mixing cineform and avchd material...
 

i have a canon a1 and a sony sr1 (i think dont actually have the cam with me). captured the a1 footage with hdlink and converted to cineform file. the sr1 has a hard drive and i basically just copy/pasted some footage that is recorded avchd. in pp cs5 can i just create a new cineform 1080i file and put the cineform and avchd footage on the same timeline? or do i have to convert the avchd files in hdlink to cineform files? btw its the latest version of neo4k. thanks

Actually, you can put them together on pretty much any kind of timeline you want to use. You are not limited to using Cineform presets.

I use Cineform NeoHD with PPro CS5 and a Matrox MXO2 Mini external display. I do a lot of multi-cam edits where I mix HDV and AVCHD tracks. I have mixed many as four HDV tracks with 3 AVCHD tracks.

When I have the time, I run everything through NeoHD. I do this because: (a) Cineform is a lighter load on the editing system than the native HDV and AVCHD and (b) I can use Cineform's First Light to do basic color matching. First Light, as you probably know, works in meta-data so you get near instant feedback when running it with CS5 and it doesn't bog down with rendering. You have a Canon XHA1 and a Sony SR11? I've worked with footage form an XHA1 and a CX550 (a descendant of the SR11). You will need to color match.

Because I've got the Matrox Mini, I use Matrox 1920x1080 presets for the timelines. This is only because I need to use those presets to display the CS5 monitor screens via HDMI to an external tv. I've worked with other presets between May (when I got CS5) and July (when Matrox released the MX drivers for CS5), and never had any trouble mixing Cineform with non-Cineform files, nor any problems with the differing pixel shapes of the diffferent formats. HDV uses non-square pixels for its 1440x1080 format while AVCHD uses square pixels to produce its 1920 x 1080 display. On a PPro timeline, everything is matched to the preset and displays with no problem.

One thing I did find during the time before Matrox updated to CS5 drivers was that Adobe's AVCHD presets seemed preferable when working with multiple AVCHD and HDV tracks that had not been converted to Cineform intermediates. By preferable, I mean that I found much less lagging and bogging down and fewer lock-ups when using the AVCHD 1920x1080i preset.

I also tested out the Cineform timeline presets. I found, with the first few builds of NeoHD version 5, that my machine had significant stablity and display problems when using CIneform presets in a multi-cam timeline. Those problems seemed to have been fixed with Build 268 in August. However, by then, I had the Mini working again and have not since run a long multi-cam edit with a Cineform timeline preset.

There may be times when using a Cineform preset will be helpful --- I believe (but have never verified) that CS5 will output 10-bit 4:2:2 color for monitoring if you have the right video card and a 10-bit 4:2:2 display monitor.

So, my conclusions:
1. You can mix the Cineform-converted HDV with AVCHD on any kind of timeline preset you want to use.
2. Editing (particularly color matching) can be smoother and faster if you also convert the AVCHD to a Cineform intermediate.