest build of Prospect HD on a Windows 7 64-bit system.

David... there was an issue of Prospect HD recent builds not working with CS3. Am I misremembering, or are all Prospect HD builds compatible with CS3?

I have spent way too many hours troubleshooting and it's time to cut the loses.

Again, I would ask that anyone using Windows 7 with Prospect HD and CS3, please jump in here and let us know if things are working as they should.

CS3 continues to work really well.

David Just one more question from me, When exporting a Cineform AVI AME only uses about 40% of my CPU? Is that normal? Exporting to MP4 uses 100%?

It is what we are seeing, but it should not be accepted, but only half that time in CineForm components, this the part we need to understand from Adobe. All we have for now.

I am beginning to believe that I should not be using cineform and CS4 to produce my next program.

What specifically are the beefs with CS4/cineform?

Hey Mike... greetings from just down the road.

CS4 has put up a lot of roadblocks for Cineform's realtime previewing functions.

From my own personal experience, I have inconsistent capturing capability with CS4 (sometimes the files are transcoded to Cineform, sometimes not), and the latest issue is the fact that CS4 does not retrieve or trim CFHD files within its program manager function for archiving. Finally, rendering times are dreadful... and have been reported on in greater detail on the Premiere board and maybe here as well.

Because of a sequence of compatibility quirks.. I ended up at CS4 and regrettably so. If you are functional with CS3, stay there. Unless I get some positive news before my next project, I'm rolling back to CS3, and hopefully I won't have some of the video issues I had previously with recent builds of Prospect HD.

It's been a long month.

Marty I have CS3 and the latest ProspectHD on an XP-64bit machine, and also on a Windows 7 RC machine. Both have Nvidia consumer cards - 512MB 9600GS's.

The XP64 machine is rock solid! The Windows 7 machine seems to work fine also, (with the latest releases the upsidedown red image problem is gone) but I only installed it a few weeks ago and havent used it extensively ....

CS4 is sitting on the shelf presently - boo!

Graham... thank you for that info, very helpful.

And trust me on this ...... you should be cheering the fact that CS4 is on your shelf and nowhere else.

CS3 and PHD working great for us and First Light is magic.

We produce our church services each week for website and DVD.

Found First Light to be really good to white balance two cameras that are different brands.

Good job Cineform

Gil

Graham, do you see any particular advantages to your Win 7 over the x64 setup? Just curious.

Our x64 ws and XP 32bit ws are both rock solid, but like you...our CS4 machine (also x64) is almost a nothing. Can't wait much longer and wish we could just stick CS3 on it. Little jobs do okay, but for serious work we just can't trust it. We got shafted by Adobe on that one! I'll soon be asking Adobe for a CS3 serial number to replace the CS4.