What is Cineform's ProRes 4444 equivalent? Cineform, CS5, and Mac questions.

[Ryan Koo]

Hey guys,

I asked this on the Adobe CS forum and was told I'd get a better response here! I'm on a Mac and currently have an old laptop with CS4 + FCS. I'd like to switch from Final Cut to an all-Adobe workflow when I upgrade to CS5 (and a new Mac), but I'm wondering what to use instead of the ProRes 4444 codec for work that requires the absolute best quality.

It seems to me the obvious answer is Cineform, but this begs a few questions:

1) Isn't this a huge advantage for Apple over Adobe, that good "visually lossless" codecs are included free with Final Cut Studio, and the equivalent (Neo HD) is a $500 add-on for Adobe?

2) Can you edit ProRes files without problems in Premiere Pro CS5?

3) If you do use Cineform files, is Premiere Pro using all of its acceleration abilities (Mercury Playback Engine)?

Thanks for any insights here -- I've been using a Final Cut to AE workflow for the past couple of years and could continue to do so, except it would seem to make sense to switch to PPro given CS5 has MPE and other advantages. Thanks very much!

[David Newman]

1) A question for Adobe.

2) You can, yet ProRES is not free, will cost you a FCStudio seat. CineForm is less expensive. :) Plus CineForm is better than ProRES -- a $500 investiment in NeoHD give you much more than a Codec (if you only want a codec, NeoScene is $129 with basically the same codec as NeoHD.) For 4444 you are looking at Neo4K.

3) Mercury acceleration is supported.

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Ryan Koo

1) Isn't this a huge advantage for Apple over Adobe, that good "visually lossless" codecs are included free with Final Cut Studio, and the equivalent (Neo HD) is a $500 add-on for Adobe?

I think it's in the eye of the beholder:
Adobe seems to have taken the route (64 bit software, CUDA enabled MPE, etc.) geared towards effective editing in native acquisition codecs. Lots of customers prefer this rather than editing with a digital intermediate.
I believe that Apple provided Prores in order to work around FCP issues with native codecs.
So, I'm thinking just two different approaches to the same problems.
In my book, Cineform + CS5 is the best of all worlds :)

[Ryan Koo]

Thanks guys. I would expect Apple to come out with Open CL-enabled GPU acceleration in their next version of FCS, but we'll see.

David -- glad to know Mercury acceleration is supported. Since I'm shopping for an editing machine, to clarify -- by "supported," you do mean it will be using CS5's nVidia GPU acceleration features? That affects which GPU I purchase, obviously. Thanks again.

[David Newman]

Yes you can do a real-time glassian blur :) Many of the Mecury features I don't need as I already had real-time color correction with FirstLight, but all GPU acceleration will work with CineForm presets and source files.