Neo3D v5 out in public beta (Mac and PC.)
 

Read more info on the techblog here : Cineform Tech Blog Blog Archive Neo3D v5.0 (Mac and Win) Beta Releases Available

These is so much in this one it will take a while to create the readme of changes.

NeoScene/HD/4K v5.0 will be out for beta next week.

Thank you Davids - brave new world.

I have CS5 and Neo3D v5 installed and working like a charm.

The new FirstLight seems beyond my wildest dreams. Thank you again.

Wow! Thanks nice feedback so early -- and I'm sure you haven't discovered half of the new enhancements. Plus we didn't consider this beta finished (well we never do that, as any product can always be improved) but that are a couple of extra performance tweaks we hope to do for the official 5.0 (if not then 5.0.1 a few weeks later)

Did you find this in CS5: right clicking bin clip, and selecting "Source Setting..." brings up FirstLight on that clip (even if the clip wasn't in your FL project?)

I sense there are countless new capabilities I haven't yet discovered. Source Setting to get to the clip in FirstLight is excellent... and Ghost Busting !?!! Thanks again - the future came so fast, I wasn't prepared.

So I have the CS5 trial installed along with the Cineform Neo v5 beta. Five layers of video, all but the bottom layer have effects, and all also have been scaled to do Picture in Picture. NO supported video card. Vista 64, 8 gigs of RAM, and my CPU is an Intel Q6600 quad core 2.4 GHz... so it's not the latest or greatest or particularly fast.

Butter. Absolutely butter. It's not until a little ways into it that there is any noticeable slowdown playing back realtime, but it's not that bad... especially considering the number of layers and effects.

However, when tried to see how long it would take to render that out, it gave me an odd error message halfway through the render and crashed. I'm going to assume its a bug in the Cineform beta... unfortunately, I didn't think to write it down.

In any event, I'm almost scare to see what a newer i7 and a supported card can do. I have to say in the little bit I played with it, I was impressed... right until it crashed =/

I'm a bit confused on the versions of Neo. Mike, are you running Neo3D?

Coming from ProspectHD.... is the Neo3D beta inclusive of what we'll see with Neo 5, or should I await the beta release of it?

The product comparison grid at the Cineform website isn't clear to me.

Yeah, the only beta available is Neo3D, but it has all the features of the other versions.

Marty,

The Prospect product line is going way, but many of its features are merging into Neo. We haven't put the old Prospect CS2/3 support into Neo yet, but it will happen for the full release.

I know that Prospect is now legacy and the Neo 5 upgrade is what is on deck, but what I am confused about is what is the difference between Neo3D 5 and the upcoming Neo 5?

As a ProspectHD customer waiting on Neo 5, does it do me any good to install Neo3D 5 and test with CS5?

Neo3D v5 and Neo4K v5 (what you will be upgraded to) are very similar, so if you don;t want to wait a few more days, use the Neo3D trail as it has the CS5 support added.

Thanks David.

I will deactivate and uninstall Prospect.

Thank you for getting back with the info.... as always, appreciated very much.

Never de-activate, unless you are moving systems. Uninstall is all that is recommended when switching products.

D-oh! I knew that... I swear I did.

Thanks David!

I'm running the CS5 trial and now the Neo3D trial.

Under Cineform presets, Neo3D appears to only offer 24fps (23.976). Is that really the case, or is there some way to utilize 29.97?

Also, HDLink offers no conversion options from 29.97fps except to 25fps.

Existing clips (encoded with ProspectHD) @ 29.97 and imported into a @23.976fps project don't play smoothly.

It seems to be a "can't get there from here" scenario so fas as trying to test out some Cineform clips in CS5 while awaiting Neo V5.

Just change the preset settings after choosing Cineform RT preset in PP CS5 when you open a new project. Go to General tab and from there you should be able to change the timebase settings. That should do the trick. All my clips are 59.94 fps and I have no problems. Just red bars over videos when applying effects/transitions but Mercury Playback Engine takes care of that if you got that running. I'm assuming more presets will be included in the final build as well as backwards compatbility with CS3/CS4.

One question I do have though is will the realtime engine found in PHD/4K (now that its being discontinued) also be included to support CS3 in the NEO 4K v5? I plan to keep CS3 (I'll get rid of CS4 since its practically useless now) since I have a lot of old projects archived made using CS3.

So far everything is amazing! CS5 + First Light is like a dream come true. I hope the Cineform release final goes gold soon because I have a project I want to start but dont want to start it using a trial.

Thanks James,

CS3 support will be restored in the full v5.0 release, working on that tomorrow.

Well that was embarrassing.... thanks James and David for chiming in. How I forgot that step I will never know.

David.... so far on my modest Win7 setup (4gb RAM, cheap ATI video card, Core 2 Duo @ 2.93ghz), with CS5 and Neo3d Trial versions, I'm achieving smooth playback at 1/2 resolution, but the system struggles with full resolution.

Will there be any difference with Neo V5's playback acceleration, or is this what I should expect as a result of my hardware setup?

This is on playback of ProspectHD encoded 1440 x 1080i source footage. I attempted to convert some XDCam footage (MXF) with HDLink, but was confronted with an error message about the format not being recognized.

Does HDLink have any special workflow requirements to convert MXF?

New system gets ordered once I understand how all this is going to fit together.

UPDATE: Manually adding the MP4 to the HDLink conversion list solves the XDCam footage issue, although I thought I remembered being able to convert directly from the MXF files that are extracted by the XDCam Clip Browser.

Marty,

For a full mercury RT playback experience you need an Adobe approved Cuda enabled Nvidia card which you seem not to have installed in your system.

We use CS5 with a Quadro 5800 with SDI (it's a colour correction workstation) and the performance of CS5 and CineForm is wonderful. Seeing is believing.

You will achieve similar perfomances with a much cheaper Cuda enabled GeForce 285 (if I recall correctly).

Hans

Marty,

We are adding more performance over time, and we should see smooth fullres on your class of system soon under CS5. However 1/2 res mode will always be our sweet sport, it is what Prospect HD defaulted to, as it uses the benefits of wavelets which can decode to sub-resolution quicker than other formats.

David.... what I am seeing already exceeds anything in CS4. Based on that, I am going through with the CS5 upgrade..... and believe me, Adobe owes you guys big time.

Hans.... although I do plan on adding at least a GTX 285 grade CUDA card, I see conflicting feedback as to whether it actually improves timeline performance and playback of straight video. If I drop in an MXF or CFHD clip with no effects.... will CUDA assist in that playback, or only if I have GPU specific duties for the card to relieve the CPU of?

CUDA is expected to boost my TMPGEnc performance as well.

Marty,

We can playback full res CF 1080p intermediate AVIs in RT anytime with or without Cuda VFX. The only problem we encounter are CF MOVs. They stutter and don't playback smoothly. That will be fixed soon, according to CineForm.

Premier Pro CS5 without Cuda enabled graphics is a big step regarding stability and reliability. Nevertheless if you want a true revolutionary 2010 editing experience based ob CF you need a proper CS5 approved board.

Hans

Hans.... if you don't mind sharing your systems specs?

It sounds like it still boils down to good old CPU power and RAM.

NeoHD V5
 

When will it be released? Thanks

Working on it. All the little stuff takes ages: installers, presets, license changes.

David
With Neo 3D v.5 Beta/CS5, if I open a CS4 project, CS5 will convert it, but only open it in "desktop" mode. It plays, looks, & works great, but has the yellow render line.
If I open a new CS5 project using the Cineform presets & put some of the same clips on the timeline, there is no render line.
Is this just a characteristic of the BETA version, or is this going to be the way it stands.
Thanks

Hey Robert.... David mentioned in another thread that the render indicators are a cosmetic issue that they are cleaning up, so at this point it sounds like they are not in fact a perfect barometer for playback performance.

I'm not worried- playback performance is spectacular, yellow lines or not.
In fact (so far) I am absolutely shocked at the whole CS5/Neo 5/ CUDA deal.
It all seems to work just as advertised right out of the box. I have never seen that before.
Is it possible we are entering an era where you just turn it on, edit, and... turn it off- like using an automobile?
I don't know what I am going to do with all of the spare time without needing to endlessly tinker to keep it sort of running & do whatever I'm trying to do.
Amazing.

I had exactly the same reaction Robert, "do you mean to tell me it works? Just like that?"