Cineform with MerCalli.... Not a good mix ?

[Chris Barcellos]

So I bought Mercalli in a deal a couple of weeks back, and I have been trying to use it with Cineform converted .avi in Vegas Pro 10. As I normally would do, I convert my HDV footage to Cineform, and work it on the time line. This particular footage was extremely shakey, so I added Mecalli to the as I would any other filter. Mercalli created a substitute .avi file and placed it on the time time. I then tried rendering it out to to a new Cineform file, and I get a mess of ghosting images as the playback occurs.

When I do the same file and use the original .mt2 file, and again invoke Mercalli, it makes a file still, and I can then render that to Cineform file, and I get a clean render.

This tells me that in converting done by Mercalli as in the first case, something occurs that is subsequently carried badly into the final Cineform render.

This is all in 32 bit by the way. Anyone else run into that kind of issue ?

[Matthew Amirkhani]

Chirs,

If you Disable Resample in Vegas would it make any difference?

[Chris Barcellos]

My work around is to just stabilize from the original hdv file, which Mercalli replaces with its own .avi, then render to a CIneform .avi from that time line. It works. I don't recall having a similar problem with my Canon 5D progessive files, so I am also wondering about the interlacing aspects..... but then I haven't had Mercalli that long to really test it out completely with the progressive stuff I do in Cineform.

[Charles W. Hull]

Chris, you might want to try Deshaker in Virtualdub. It works much better than Mercalli with DSLR clips, and it works well with Cineform AVI.

[Chris Barcellos]

Hi Charles:

Yeah, I have have that on board too and I should have tried it for this clip...

[Robert Young]

I'm using Mercalli V. 2.0 plug in for Premiere CS5 and editing exclusively CFHD.avi on the timeline
I've had absolutely no issues with Mercalli stabilized CF clips- either previewing of the timeline, or render out to CF master avi, Blu Ray, or web encodes.
On my system, Mercalli V 2 does an outstanding job of image stabilization while preserving image quality and detail- and works very quickly as well.
IMO it is a huge, huge improvement over Mercalli V 1.0 and effective enough that I'm finding little need to use the more time consuming stabilizer/trackers like Mocha.
Maybe there is some issue with Vegas settings, Mercalli/Vegas compatability, etc. that's causing the problems you notice, but I'm definitely not seeing anything that suggests a fundamental problem with Mercalli + Cineform.avi
BTW, I have used Mercalli V2.0 on both CFHD 60i and CFHD 30p sequences with equal success- interlacing does not seem to create any problems for Mercalli.

[Chris Barcellos]

Okay, thanks Robert, I'll keep checking out issue. I am beginning to wonder if it is a playback issue on the player-- maybe calling up the wrong playback codec..

Shows up on Media player too, but not on Media Player Classic. Hmmmm. Don't know much about what Vegas is calling on for playback of this stuff...