I'm Guessing, but I feel pretty confident that if you are currently using PHD4 you would be considered a "PHD4 customer" and would be entitled to a free Neo 4K v5 upgrade .

Cineform plus Premiere CS5
 

David,
Having been burned badly by the unfulfilled promises of Premiere CS4, I went back to CS3/ConnectHD for our video miscroscopy work using the Canon HV20 (HDV) in HD mode. I was about to upgrade to NeoHD after switching to the new, fabulous Panasonic TM700 (AVCHD and 1080/60p mode) camera. I now read in the Premiere CS5 propaganda that CS5 will handle AVCHD without a fuss, that the media encoder may actually work, and in addition will have fixed the things that had been promised for CS4 (upconvert, downconvert without trashing the file, reverse telecine, etc., etc), If they are not overpromising (as in CS4, and come to think of it, all versions before...), what is the advantage now of including NEOHD in the work process?

FirstLight -- no destructive color correction for all you tools, in and out of Premiere. After Effects, while NVidia cuda acceleration helps Premiere, not any other tool. Colorspace, we still seem to extract more information correctly out of more sources than anyone -- particularly for Canon HD DSLRs. 3D support, after NAB we finding out we way out in front for bringing new content creators into 3D. All of this for less than the new NVidia card you will need to get cuda acceleration for CS5 anyway. Get CS5, get a Quadro, get Neo HD v5, and you will get the best of everything.

Speaking of Quadro...is there any serious advantage to paying double for the Quadro FX 3800, as opposed to the much less expensive GeForce GTX 285? Seems the latter is better for much less and both are qualified for CS5 Cuda acceleration.

What's your opinion, David?

After we ship v5 of our products we'll add paid upgrade options to the ecommerce site, and free upgrade links through our Update logs page.

Charles, the upgrade is based on your current version, regardless of when you originally purchased. So anybody currently running PHD v4 will get a free upgrade to Neo4K v5.

Similar to this subject, if others are still running PHD v3 it might make sense to upgrade to PHD v4 for $199 now, then get a free upgrade to Neo4K v5. Once we release v5 the upgrade to PHD v4 will go away.

I'm still asking...any answers to this question? Why pay the large difference? What's the advantage for video editors/AE effects stuff...other than nVidia getting more $$ for selling an unnecessarily powerful board? Is there real gain for double the price?

I'm asking here, because this is supposed to be a part of the "CS5 difference"....or is it? Is the real gain more with Cineform and does it leverage the Quadro power more than the GTX 285? Come on you guys, you've been testing this stuff! Give us some info! Where's the beef?

Stephen the difference as far as I know is in the cooling and the testing on the various boards.
One is a gaming card the other is not. Some big industry players are saying they are getting 25% more performance from the gaming cards... do your maths regarding which has more bang for your buck.

Then it sure isn't hard to figure out...a gamin' we will go...

As far as I know the difference is in number of layers.
GTS 285 can support only 3. The Quadro can process much more .
Check Premiere Forum. There was some discussion there.

Alex

I guess what I was looking for Alex, was info from Cineform. Since they are major players in this new combo, what exactly does the "extra" power board buy a Cineform user in reallife use? Since we already do 3 layers without ANY updates, what's the potential for a CF user with those two boards running under CS5?

That's the type of info I'd like to see here, on CF's forum. Real world stuff as in: "you have this board, you'll get this" comparisons. Since these are very spendy upgrades if you look at them holistically (as in TCO), updating our 3 edit stations to run this new show will cost us at least $12,000, so I'm looking for some hard numbers now.

We have done no characterization of CUDA as we don't use CUDA, nor any graphics engine, for acceleration. Our goal with CUDA is to be "neutral". That is, we'll do our processing as usual in the CPU (including with First Light), and if there is a CUDA engine present, Premiere can use the engine for its own effects after we hand off our images developed through First Light.

But CineForm will not require that a CUDA engine be present for any of our processing. That said, we have been encouraged to consider using CUDA in the future, but currently it is a point of consideration, not a point of implementation.

Thanks David. That's the real bottom line I wanted to hear. We'll be watching this unfold, thanks for covering the bases.

That is very useful info David. It confirms my shaky notions from prior posts on this topic.
It seems like the bottom line is that folks who edit native AVCHD, XDCam, EXCam, etc. will see big preview and rendering improvement with the CS5/CUDA combo. People editing in CFHD.avi are already in fat city, and with the NeoHD v 5.0 RTE + CS5 will have similar benefits without the need of CUDA card upgrade.
So Stephen, you are already saving $$$ ;-)

Well said Robert....