{"id":7,"date":"2007-10-08T23:28:16","date_gmt":"2007-10-09T06:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2007\/10\/08\/cineform-prospecthd\/"},"modified":"2010-07-29T22:35:04","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T05:35:04","slug":"cineform-prospecthd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2007\/10\/08\/cineform-prospecthd\/","title":{"rendered":"Cineform ProspectHD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cineform<\/a> was one of the earliest companies to create solutions catering to the emerging HDV workflows, lowering the budget requirements\u00c2\u00a0for projects desiring to produce higher resolution images.\u00c2\u00a0 Their solution AspectHD<\/a> involved a separate high quality wavelet compression format that is scalable to\u00c2\u00a0even higher resolutions than HDV.\u00c2\u00a0 Combining this compressed format with a realtime rendering and effects engine in Adobe\u00c2\u00a0Premiere <\/a>created a very efficient workflow.\u00c2\u00a0 By adding support for the AJA Xena<\/a> HD-SDI cards, they had a professional-level I\/O solution in ProspectHD<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The original ProspectHD<\/a> supported compression of 1080p\/i 10bit 422 data into a variable bitrate codec that only required around 15MB\/s or 1GB\/min.\u00c2\u00a0 Lowering the datarate had two significant benefits, both related to lowering the cost of disk storage.\u00c2\u00a0 Data rates at that level can be supported by a single hard disk drive, removing the need for expensive arrays, and much more HD\u00c2\u00a0content can be stored on a given drive.\u00c2\u00a0 The catch was that the amount of processing power needed to compress the data required the fastest CPUs, which at the time, meant dual processor AMD Opteron systems.\u00c2\u00a0 In the two years since then, processing power has greatly increased, and many more capable options are available.<\/p>\n

Capture and playback over HD-SDI is supported in realtime using Premiere Pro<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Motion and opacity effects are realtime, as well as limited color correction and\u00c2\u00a0transitions.\u00c2\u00a0 The performance of these features scale with the power of the system, with many tasks being multithreaded to utilize multi-core CPUs.<\/p>\n

The Cineform codec itself has many inherent advantages.\u00c2\u00a0 Wavelet codecs can easily be viewed at lower resolutions in an efficient manner.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as quality goes, Cineform is hard to beat, especially for their file size.\u00c2\u00a0 Another advantage I find significant is that their files perform well in After Effects<\/a>, unlike many other compressed formats I have tried.
\n
\nCineform also includes a stand alone utility called HDLink.\u00c2\u00a0 HDLink can convert capture and convert files into the Cineform format with an efficient multithreaded encoder.\u00c2\u00a0 It currently supports HDV<\/a>, Firewire, HDMI, SDI, P2<\/a>, XDCAM<\/a>, and a number of other formats.\u00c2\u00a0 The recommended Cineform workflow is to convert all of your footage from different sources into the Cineform Intermediate codec<\/a>, for realtime online editing in Premiere Pro.\u00c2\u00a0 I will include more details on HDLink in a future review, which hopefully will coincide with\u00c2\u00a0the release of an OSX compatible version of\u00c2\u00a0the utility.<\/p>\n

As with any workflow, Cineform is not perfect.\u00c2\u00a0 It can capture and playback in realtime, but file exports to and from Cineform compression tend to take much longer than one would expect.\u00c2\u00a0 You may also find their default settings in Premiere and AE need a bit of tweaking, and are rarely persistant upon reboot.\u00c2\u00a0 Certain systems may experience a color shift between stills and motion video with Nvidia cards, although their recent development of an RGB overlay processing option seems to have largely aleviated that problem.\u00c2\u00a0 Another minor frusteration is how they hand AE imports, since their custom importer is not compatible with other AVI formats.<\/p>\n

(EDIT: As pointed out by David Newman, this seems to have been fixed in CS3.\u00c2\u00a0 I just imported CF, CF RAW 2K, Matrox 10bit, BMD444, DPX, HDV, and DV into my my AE project one after the other.\u00c2\u00a0 This would have saved me a\u00c2\u00a0considerable amount\u00c2\u00a0of time a few weeks ago, but I was working in AE7.)<\/p>\n

There are newer developments to their codecs, including OSX<\/a> and Quicktime<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0support, Cineform RAW<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0with the SI-2K<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a0 Cineform Neo<\/a>,\u00c2\u00a012bit 444 RGB, 2K, and soon 4K, but I will discuss those in future posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cineform was one of the earliest companies to create solutions catering to the emerging HDV workflows, lowering the budget requirements\u00c2\u00a0for projects desiring to produce higher resolution images.\u00c2\u00a0 Their solution AspectHD involved a separate high quality wavelet compression format that is scalable to\u00c2\u00a0even higher resolutions than HDV.\u00c2\u00a0 Combining this compressed format with a realtime rendering and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[16,15,24,19],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":118,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}