If you have not read my three previous posts (if you have not, go and do it now, please….pretty please) you know I have forsaken my low budget video production methods for a Canon 550D and a bad hunger for L lenses.

I’ve been happily riding the tiger of HDSLR production for several weeks now, and as I predicted, the learning curve has a pronounced tilt. Triumphs over the limitations have been frequent however, and the light at the end of the tunnel may not be a train. Perhaps a Yugo with a headlight out, but not a train.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb: Cineform & Transcoding

What if I told you that you could improve the speed of your NLE by at least 8x and up to 16x for only $129. Think about what an 8x speed improvement in your post workflow would mean to your income. You’re going to save hours a week – gain back weeks every year.

The enemy is AVCHD (and .h264 in general). It’s a wonderful codec for what it can stuff into a tiny container. The deal with the devil comes when your NLE has to decode it on the fly for post. It’s really CPU intensive and a huge choke point for your system’s abilities.

Along comes Windows 7, multiple updates for Quicktime and AVCHD all in a short period. Now, Vegas 9 handles all of these well, but that means a very expensive upgrade.

I’ve decided to move to Premiere and the CS5 platform (more on that soon) but while waiting for that to actually ship to this end of the earth, I’m S.O.L. And I’m not paying to upgrade Vegas in the interim.

Playback of the files from my 550D on Vegas8 is hit or miss. It seems that every other week something gets lost and I get audio playback but no picture. Ahhhggg.

The solution – an intermediate codec. Or, for the rest of us, get my movies out of AVCHD and into something that works better for editing.

If you use FCP, you have ProRes (and Cineform’s Neo Scene outputs that with some advantages, so read on).

This leads me to trying the CineformHD codec.

My original intent was to get over the spotty support for AVCHD on my now aged NLE – and CineForm did that wonderfully. What I did not expect was just how FAST…I mean NASA test flight fast…the codec runs under Vegas like a V12 runs under the hood of an excessive German motor car. You don’t see it, but the performance is worthy of a Greek legend.

From Cineform.com:

“…camera formats are designed for recording, not editing. With Neo Scene you will convert your difficult-to-edit HDV, AVCHD, Canon 5D Mk II / 7D or T2i camera footage to CineForm AVI or MOV files and then benefit from the same theatrical quality and real-time editing performance as professionals.”

http://www.cineform.com/neoscene/features.php for the tech stuff

So how it works is you download their encoder  (the cheapest being NeoScene @US$129.00)  import a list of your footage, the encoder ‘transcodes’ or rewrites your footage into the Cineform codec, saving it to your hard drive as a new file. Your originals remain untouched for archive if you want.

What you get is file birthed for editing, color correction and compatibility among many programs.

The pioneering desktop HD production of “Dust To Glory” was cut several years ago on Adobe Premier Pro using this codec – before Dual Core chips! And it’s After Effects friendly (the kind of friendly I don’t want the kids to know about).

You get a jump from 4:2:0 to 10bit 4:2:2 in color space. This means way more room to move for color correction. And Magic Bullet thrives in this environment. The reduced load on the computer working with CineformHD means all my color correction is done in 32bit as well!

Before Cineform, my PC with Black Edition Quad Core AMD struggled to render in 32bit mode – basically incapable with AVCHD. Let’s be blunt, it crashed 99% of the time. With Cineform, no problems.

The real kicker is it runs so much faster I can preview Magic Bullet cc’d footage at 4-12 fps. What’s remarkable about that is we are talking about Magic Bullet Editors (the less efficient older version) with only a Nvidia9500 GPU in the box. Before Cineform I was getting 1 frame per 4-6 seconds. That’s right, it took 4-6 seconds to render a single frame for preview at full quality. Do the math!

All my effects run in real time on multiple layers at full quality in real time – something I had not seen since the last project I cut in DV (standard def).

If you cut on a laptop, you need Cineform. If you want stupidly fast renders of anything in any format, I think you owe it to yourself to try the demo.

And while we are on the demo subject, be very careful to install the version you want to tryl – NOT the player. The player is great for making sure you can play your newly transcoded files on any computer for free! And it means your friends don’t have to pay for NeoScene or any of the Cineform products to edit it. They can download the player for free, though I understand Premiere natively supports the format (others may too).

What you pay for is the encoder – the ability to get your footage out of the Hatchback and into the Nascar and run it round your hard drives.

Also, be sure to uninstall any other version before installing a new one. I tried to use Cineform last year and it never worked on my 64bit XP box – probably because I installed the player then the encoder, and I could never get it to work.

Even if you plan on getting hooked up with the Mercury Engine and you have a quad i7 mobo and a raid that would scare ILM, getting 10bit 4:2:2 files out of your HDSLR will make the vital task of color correction far more powerful. And, anything that gives me an average 8x jump in speed (and a peak of 16x) for less than the price of a 2 year old video card…

Your caffeine intake will cut down, saving you another coupl of years before the bypass, your clients will think you have a super computer, and your pics will have a new color depth that even youTubers might notice. If they weren’t waiting for someone to get hit in the man bag. (Brad, you can substitute something less offensive there…like hackey sacks, ‘nards, wedding tackle…)

It’s all good.

PS – on my system, the transcoding process was so stupidly fast that I forget to mention it earlier.