Problems with CS4 + Win 7 + NeoHD
 

First thing, I open HDLink, it takes about 35 seconds for the program to appear. Then, my attempt to convert an EX1 clip to an avi is met with an error as per the attached screenshot. And the converted file does not exist!

I am also failing to see how to maintain the aspect ratio of simple 16x9 DV material. It ends up vertically stretched...

Secondly, encoding times in Adobe Media Encoder are huuuuge. A two minute DV clip that takes 5 seconds to export as a DV AVI and 30 seconds to export as an MPEG-2 DVD is taking 3 minutes plus to export as a Cineform AVI. The resulting file is fine.

Are these things normal?

AN EX1 is an MPEG based format not AVCHD, so the error indicates something else is wrong. You might have to upload a short sample to support after the weekend. As for DV, we don't do much with SD sources, so that is like a bug in HDLink. The export slowest of CS4 is terrible, it is not the codec, something CS4 is doing and Adobe doesn't seem to have a solution (other than maybe CS5.) We have spent months of wasted engineering trying to make it faster, Premiere simple won't send us the frame fast enough (notice the CPU is not being used.)

I'll keep investigating.

First Light also takes a good 30 seconds or more to load. It's strange.

Also, should there be two Cineform HD VFW Codecs installed in my list of programs?

Not likely an issue, old Vfw install may have left that. 30 second startup suggests a licensing issue, does it say "HD license" in the shell window when First Light starts?

RE: LOAD TIME:

It does say HD License. But it only appears after I exit First Light, and that command prompt style window doesn't close - it has to be closed manually, after I've closed First Light.

It could be a licensing thing. I was unable to deactivate on my computer (tried but I got a failure message) before going to Win7, but went ahead and upgraded anyway, and then re-installed. So perhaps that's a problem?

RE: DUAL CODECS:

I've only installed the software on this drive once - so I'm not sure why there would be two of them. Should I uninstall one?

Or maybe I need to deactivate and uninstall the whole thing in order to cure the first problem???

Sound like it needs to be cleared off and reinstalled. Contact support for how to do a full remove.

Will do so. Thanks David!