Announcing Neo Family Version 5
 

CineForm is enthused to announce version 5 of our Neo family for both Windows and Mac. There are many new features and capabilities rolled into the new version as discussed below.

SUMMARY
----------
- Platforms: Both Win and Mac, including new versions for each Neo family member: Scene / HD / 4K / 3D.
- All previous Neo versions on both Win and Mac will be incremented to Version 5.
- Ship Date: Approximately end of April. Public beta releases will be available the week after NAB.
- Prospect (HD/4K/3D) families are absorbed in the Neo family. This means that the Prospect family is retiring after a long and productive life. (Don't worry, Prospect customers will be happy with the move to Neo). And yes, the CineForm editing experience is a good one in CS5.

New features are many, and include:

NEW OVERALL FEATURES
------------------------
- Support for CS5 on Windows (CS5 Mac support within a couple months). CS5 support includes special 3D capability including 3D renders and 3D titling.
- The return of HD-SDI monitoring within CS5 through a third-party plug-in (more on this soon).
- 3D content creation and editing is added to all Neo products except for Neo Scene, at no change in current prices.
- Support for OpenGL surfaces for monitoring as either a primary or secondary display (or both), including for 3D active and passive displays.


NEW FIRST LIGHT FEATURES FOR NEO HD/4K
-------------------------------------------

- Keyframeable Active Metadata for primary color controls.
- New "Tools" control as video overlay for burn-in or other uses. Histogram overlay was previously supported. New tools include vectorscopes, waveform, and "grid lines" (particularly useful for 3D adjustments).
- Text/graphics engine built in as part of Passive Metadata tab. Allows for addition of text overlays as metadata on top of video. Allows selection of fonts, sizes, color, outlines, etc. Supports 3D parallax control for 3D subtitles with 3D depth independent of underlying video.
- Graphics engine also supports PNG overlays for logos or other uses. Also supports independent parallax control to present 2D objects as 3D.
- New passive metadata extraction during file conversion. All passive metadata now appears in the Passive Metadata tab within First Light.
- Support for OpenGL surfaces for monitoring, including for 3D active and passive displays.


HD LINK (WIN) AND REMASTER (MAC)
------------------------------------

- On WinDOWS, HD Link is scheduled for a major interface overhaul. The result will be similar to the interface used for ReMaster on Mac, and will include many new features. This is not completed yet, but when it is finished it will be provided as a free update to all Neo HD/4K/3D customers.


NEW NEO3D FIRST LIGHT FEATURES
-----------------------------------

- Addition of separate Left eye and Right eye 3D controls. (Previously Right eye or Both).
- Keyframeability of convergence controls to match clip transitions.
- Floating window masks to manage 3D window violations.
- ‘Ghost busting’ to minimize high-contrast crosstalk between Left and Right channels visible on some 3D display technologies
- Dual-link stereo output will directly drive RealD or Dolby projectors directly from the FCP or PPro timelines.


PRICING
--------

No change in pricing from current versions. Pricing below reflects a) new license purchases, and b) upgrade prices from the previous version to version 5:

- NeoScene: a) $129 b) $49 upgrade
- NeoHD: a) $499 b) $149 upgrade
- Neo4K: a) $999 b) $249 upgrade
- Neo3D: a) $2995 or b) free upgrade


UPGRADE PRICING FOR PROSPECT FAMILY OWNERS
-------------------------------------------------

- Prospect HD v3 or earlier to Neo HD v5: $149
- Prospect HD v4 to Neo4K v5: Free. Yes, All Prospect HD v4 customers will get a free upgrade to Neo4K.
- Prospect 4K (any version) to Neo4K: Free.


DID YOU PURCHASE DURING 2010?
---------------------------------

Any customer who purchased a CineForm license during 2010 will get a free upgrade to version 5 of the equivalent product.


A NOTE FOR THE ARITHMETICALLY CHALLENGED:
If you upgrade from a previous version of Prospect HD to version 4 of Prospect HD ($199) before we ship version 5, you will get a free upgrade to Neo4K v5.


APRIL SALES PROMOTION
-------------------------
- We have scored a deal with Gunnar Optiks in Carlsbad, CA to provide a FREE set of their new

Phenom 3D glasses with the purchase of a new (non-upgrade) license for NeoHD, Neo4K, or Neo3D from the CineForm website through April 2010. These are awesome RealD-compatible passive polarized glasses that retail for $99. They will instantly become your preferred glasses when watching a 3D movie through RealD projection, or as you edit using any RealD-compatible passive polarized monitor. Customers will only be charged for shipping of the glasses around the first of May. Any purchases during April will come a version 4 license that will be upgraded for free to version 5 when it is ready to ship.

- When ordering, enter the code "GunnarOptiks" in the "Customer Notes" field during the online order process.

David,

Sounds very exciting. The logo overlay is a great feature especially for doing run off dubs of offlines and cuts before the proejct is finished for review.

So the Prospect HD v4 I have now will be upgraded to Neo4K? Will the capture into Cineform using Premiere pro cs5 be available as well?

Leo

Capture through HD-SDI in CS5 will be available but through a yet-unannounced third-party in the near future. They have not yet announced so we won't pre-empt them.

Perfect, is the Real-time engine available for Cineform like in CS3?

Leo :)

Leo, yes and no. We do have a custom playback engine for CS5, but it is not the one used in CS3. This new one is more Premiere friendly, no more audio sync issues, and monitoring color mis-matches -- also non-CineForm FX also play without rendering.

Since I didn't see it listed anywhere... Neoscene 4 to NeoHD 5 is how much money...?

Good question. There are numerous upgrade possibilities, including from one product family to another, such as Neo Scene to Neo HD.

I should have mentioned that a version change (such as to version 5) is a good time to do this upgrade because our policy is to offer a full discount on the MSRP for the existing product from the purchase price for the upgraded product. So...Neo Scene to Neo HD will be $370.

Very cool about the pricing... also, safe to assume the RT engine won't be making it's way into NeoScene, and just sticking to HD/4K/3D?

Real time play back
 

Hi

I am using Neo 4k Neo4KMac-2.4.3.122-15 I have a problem in playback in fcp.Does this New Version of neo v5 solve this play back problem.

My system is
Mac pro
Processor xeon double quadcore 2.5 ghz
8 gb ram
nvedia graphic card
using Raid 0 hard disk

And I am woking on 2k file format

Thank You

The current version works correctly for RT playback under FCP. Your question is for support, please tell them what the problem is. File a trouble ticket here Support Center

Ohhh think I'll be upgrading my NeoHD but I think I need Neo4k.

Can you say what the main features differences between NeoHD and NEO4K?

Will the RT engine be in NeoHD?

Win/Mac
 

The Neo HD upgrade price of USD 149 will that be for cross platform or for single platform use (I capture in win 7 and edit on SL)?

//Hans

Just wondering if you have any clearer idea on when you will be able to add the mac CS4 importer functionality to the current neohd product. I noticed that Final Cut Pro got some love recently. You mentioned that you would know around NAB time, after having got the CS5 compatible version out of the door.

David, the new playback engine will be in all Neo products (and feature even in NeoScene.)

Hans, no cross platform upgrades, sorry -- each is a separate upgrade (Mac or PC.) Although the same two activation policy is in place (so laptop and desktop.)

Brian, The Mac work is still to be completed for CS5, no news for CS4 yet.

Oh great news for playback engine - Will be upgrading to V5.

What do you mean for the activation policy ? Laptop/PC?

So to be clear. If I upgrade from my current version of NeoScene to NEO HD 5 will the upgrade price be the same as if I was upgrading to present Neo HD version ?

Typ-o "Some" features in NeoScene.


David,

We are just like with Adobe Premiere and Sony Vegas licensing, is it officially one license, one system, but we do allow two activations for system configurations that are not used simultaneously, a laptop and a desktop system.

Yes, update to NeoHD v4 today, and you will get v5 for free.

Ah because I'm thinking about purchasing a netbook Acer 542G (semi decent spec) and it would be handy when I'm away to Cineform on there. So when I capture the files through my Sony MRC1K I can convert them into Cineform AVIs ready for when I get back home for editing.

So that would be all legal? I wouldnt using both, netbook will only be used on the capture and convert stage.

David, that's perfectly consistent with our reasoning for making two activations available.

Great News! Now I have to ensure that the Acer ION2 netbook has a 320GB+ HDD

oops. nm. See the answer.

No cross platform
 

David,

That's bad news, especially for someone who bought the program when told that the Mac-version would be ported to CS4 (which as you know never happened). Will the Mac version have a capture utility or if it will it be able to split into scenes HDV captures from Mac (it can't split HDV captures from CS4)? If so, I guess the Mac version will do. If not, will mov-files captured through win7 "play as smoothly" on Mac CS5 as would a remaster in Mac?

//Hans

Mac CS5 should play very well, whether the files are captured.

Hans,

There are some feature differences between Mac and Win. On Win we have a capture/conversion utility for HDV content that talks directly to the camera. On Mac you must capture from tape using QT or FCP (or equivalent), but without transcoding, which moves the HDV tape content to Mac as an MOV file. We then convert the MOV file to CineForm. This workflow will not change, so HDV on Mac will remain a two-step. BTW, yes you can capture on Win and move the files to Mac - that works fine.

Regarding CS4, it is true that CS4 support never happened on Mac; similarly our RT engine never happened for CS4 on Win. It is unfortunate, but supporting CS4 perfectly was simply not possible given the many problems in the CS4 SDK.

So the good news is that the CS5 SDK we develop to is in good shape. All Mac customers of v5 of Neo (Scene/HD/4K/3D) will get the CS5 components as a free update when they are ready, probably within two months of their availability on Windows.

Hello David,

Will Neo v5 be backward compatible with CS3 and CS4, including support for real time playback in CS3?

Or will Prospect v4 users currently using CS3 or CS4 also need to upgrade to CS5 to move to Neo v5?

Steve,

Good question, but the details are not finalized. Both CS3 and CS4 will continue to be supported, yet the new playback engine is CS5 only. CS4 will work well under v5.0 running the Adobe playback engine, but with all the Active Metadata improvements and of course the new FirstLight. CS3 is interesting one, we have a lot of the old playback pipeline to move from Prospect into Neo. The goal is to get everyone many new features whether they change Premiere version or not.

Well I hate to have to be the one that ask this question... but from the Cineform post I get this....

Based on the pricing... If you bought Prospect 4K ( $1499 ) you wont get upgraded but down graded to NEO4K ( $999 ) ???

A $500 difference in price... The difference in price included:

40 Transitions
Keyframeable color adjust
Levels control
slow-motion
static/moving titles/video overlays
Pan/scan/rotate/zoom
32 bit floating point effects
multiple spatial resolutions on the timeline
AVI/MOV render
batch capture with timecode
batch capture with HD-SDI w/timecode
and HD-SDI timeline monitoring....

are the extras now included in the NEO4K or are the extras no longer there???

What am I missing here??? besides $500 Thanks

PRICING
--------

No change in pricing from current versions. Pricing below reflects a) new license purchases, and b) upgrade prices from the previous version to version 5:

- NeoScene: a) $129 b) $49 upgrade
- NeoHD: a) $499 b) $149 upgrade
- Neo4K: a) $999 b) $249 upgrade
- Neo3D: a) $2995 or b) free upgrade


UPGRADE PRICING FOR PROSPECT FAMILY OWNERS
-------------------------------------------------

- Prospect HD v3 or earlier to Neo HD v5: $149
- Prospect HD v4 to Neo4K v5: Free. Yes, All Prospect HD v4 customers will get a free upgrade to Neo4K.
- Prospect 4K (any version) to Neo4K: Free.

I'm guessing that the name change is to streamline the marketing, just like when Aspect was dropped. The name Prospect was used to differentiate the product line, in that it had a RT rendering engine in CS3. That dichotomy is no longer necessary as:

1) CS5 has its own improved rendering engine, which uses the GPU.
2) If you're doing video work on the desktop in 2010, you probably have a fast quad core computer and possibly a dual 6 core machine ( I see Apple is announcing its 12 core beasts at NAB). This has sped up rendering enormously, in addition to what your GPU might be doing.

Everything is now "Neo" something or other, but the "new" Neo 4K V5 is basically Prospect 4K with improvements. The Cineform guys can elaborate more on this, but I don't think it's that complicated.

It's a relief to hear you are continuing to support CS3 and CS4, but it sounds like there might be some gotchas for the CS3 support? After all the pain we had with CS4, what we (and you) don't need now is a major bunch of hassles with CS3. Depending on Adobe's upgrade pricing scheme for CS5, it could be a while for some of us until we can afford Adobe's upgrade (expensive, you can almost bet on it...) on multiple machines.

Thank you Cineform, for the present of a freebie upgrade for Prospect HD 4 to Neo 4K 5.0. That is a wise and generous offer for many longtime, loyal customers!

Stephen.... you raise a good point.

Even though I have made the move to Edius 5.5, I have years of projects that I will need to access in CS4.

The offer of free upgrade to the Neo Family may not be wise in some cases.

If nothing else, I would hope that a rollback to Prospect HD 4 would be an uneventful task if need be.

Jay your point is exactly correct. We've been supporting PPro since PPro 6. At that time the Adobe engine was hopelessly underpowered and couldn't do HD. Cineform was the only way to do HD, and we were 3X-4X faster than the Adobe engine. But our own RT engine was a lot of work to evolve through the always-changing SDKs from Adobe, and was impossible to port to Mac.

In light of faster CPUs plus improvements in Adobe's own engine, we elected to drop our old engine and build our new engine using more Adobe components. Ultimately that offers more features for our customers and also cross-platform compatibility. It also frees up time for innovative new products like First Light.

Ray, I will respectfully offer that there will be significantly more value in Neo 4K v5 than in Prospect 4K v4.

Further, many on this board were with us when we began shipping Aspect HD in 2003 for $1200. When we discontinued Aspect HD it was $499. Volumes were lower in the early days and we needed higher prices to pay for development. As volumes increase we're pleased to drop our prices, but we hope you don't think it's because you're getting less! It's similar with the current move from Prospect to Neo. We're packing in a lot more, and are able to offer a lower price (relative to Prospect).

Wise in the business sense of keeping current customers...and for bringing us into the possibilities of a starting to work in a new 3D world...

Wow.... looking at all of the CS5 info on Adobe, plus all of David's clues about Neo4K v 5, looks like we are entering a new era.
I hope it is all true. The big question is-will it actually work ;-)
We will see!!

Now we just have to wait until the end of May to find that out, Robert! At least some of those bleeding edgers w/ the hp to make the upgrade worthwhile! In the meantime, we just hope NEO 4K 5.0 runs our oldware.

I just upgraded from Prospect HD to 4K about 4 weeks ago for the normal upgrade price. ( It's still not working properly.)

Sorry, I just didn't realise that it was going to be available for nothing if i had just waited for a short while!!!

Stephen... the great news for me has been CFHD compatibility with Edius. I will eventually jump onto the i7 processor parade and CUDA GPU, but for now.... with my typical single stream edits.... there is no need. I've been editing silky smooth CFHD clips, togehter with Canopus' codec, and MXF files on the same timeline for a couple of weeks now, and it's wonderful. After a year or more of CS4 frustrations, I nearly forgot what "realtime" was.

After Effects remains, and may see an upgrade to the new version... but Premiere is now a legacy tool to enable me to access old projects.

I hear you, Marty. Hard part is parting with the suffering...I must be masochistic. But the idea of updating two CS3 machines and one CS4 workstation to CS5 is leaving me cold. That's a cool $2200 bucks just for upgrades and a wide open invitation to ship jumping, irregardless of the real or perceived benefits!

Where is Adobe in our real world of crunched budgets and strangled update money? Seems like they're still living back in 2006...

BUT... and here's the siren's song... if it all actually works as advertised, and all of the predecessors (CS4, etc.) were secretly just beta versions, and this is really THE ONE... then you'll be set- for years maybe. Then, all you'll have to do is actual video production- you won't know what to do with all of your spare time.
Actually, you would get used to it in about a month & decide that you just have to make the move to 3-D ;-)

Worst part Robert, would be seeing "red Corvettes" all primed and ready to roll...but the real engines (new CPUs + Fermi cards) missing! We'd need to pay for new engines too! Add it all up for our 3 workstations and it's close to $12k. Just for an upgrade? Cineforms done their part in this story, but it just seems Adobe is still living in "what used to be in 2003".

Throw in two new cams we're needing (choke choke choke)...and things start looking skinny indeed!

For a US-based "just lease 'em" scenario, maybe that's viable, but for much of the rest of the world...I'm afraid most will be left way behind, putting along in their VW's! I love the rush of Corvettes, but I guess we're probably more needing a crew cab pickup for the day-to-day work. Something we can better use for our workgroup type approach. Surely not sexy or standout, but cities aren't built by Corvettes!

It's getting harder and harder to justify heavy layouts for incremental benefits gained. Lot's of red paint and noise there, but we'll have to see some seriously good reasons now to make it worthwhile. Slick new features are great, but only if they truly add value and give serious gains in productivity.

How many times would we REALLY need these new features, and are most of them truly useful/productive for our workflow? I guess those are questions to weigh carefully before betting the farm on Red Corvettes.

Thanks again to Cineform for offering serious "bang for our bucks" and updating many of us for free, yet still allowing those with VW's to keep rolling forward. Too bad Adobe doesn't have that corporate mindset!