Bye bye Cineform

There's simply too much hazzle involved working with the Cineform codec in the Production Studio Suite and between several systems like I do. I'm constantly jockying the 15 day trials even though I own a license. It's proven more convenient for me to reinstall WinXP and the entire suite and all the plugins than to actually wait for deactivation and activation procedures from Cineform.

I actually only own Connect HD since the only thing I need is the CFHD codec in my media architecture. I don't need any real time features in Premiere Pro. I never use PPro to capture HDV streams. All my files are already on disk and are mostly CG and FX plates.

So I'm going a different route. It's a shame because Cineform HAS the best wavelet codec around. No doubt about that. But this time piracy won the battle. Cineform is loosing a client - I was really close to getting the NEO 10-bit.

It's funny. It looks like my film YEAR ONE that started in Mjpeg 4:2:2 1,5:1 compression SD (Aurora Video's Igniter system) will be ending up in Mjpeg 4:2:2 HD. Right now all the files are being converted to Black Magic Design's Mjpeg codec. It's the kind of light weight codec I'm looking for and it hold's up for what I'm doing. And it's just there to install. It works.

Lossless codec nightmares

Cineform, Raylight, Sheer, Microcosm...I've tried them all including a bunch of Open Source projects like Lagarith. My deepes wish right now is that Adobe would bring me something like Apples ProRes but designed for the Adobe architecture. A lightweight 4:2:2 codec that could play HD of regular disks in RT and still hold up for some grading and chroma key work. A codec that is not surrounded by all the registration fuzz that Cineform has (come on! - serial, hardware key AND activation code).

Adobe. Make my world simpler. Now.

Premiere Pro on the Mac

Well...I couldn't tell you. I use Macs all day and I don't like them one bit. Too much bling-bling, candy colored buttons, metallic interfaces, glossy menus and other distractingly ugly things for my eyes - and no - I'm not running Vista yet - I'm still on XP for my main post work.

I have a hard time believing Premiere Pro CS3 will pull any users from the FCP crowd. They are hooked on Apple Evangelism (I used to be one of them) and is simply not ready to try something not connected with an Apple logo. Instead I believe Adobe has got a good chance with the new media crowd that works a lot in Flash.

Here's one of the first CS3 reviews over at Studio Daily.

Restart

This blog was kind of dead - so i figured it's time to change that.

Part of the reason is I've been betatesting Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and I'm striving to do more of my work right in there in the edit timeline. The ambition is to do as little as possible outside of the app.

I'm currently setting up Premiere Pro 2 (no not CS3 yet - since there are a few plugins not yet supporting CS3) with Boris Continuum for chroma key work. I'm doing a lot of 2D-tracking in AE and I'm cutting and pasting the results from AE:s timeline into Premiere Pro's. BTW: I'm using AE CS3.

I'm doing a lot of my work on a simple MacBook (no not Pro) hooked to an 24" LCD 1920x1200. And I'm running boot camp on that machine and I have a few regular PC's on the network. One of them is an integrated finishing station hooked up with a Matrox Pharelia APVe for getting 720p out to a reference monitor. It all looks something like this:

I've recently started the Premiere Pro User Group Sweden. The website can be found here. The website will initially only be in Swedish.

Aja is releasing three cards and a break out box for SD and HD production to use with Adobe Premiere Pro. The cards are called Xena. What seems very attractive is the very slick plugins for capturing via After Effects, Combustion and even Photoshop. The Aja software looks really well designed.

FCP: Uncompressed on a powerbook hoopla...

I'm not sure why this is such a big deal but I'd thought I'd share it since it's a funny link. Gary Adcock of the Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group shows uncompressed HD running on his 1Ghz TiBook. He has no way to capture or output it but he can run one stream of uncompressed. I don't think he can edit it very we'll though. The thing is people like Scott Billups have been using PowerBooks as DDR's for several years using CineWave HD in PCI expansion chassis from Magma. I was close to building one for a job myself but found another solution. On a side note I'd say you could probably tweak a PowerBook to run several streams of uncompressed HD if you use a lossless wavelet codec.


Scott Billups rig running uncompressed HD on a PowerBook. CineWave hooked up via Magma underneath the TiBook. This is from an issue of DV magazine. In this particular case he used Premiere 6.0 on OSX for stop motion animation.

FCP/PPro: New FireWire Box for uncompressed!

Convert Design has a new box out that does uncompresed SD over FireWire. It will retail at about $1495 and it will support both Mac and PC with FCP and PPro as host apps. It has a nice 19" rack design.